Archive for December, 2011

Dec/21/11//Curtis Ogden//Inspiration

Catching Up With Bucky

Clearly a man ahead of his time, R. Buckminster Fuller’s thinking seems to become more and more relevant.  His invitation is for us all to be comprehensive anticipatory design scientists, to engage in the “design science revolution.”

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Dec/20/11//Cynthia Silva Parker//Race, Class, Power

Got Racism?

We’ve been having a good conversation at IISC about ways to challenge and re-frame race discourse in ways that are truthful, loving, compelling, welcoming and so much more. Last week, I posted a video from Jay Smooth about shifting from a discussion about “being” to a discussion about “doing.” Let’s keep the conversation going.

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Dec/19/11//IISC//Collaboration

Fair Chance America

The following post is from Founding Board Chair, Thomas J. Rice.  It is a little longer than we  post, however, we hope that you will find it is rich in content and helps continue to challenge the way we think about various systems and movements.

Historian James Truslow Adams defined the American Dream when he coined the term at the depths of the Great Depression. What we seek is “a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone.” If there’s one thing we could all agree on, we have lost our way in this quest. And there’s no GPS to find our True North, or the way home.

Enter the Occupy Movement, a spontaneous cri de coeur from a millennial generation that feels betrayed and abandoned by the people and institutions they believed in. No American Dream for them. Their prospects are bleak, in no way better or richer or fuller than their parents. In spite of great effort and expense to move up and out, the millenniums are back in the nest, in serious debt from college  loans and working at some menial or dead end job with no health benefits.

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Dec/16/11//Gibrán Rivera//Inspiration

Live Love

Here at IISC we talk about having three lenses for the work of collaboration.  One of those lenses is the lens of love.  I have worked and played with Anasa Troutman in all kinds of formations over the years, most recently as part of the same Networks and Decentralized Organizing Community of Practice.

I thought that her stance for Love is a very real call for those of us interested in the practice of social transformation.  What do you think?

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Dec/15/11//Curtis Ogden//Learning Edge

Wanted: A Living System Blueprint

I have previously written in this space about a state-wide early childhood system change effort in Connecticut, for which my colleague Melinda Weekes and I are currently serving as the lead process designers and facilitators. For the past year, we have been engaged in a robust and somewhat emergent process of exploring some of the underlying systemic dynamics surrounding early childhood development and care in the state, and beginning to re-imagine that system, in all of its complexity as it holds the vision of nurturing whole children, from informal to formal elements, from grassroots to grasstops.

At this point, we are poised to think more deeply about what it would mean to create a “blueprint” for that system, acknowledging that this blueprint could never cover every component and dynamic in the system, nor would we want it to be static. Read the rest of this entry »

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