Tim Jackins at a Workshop for International Liberation Reference 
Persons and International Commonality Reference Persons, March 2024


RC spread out of Seattle in the late 1960s. We started thinking about leadership in the early 1970s. Until then RC was just a little group of people who all knew each other. RC wasn’t growing rapidly, so there wasn’t a big need for leadership. We were figuring out other things.


In 1972 we had the first World Conference and the first Guidelines. It was our first full effort to think about how to make RC work as it spread. We developed leadership positions with various title and forms—coordinators, Reference Persons, and so on. We developed these different layers of Reference Persons, and you, as International Liberation and Commonality Reference Persons, are one version of them.


This leadership structure was built before our current tools of communication existed. Communication was very different then. We wrote letters. We have boxes full of correspondence at Re-evaluation Counseling Community Resources (RCCR). Letter writing was slow, and people made as much use of letters as they could. They treasured them and used them in their sessions. But slow communication also meant that developing leadership, understanding leadership, building relationships—many things—were not quickly done.


Almost all of us who took leadership positions just led and led and led and led and led. A Reference Person is supposed to play a specific role, but almost all of us were leading almost everything in our constituencies. 


My father [Harvey Jackins] was probably absolutely necessary for a period. If he didn’t do it, it didn’t get done. It took time to develop enough resource for there to be an alternative to that, and the resource developed over time. There were more and more people doing more and more things. I did more and more things. 


The “lead everything” habit persists among us Reference Persons. But things have changed. It is no longer necessary for us to do this much leading. We’ve always said that “everybody can lead.” We know that everybody wants to lead in some way. But we’re still edgy [uneasy] about allowing it—not you, not yet, maybe someday. However, as more and more people free themselves from distress and can think more clearly, we realize how little we knew when we took our current leadership positions. Now forty or fifty people in our constituency know more than we knew back then. Probably every constituency has many people who would lead things much better than we did at the start. 


So we get to think afresh, over and over again, about our positions and about leadership. We get to think about how much we can just reference and not actively lead everybody all the time. 


We are still scared about possible mistakes that might grow massively and can’t be corrected quickly. So we run in [intervene] and do things. But that’s mostly coming from our fears. The wonderful thing about RC—the thing that makes us different from anything else—is that we can be self-correcting. Our process corrects us. If we continue using this process, we stumble on our own mistakes, recognize them, get to discharge on them, and things move forward. We can correct our mistakes and not get stuck in them for too long or too badly, even though we still worry about that. 


So what is our future? What can we figure out? 


Part of what limits the spread of RC is the shortage of leadership. Leadership makes such a difference. People need to see that someone is capable of leadership. It encourages them in ways they don’t necessarily think of explicitly. Seeing somebody go forward encourages them about themselves—that they, too, could do things. 


We’ve always encouraged people to teach fundamentals. We still do, but I think we are sometimes too cautious about it. We’ve been scared to let other people take initiative and then be unable to check on them thoroughly enough or quickly enough. However, I think that the level of counseling that we’ve achieved across a wide swath of people makes that worry unnecessary.


WORKSHOPS


The first workshop was in 1970, Buck Creek I. It was two weeks long. It was set up for a different purpose than our usual workshop today. It was set up to teach people from outside of Seattle all of RC in two weeks. That was the goal because at that point hardly anyone outside of Seattle knew of RC. The workshop was eye-opening, revolutionary (pick a word!). We had no idea how beneficial the workshop would be. We saw what was possible.


But most people didn’t get to workshops very often. They couldn’t afford to. But we had no other way. It was pre-Internet, pre-cellphone. A lot of us have gone around the world for years doing workshop after workshop after workshop. We tried to quickly do what we could, as broadly as we could. It was the only way available.


It’s not the only way now. We no longer need to do big things all the time. Nothing can replace workshops—having the time to be together in person to do the work and really get to know each other. I don’t think anything is ever going to replace that. But it isn’t the sole tool anymore. There may be ways to gather and work together more easily; for example, in smaller groups.


SPREADING LEADERSHIP, 
BUILDING COMMUNITY 


Many of you are planning to hand your Reference role to someone else. We need a structure for those of us who step away from our positions. Perhaps we can use our resource and knowledge anywhere anybody asks us, without travel. Maybe we can just be with twenty people for two hours. It would make a tremendous difference to them to be with you. Partly it is what you say, but partly they can just see the effect RC has had on you. You are the proof that this works, and people need to see that as well as hear what you have to say.


I think we can figure out ways to spread leadership. We can each collect, nurture, and encourage some collection of people that have chosen us to be the person they follow, and we can make a commitment back to them in doing this work. 


We can spend more of our time referencing people who go out and lead, rather than doing all the things we have had to do until now. The things that we are doing now are worth doing, but they are not always the most effective way to build community. I think our first goal as leaders probably is to build community. This a good moment for us to decide to take that on.


We still need Reference Persons. Somebody has to be there as a reference. Somebody has to lead from that position.


APPRECIATION


Some of you aren’t going to be here the next time this group meets. Many of you have played a role that nobody ever played before you. You created, adjusted, and improved a role that led in the direction of liberation for thousands of people. Most of you who are going to step away within the next four years, to use an old phrase, had to “make it out of whole cloth” [make an idea a reality.] There may have been someone who tried it before, but really, you did the work to make it happen. 


We, the RC Community, and in a very real sense our species, owe you a debt of gratitude. We have moved because of you in a significant sense. Would it have happened anyway? Eventually, yes, I think it would have. I think everything will happen eventually, but it wouldn’t have happened in this time frame except for you. 


You’ve played a significant role, and a lot of us know and understand that and will remember it. We know. It’s important that you who are stepping away realize that we know, and we appreciate both the efforts it took as well as the intelligence and the caring.