Unheard In MKPUSA

I think one of the most important things coming out of Thursday's MKPUSA Town Hall was that the speaker recounted that all of this started in the MKPUSA Leader Body, with a large group of leaders forcing others to take sides against another constituency, with the MKPUSA board eventually falling in line with their demands, as well as the demands of an outside entity purporting to speak for the entire Sioux Nation. This validated a concern of mine that I had reported over 10 years ago to MKPUSA leadership. At the time it seemed that the organization was singularly focused to look at race and men of color as well as gay men, I reported that the biggest issue in MKPUSA around power dynamics was the issue of leaders in their communities, on their weekends, in their groups, and the power that they had to influence fundamental parts of the training and the organization itself. Leader-centricism manifests itself from the weekend enrollment of a leader, passed into the community and it...

Mankind Project USA has changed, and not all for the better.  They are at the precipice of losing control of its members and constituencies over some misinformed usage of diversity concepts, shame and blame, and white fragility.  And now they have essentially cancelled 1/3 of their leadership on the weekend. While some struggle and cooperate through the insults in the name of initiating men as its higher purpose, others are guided by the bureaucracy and needing the money to keep the machine running.  They also need to demonstrate that their holacracy principles and membership models work and can sustain the organization. And for those of us on the periphery worried about staffing or the next initiate:  Why would you want to initiate a man into this polluted and toxic atmosphere?   MKPUSA and its leader body have essentially amputated one of three legs that represent the entire leadership structure on the New Warrior Training Adventure and now are rushing...

At the last MKPUSA town hall meeting there was a character on the zoom call named “Unheard”. Anticipating that the Q and A would go on in the chat section as in other Town Halls, it seemed he was prepared to hold court in the chat while the speaker carried around what he had done, why he (we) were doing it , and eventually turning the Town Hall into a retirement event as he surprisingly quit in the middle of conflict, having done the best he could under the circumstances. The unheard character continued to pose quite a few poignant questions and comments in the chat until the moderator asked the person to stop declaring “No Crosstalk” to which the Unheard responded “Whiteboy owns the Forum” or something to that effect. To me it seemed like the institution was trying to shut down feedback, so I immediately raised my hand to put in a response during the feedback session after the speaker was done. It was the first time I'd really spoken in any MKPUSA forum since being awarded a Ri...

One of the questions the "Unheard" participant posed in the chat on last week's Town Hall was around the lack of security in MKPUSA's data.  In reading up on the issues around the outside group currently controlling MKPUSA and it's MKPUSA Leader Body, the group has issued certain threats that should concern all of us. Whether it's our e-mail systems, Google docs, or direct access to every single warriors name and address and whether they, for instance, have disavowed their Animal Name through the MKP connect "find new warrior" function, it puts all of us at risk if we stay in denial of the impact of an outside entity either hacking our systems or relying on their allies from the inside to inform them and forward all of your emails and meeting minutes to an outside group. Whether we made an overt commitment to confidentiality or I assumed the intentions of the man across from me, our digital data system is now at risk and it seems it has been for ...