Sep/02/10//Curtis Ogden//Featured, Your Experiences
A couple of weeks ago I worked with a special group of special education facilitators who will be helping to coordinate key players in their school district to provide services to students with different learning needs. This work will put these people in some difficult circumstances when it comes to occasionally not being able to provide exactly what parents want for their children. For this reason, we spent a fair amount of time talking about how one can be of service when faced with irreconcilable differences. Much of this came down to staying grounded in one’s values, continuing to regard the humanity of those of others, and standing firm for what the district could reasonably provide.
What I also also saw on display for those three days was the incredible power of artful and compassionate inquiry. Read the rest of this entry »
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Aug/09/10//Gibrán Rivera//Featured, Spiritual Activism

I did not make it to the US Social Forum, but I have been hit by its reverberations! Given my take on how change happens, I’ve been particularly excited by stories from the “transformation” track. I saw my friend Jodie Tonita just as she was returning from the USSF, and she handed me a copy of “framing deep change: essays on transformative social change,” produced by the Center for Transformative Change. We are really in motion here, and the deeper aspects of our works are calling more of out attention. Read the rest of this entry »
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Aug/03/10//Gibrán Rivera//Featured, Social Innovation

Lots of anticipation around this year’s Web of Change! I am on the facilitation team as well as one of the hosts for the event. Hosts have been asked to launch this year’s conversation through a series of thought pieces that will be posted on webofchange.com every week until our convening begins. I have the honor of launching our “WOC Thought Bomb Series,” with the following reflections on “Paradigm Next and the Intersection.” Click here to read, and please do share your responses!
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Aug/02/10//Gibrán Rivera//Featured, Networks

This is a very exciting time for those of us who are working to apply the logic of networks to the work of social change. Our ideas are gaining traction as more and more experiments start to point towards success. Life online, the viral nature of meaningful stories and our human desire for deeper connection all serve to confirm our intuitive understanding of life in a network. However, as we step into this paradigm shift, as we start to approve of these ideas, we still have to contend with the constraints of the organizational and funding structures within which we currently work. Read the rest of this entry »
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