Archive for November, 2011

Nov/30/11//Curtis Ogden//Collaboration

Evergreen Collaboration

I have been very excited to hear about what is going on in Cleveland, not to mention how it is serving as a model and inspiration for other cities in this post-industrial age, including Springfield, Massachusetts and various communities in my native Michigan. What do you take and make of this? How might the efforts and aspirations of Evergreen inform your collaborations?

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Nov/29/11//Gibrán Rivera//Inspiration, Liberation

Horizontal

“Stamp [the facilitator] jumped up and down. Her voice was hoarse from three hours of yelling. ‘Everyone is beautiful!’ she shouted. ‘Everyone is awesome!’

That’s some hard core facilitation.  I am struck, profoundly affected by, what is happening in our country.  I am inspired.  I am moved.  I have a deep sense of resonance.

“[T]he point of Occupy Wall Street is not its platform so much as its form: people sit down and hash things out instead of passing their complaints on to Washington. ‘We are our demands,’ as the slogan goes.”

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Nov/28/11//Cynthia Silva Parker//Race, Class, Power

Busting the Binaries

I’ve thought a lot about how either/or thinking reinforces hierarchies of oppression. As Tema Okun recounts in The Emperor Has no Clothes, “Inherent in western culture is the very act of defining ‘us’ in ways that claim superiority over an opposite and increasingly threatening ‘them.’”

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Nov/23/11//Curtis Ogden//Your Experiences

Occupying Experience

Poetry is what you find

in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God

in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.

-Elizabeth Alexander (From “Ars Poetics #100: I Believe”)

Let me start by saying that I am well aware of the inherent irony of posting a piece with this title in the blogosphere and furthermore tweeting about it to my “followers.”  That said, I offer this in the same spirit of the saying, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill the Buddha.”  In other words, thanks in advance for reading/sharing, and then let’s get back to the work of being our own lights.

As I turn thoughts to this week’s holiday, I am thankful for so much: for health, for family, for friends, for the opportunity to do the work I do, where and with whom I get to do it.  And I am also grateful to be living in these uncertain, trying, and exciting times.  If we would believe history and the views of certain amateur and professional philosophers, we might see our current circumstances as the makings of a great age and evolutionary leap forward. Read the rest of this entry »

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Nov/22/11//Gibrán Rivera//Featured, Inspiration

A legacy of Excellence

The Interaction Institute for Social Change remembers Margarita Muñiz, educator, leader, champion- as well as one of our beloved Barr Fellows.  The following is reposted from the Boston Globe column written by Yvonne Abraham.  We could not have said it better.

How do you turn an abandoned school in a crime-ridden neighborhood into a gleaming beacon drawing children and grateful parents from across the city?

The answer is Margarita Muñiz.

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