Author Archive

Feb/03/12//Curtis Ogden//Inspiration

Growing Our Way Into a New Economy

This may be the best 14 minutes of your day (and the best TED talk ever). Watch it! Go Green Bronx Machine! Si se puede!

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Feb/02/12//Curtis Ogden//Race, Class, Power

Funder as Convenor: Part 2

A year ago I blogged about the critical role of convening in collaborative multi-stakeholder change work, particularly as it plays out through a funder.  Having been in Michigan last week working with a group of diverse foundations in a customized Facilitative Leadership session, I have additional thoughts to offer stemming from a very productive and provocative conversation about how to address and manage power dynamics when one attempts to initiate a partnership or collaborative effort and one is holding the purse strings or a significant portion thereof.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Feb/01/12//Curtis Ogden//Learning Edge

The Betterness of Bitterness

This post comes courtesy of our friends at the National Bitter Melon Council (NBMC) – Jeremy Liu (also a board member here at IISC) and Hiroko Kikuchi.  NBMC is devoted to the cultivation of a vibrant, diverse community through the promotion and distribution of Bitter Melon. Its projects, events, and festivals celebrate the health, social, culinary, and creative possibilities of this underappreciated vegetable and of embracing bitterness as a key to personal and community change.

Everyone experiences bitterness. We all deal with it; often in ways that are counter to addressing the bitterness, by denying, rejecting, or repressing the emotions, and/or our loss and our attachment to loss that create our bitterness. The need to actively address our bitterness is profound. Read the rest of this entry »

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Jan/26/12//Curtis Ogden//Your Experiences

Where You Sit, What You See

It has been a heartening return to my home state these past couple of days while delivering a two-day Facilitative Leadership workshop with members of Michigan’s philanthropic community.  Yesterday, we spent some time in the afternoon talking about power and how it plays out in different kinds of change initiatives.  The point was made a number of times that those who are most impacted by the issues we are trying to solve must be in on the solutions, including the design and carrying out of the processes of problem-analysis, opportunity identification, and vision creation.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Jan/25/12//Curtis Ogden//Featured, Networks

Growing Leadership

bridge

Photo from xinem

Picking up from Gibran’s post yesterday and continuing in the vein of follow-up to our LLC webinar on collective leadership, I want to respond to some of the questions we did not have a chance to answer or answer fully from participants, including requests for examples of collective leadership in action and inquiries about blocks and how to work through or overcome them. Read the rest of this entry »

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