Archive for February, 2010

Feb/26/10//Melinda Weekes//Facilitative Leadership

A Leadership Blessing

Thanks to our colleague, Susan DeGenring of Alchemy Learning, for bringing this a blessing about leadership to our attention. It is the work of John O’Donohue, the late Irish teacher and poet, from his last book, To Bless the Space Between Us. Please read and share your thoughts, as I share mine below: Read the rest of this entry »

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Feb/25/10//Curtis Ogden//IISC:Inside

Mission Affirmed

I want to thank Susan Wright of Wright Momentum for spurring on this post, which is in essence a response to a thoughtful dialogue we have had going for a few months.  My thoughts here are further inspired by a training my colleague Melinda and I did at the historic Penn Center on St. Helena’s Island in South Carolina, a site where the first school was built in the US to educate freed slaves.  It was also an important site for people to come together across racial lines to do strategy work during the Civil Rights movement.  Melinda and I had the good fortune to spend three days with the amazing Gulf Coast Fellows, a diverse group of grassroots leaders from Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas.  Our time with the Fellows affirmed for me the strategic direction IISC has recently adopted.  Specifically, in considering the next three years (2010-2012), our IISC”s staff has collectively committed to concentrating more of our efforts around: (1) helping to build power and collaborative muscle at the grassroots, and (2) supporting social change work that bridges sectors and organizations (including building networks).

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Feb/24/10//Linda Guinee//Networks

Networks for Creating Change

I just had the great fortune of spending seven days in Dakar, Senegal (and traveling back and forth to it). An amazing trip – and the two twenty hour travel days gave me time to really dig into the book “Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives” by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler.  I read it within the context of doing work in Senegal on a project that’s global in scope – and also thinking back to many of the other initiatives I’ve worked on.

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Feb/23/10//Gibrán Rivera//Liberation

Love and Freedom

Part 1 of 2, go here for Part 2.

Love as the practice of freedom has been on my mind these days.  My good friend Cyndi Suarez, who is the co-director of Northeast Action, recently shared a bell hooks essay by the same title – I appreciated Cyndi’s e-mail:

“I was thinking today on just how much social change movements reflect the dominant culture.  I just finished rereading an old-time favorite essay by bell hooks and had to share it with you. I feel it is as pertinent now as when I first read it 15 years ago.  I wonder what would change if at least some of us focused on building love rather power.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Feb/22/10//Marianne Hughes//Collaboration

Freedom and Structure

In the upcoming edition of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, IISC gets a mention for our work with both Grantmakers for Effective Organizations and their Change Agent Project as well as the work we did with our client The Davis Foundation and their project Cherish Every Child. In each instance IISC partnered with our client by providing them a collaborative approach and architecture that scaffolded them in their pursuit of their collaborative goals.

P2C Diagram Blog

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