IISC Senior Associate, Curtis Ogden, reflects on the question asked in a staff learning session, “What do we know from years of doing collaborative capacity building and social change work?” Recorded at Space With a Soul in Boston.
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Blogging this morning from the Building Energy Conference, New England’s most established cross-disciplinary renewable energy and green building gathering. If you are here, come visit us at our IISC booth! One of the big topics of this year’s conference and trade show is thinking in terms of systems. In this spirit, the following post draws from an email that I recently sent to the convenor of a state-wide system change initiative that is poised to identify strategic points of leverage within the system and its component systems to nudge it in the direction of serving all people equitably in the state and ensuring community food security. Related to this goal is the desire to support a more robust local economy and to work synergistically with ecosystems. I believe the questions listed pertain to any complex dynamic system change effort, whether one is talking about food, education, or community energy use and production, and I welcome your thoughts . . . Read More
Last night we came together as IISC to bid farewell to the great Melinda Weekes; we are proud that she is moving on to be the Managing Director of the Applied Research Center. But today’s is not a post about Melinda. It is a post about community.
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Dear Clients and Colleagues,
I trust this finds you well in every way.
This March 16, 2012 will be my last day with IISC. In April, I begin work as the Managing Director of The Applied Research Center (ARC), headquartered in New York City. ARC is a racial justice think tank that uses popular culture, media, research and activism to promote solutions, and is the publisher of Colorlines.com.
Leave a commentIISC Senior Associate, Cynthia Parker, answers the question asked in a staff learning session, “What do we know from our years of doing collaborative capacity building and social change work?” Recorded at Space With a Soul on February 6, 2012.
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Last weekend, while on school vacation with my family, my wife Emily and I went to hear Richard Louv speak at McKee Gardens in Vero Beach, Florida. If you don’t know him, Louv wrote the books The Last Child in the Woods and The Nature Principle and is a big advocate for getting kids and adults outdoors to overcome what we calls “nature deficit disorder.” I have heard him speak in the past, and very much appreciate his work. That said, I was a bit troubled by the public comment session and conversation after his talk. Read More
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Last weekend, while on school vacation with my family, my wife Emily and I went to hear Richard Louv speak at McKee Gardens in Vero Beach, Florida. If you don’t know him, Louv wrote the books The Last Child in the Woods and The Nature Principle and is a big advocate for getting kids and adults outdoors to overcome what we calls “nature deficit disorder.” I have heard him speak in the past, and very much appreciate his work. That said, I was a bit troubled by the public comment session and conversation after his talk. Read More
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I offer this post in memory of my father, John D. Ogden Jr. (1942-2012), who passed away much too young this past Saturday after a two year fight with cancer. Known to all of his friends and family as a good and kind man, my father was also the inspiration for much of my interest in conscious evolution and the fight for justice. From his time as one of the first Peace Corps volunteers in Liberia, he spent his career promoting inter-cultural understanding, most recently as director of international programs at SUNY Cortland. My dad once told me the older he got, the more radical he became. Read More
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It’s my birthday today and a few nights ago my friend Malia asked me to reflect on a lesson I’ve learned over the last year. It was a BIG year for me! I got married and had a son! Lots and lots of lessons.
1 Comment“ What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify it. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans.”
-Excerpt from The New Jim Crow
Leave a commentEco-philosopher Joanna Macy PhD, is a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology. She is a respected voice in the movements for peace, justice, and ecology, and interweaves her scholarship with five decades of activism. As the root teacher of the Work That Reconnects, she has created a ground-breaking theoretical framework for personal and social change, as well as a powerful workshop methodology for its application. The Great Turning, to which she refers in this clip, is a name for the “adventure of our time: the shift from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization.”
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|Photo by Phillip Chee|http://www.flickr.com/photos/pchee/521027252|
This post comes via our friend and colleague Danny Martin, with whom I have recently had the pleasure to present at the Bioneers by the Bay Conference. Another of Danny’s posts appeared here last fall on deep listening. As you will see, he is an old soul, a wise man in the best sense of the word, and his words a beacon for our collective future.
I am privileged to be one of four conveners of The Berry Forum for an Ecological Dialogue at Iona College, NY. Thomas Berry who died a couple of years ago was the prophet of a new era that he called ‘The Ecozoic’ which he described as an era founded on mutually enhancing human-earth relations. Read More
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