Civic & group leadership
- Downtown Master Plan (2008-2010):
- As an outgrowth of my activist work to reform Asheville's notoriously flawed development-review process, I am actively serving on the Urban Design/Development subcommittee of the Master Plan Action Committee. This is giving me an intimate understanding of the city's new Master Plan as its details are being written into ordinances.
- Parkside (2007-2009):
- I sparked and helped lead a successful grassroots movement to stop a major condo project from being built in front of our famous City Hall, on the site of a well-known magnolia tree and a historic building connected to novelist Thomas Wolfe. This experience gave me invaluable, "battle-tested" experience and skills as a community activist. It also brought about a fundamental political shift in our once-insular city and county governments.
- Police reform (2003-2005):
- In the wake of a brutal law-enforcement response to peaceful local demonstrations against the start of the Iraq War, I helped organize and lead a movement to reform the Asheville Police Department, called Asheville Justice Watch. We succeeded in bringing citizens (especially from the African-American community) and the local ACLU together on common ground with leaders of a police union and black and female officers who wanted to end the institutional discrimination and corruption in their own department. Though we didn't achieve all our goals, we did compel the city to begin taking public input whenever it hires a top city official — starting with the new police chief, whom the city had to find when the former chief retired in the wake of the scandal. This public-input practice is now standard in Asheville.
- Coven Oldenwilde (1994-present):
- As a Third Degree Gardnerian High Priest (the Wiccan equivalent of a seminary degree), I co-founded and have continued to co-lead this internationally active 501(c)(3) religious non-profit, which focuses (among other missions) on advocacy and education for religious tolerance.
- South Bay Astrological Society (late 1980s):
- I served for several years as president of this organization of professional and amateur astrologers, based in San Jose, Calif.
My role in these and other achievements has been governed by what I might call "respectful opposition":
- Do the homework and research the issue's legal and historical background (you're never the first to encounter this problem);
- Attend public meetings and speak up forcefully but informatively (practice your three-minute speech ahead of time);
- Listen attentively to critics and opponents, and see the issue from their point of view (you can agree with parts while disagreeing with other parts);
- Stay focussed on the higher principle at stake that we all at least claim to agree on (democracy, freedom of religion, environmental/economic sustainability, etc.);
- Work firmly but cooperatively with all sides to shape a solution that benefits everybody by applying and reinforcing that higher principle (the solution often is a "third way" that unites two opposite poles — which is not the same as a compromise).