Howell Group Provides Leadership

Dohn Hoyle, Partners in Policymaking Faculty Member, Activist and Organizer
20. Howell Group Provides Leadership
I love to talk about the Howell Group, it's a, um it's a work in progress, it goes on without me now, but it goes on. Um, As we were moving on, inclusive education um, people started to ask me about, but look if they come outta here ready for inclusion and ready for, for being the, the adult side is a mess. They're gonna, they're gonna graduate to, to something different than what they've learned about and what they hope for. Why don't you, why don't you why don't you organize a group to work on that?
And finally, I said, okay, and they said, well, let's not, let's not meet in Ann Arbor like we do for the inclusive ed, Inclusive Education Network was what we called the earlier thing. Let's not meet in Arbor. I said, okay, we'll make it closer to the middle of the state and we'll meet in Howell, Michigan instead. So some people in this country think Howell is h o w l like howl at the moon, but it's H o w e l l, which is a small city, a village in Michigan.
But they happened to have a motel that had a meeting room, which is, and it's actually was closer to my home, um than Ann Arbor was, where I lived so, but it seemed more, it's more, it's closer to Lansing closer to the middle of the state. So as, so as we started, as people came together and they started to talk you could break people into two groups. There was one group that wanted to talk about it and, and design it and work on it in some kind of global, um, way.
And then there were people who wanted to know, what can I do when I get home tonight? Or what can I do when I go to work in the morning? So, so it ended up that what I thought was gonna be one group meeting a month ended up being three a month, one for a group who wanted to talk about it. And, and, and we could have all tried to do that all at once but it proved to be such a cacophony in the, in the the first two meetings that, that I said I let some people gravitate. Some people went to both, but people gravitated either towards a group that wanted to, to do that mapping or planning or whatever.
And then other people who wanted to start pounding on it right away. And, and some of this, as an organizer, you, you kind of recognize what's gonna lead people and what's gonna motivate them and that kind of stuff, and so, so I let them divide into two groups, now I had three meetings a month. I, the whole group, the maps and the wheels group that was gonna be, what, what do I do with pavement heads? When the rubber hits the pavement? And so, so they each came up with their own kind of statement, and one was, one talked to in glowing terms about everything from, this is before we ever heard of person center planning.