Acronym

The relationship between a national association and its local chapters tends to exhibit pendulum swings, from reinvigoration and pulling together at times to discord and disengagement at other times. When an association responds to changes in the economy or industry with new marketing, advocacy, standards, products and services, etc., these strategies ripple out to chapters, and differences in opinion between chapters and the national office often color the relationship. The whole business of managing these relationships takes enormous amounts of energy, attention, perseverance, and creativity, yet no one model or method seems to last, and the pendulum swings continue. Isn't there a way to have a more sustainably productive relationship?

Given the interest in greening our economy and "green" in general, I'd like to suggest that a permaculture approach offers tips for achieving a more evolved harmony for chapter relations.

Permaculture is a way of designing agricultural systems that mimics the relationships found in natural ecology in order to sustain productivity indefinitely. Its principles for maximizing beneficial relationships are based on ethics for living in long-term balance. It seeks to meet the needs of people, to care for the health of the land, and to accept limits (i.e. to know what is enough). While industrial agriculture maximizes production at a cost of reduced well-being, permaculture, by contrast, maximizes well-being, even if that means reduced concentrations of productivity over the short term—because permaculture generates stable, productive systems over the long term. Elements in the system are viewed in relationship to other elements, where the outputs of one element become the inputs of another, producing complex synergies and high densities of food and materials with minimal input.

So what does an agricultural philosophy have to do with managing association chapters? Permaculture design principles can be applied to any system of relationships. It's refreshing to translate this approach to the relationship between an association and its chapters. Twelve key permaculture principles include:

• Creatively respond to change
• Value edges
• Value diversity
• Slow and small solutions
• Integrate rather than segregate
• Design from patterns to details
• No waste
• Use renewables
• Apply self-regulation
• Obtain a yield
• Catch and store energy
• Observe and interact

I'll be selecting a couple of these principles to apply to the association context in subsequent posts ("value edges" will be first). I welcome your thoughts on cultivating a sustainable chapter "permaculture" that provides for diverse needs while increasing the relationship capital for future generations. Let me know which of the above principles you might like me to discuss in more detail and if you have experience or further ideas on applying systems-based design principles to chapter relations.