Post 21: CWG initial success and troubles

As always, with the exception of public figures, I use altered names to protect the individuals in this history.

Jay (I've altered the name), the CWG co-chair and meeting moderator, was neither Chinese nor a member of the Chinatown community, but was a thoughtful, thoroughly well-intentioned, extremely kind and caring person, who led the group in two important successes. He obtained a $150,000 grant for the group and organized the membership into committees. The grant eventually paid for the zoning consultant and produced the CWG study and plan recommendations which form the CWG zoning plan. So the grant was indispensable. The committees allowed interested members to engage actively in coming up with a comprehensive plan -- in the city's legalese, a 197-a plan. He directed each committee to draw up its goals or principles, then an action plan for implementation featuring the governmental agencies that the CWG or the committee members would apply to. The process, as he envisioned it, moved forward methodically, following his deadlines, and successfully. The final step, pending the full CWG's approval of each committee's action plan, would be transforming these planning committees into action teams to implement the plans each had developed. 

Among the committees were Housing and Affordability, Zoning, Immigrant Services, Economic Revitalization, Public Space and Recreation, Education, Transit and Parking, Culture and Historical Preservation. Of these, only the Zoning Committee and the Economic Revitalization were unable to meet the deadline. To produce a plan, the Zoning Committee needed much more data and technical assistance for navigating the zoning text, and the Economic Revitalization Committee was unable to find consensus on the plans it developed despite Zephyr's dedicated efforts and experience.  

Jay, working with his co-chair Tim (I've altered the name), set about the task of obtaining a zoning consultant. This would require a bidding process and an oversight board. It was here that the leadership model failed. 

What made the committees such a success was participation of the members. This was not true of the leadership of the CWG. Its top-down model was most evident in the monthly CWG meetings themselves. Each meeting began with a chair's greeting and report, usually 40 minutes long (I watched the clock each meeting, a habit of mine as I have an interest in efficiency, or maybe I'm just impatient), followed by a presentation arranged by the chair or the coordinating committee which consisted of the co-chairs and perhaps a few others. The presentation also usually lasted about 40 minutes. There was, of course, time left for questions and comments from the floor, but each question or comment or criticism would be answered by the chair. This intervention from the chair was understandable since the chair had taken on so much of the work of the CWG, so the chair felt the need to defend his work. But constant intervention from the chair is a dysfunctional model of meeting. It turns the meeting into the chair's show to the exclusion of everyone else, and the chair then becomes the target of all dissatisfaction with the lack of participation which is translated into criticism of the chair's program.

Let me add that I know this because I have failed in just this way. When, years prior, I chaired a meeting of an organization which I'd been taking all the responsibilities for, I too answered every comment, criticism and question. A friend afterward advised me that I'd turned the meeting into my show and made myself the target of all dissatisfaction. I recognized the failure, having seen successful meetings of the CUNY board of Trustees in which the chair would say absolutely nothing and let members represent his ideas for him. It is generally true that if someone criticizes a program, some else in the meeting will defend the program against the criticism, if the program has any merit at all. It is in people's nature to disagree and best each other. The chair or the proposer of a program needn't say a word to promote the program. It will be promoted by the members if it is a good program. But if the promoter of the program monopolizes the defense of it, the group, sensing their disempowerment, will reject the program regardless of its merits. 

Keeping silence and letting others be brilliant is the key to running a successful meeting. Jay had succeeded at this in creating and promoting committee participation, but he did not extend this horizontal model to the central group and its monthly meetings. And when he made a crucial decision without the CWG, the top-down model of the central administration of the CWG showed its weakness and fell apart. 

Jay asked the EDC to have a majority vote on the bidding oversight board. This was perceived as an affront to the Chinatown community since it took legal authority out of Chinatown hands, a circumstance all too familiar to the Chinatown community where decisions that impact Chinatown are repeatedly made by city government in total disregard for the Chinatown community and without consulting that community.