In the early days, when “normal” people first started using the web, we saw websites that looked just like our pamphlets. We used the new technology to do the same thing we always did – until we dared to experiment.
Leave a commentWhen we talk about networks we tend to think scale, we think viral. But networks are also about community. Networks can thrive in that mysterious place where the most local intersects with the global.
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A big shout out to our colleagues at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. Their recently released report “State of the Science: Implicit Bias Review 2013” reviews what science can tell us about what implicit bias is and how it works, why it matters and how to reduce it. Here’s a quick recap:
Implicit bias results from the way our brains process data and experience. We’re wired for pattern recognition and our brains use lots of shortcuts to make sense of the world around us. In and of itself, this isn’t necessarily a good or bad thing. But, so many of the implicit associations we make are laden with stereotypes—say, between women and family, vs. men and careers. (Check out the Project Implicit to explore your implicit biases.) We absorb these associations from the world around us and they become part of our unconscious “operating system.”
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The following post was rebloged from our friend Adrienne Maree. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!
If you are a frequent reader you know of my love and admiration for Adrienne Maree Brown. She is the one who introduced me to the work of Octavia Butler. Art, science fiction, futurism – these are powerful exploratory fields. Here Adrienne begins to capture what Octavia teaches us about emergence, and since we have been on the topic lately, I thought it important to share her post.
Leave a commentShout out to our colleagues at Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center for their Youth Racial Healing Project—making the connections between health, social determinants of health and racism; making the connections between what folks know, see and feel; and making the deep connections between young people across racial differences.
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Our colleague Bill Traynor describes essential inputs and outcomes of network organizing. See what you think!
In a recent presentation to the Ways and Means Staff of The Community Builders, we discussed the primary inputs and resulting added value that the Network Organizing practice can bring to a service environment. This slide captures the essence of this.
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|Photo by Dawn Huczek|http://www.flickr.com/photos/31064702@N05/3847338602|
Working with numerous multi-stakeholder collaborative change efforts, we at IISC are often invited to help people co-create the structures and processes that will move their complex work and collective development forward. There is never an easy or readily apparent answer and each case is unique to its particular context and nature. A quote that I’ve found helpful to quell some of the anxiety that comes up around this work, especially among those who want to rush to adopt a structure that others have used and “get on to the work” (more on this false dichotomy here), comes from Fritjof Capra from the Center for Ecoliteracy. Capra writes about the importance of recognizing and working the dynamics of life. Read More
Leave a commentTwelve year old Adora Svitak called for mutual respect and reciprocal learning between adults and kids. Her TED bio calls her a “child prodigy” but I think that exceptionalizes her talents and perspective and implies that she is very unlike her peers. I think she models a poise and wisdom that is all around us if we just look for it.
Here’s a little taste of her talk.
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The following post has been reblogged from our amazing friends at Seth’s Blog. We hope you like it as much as we did!
Improvement comes with many costs.
It costs time and money to make something better. It’s risky, as well, because trying to make something better might make it worse. Perhaps making it better for the masses makes it worse for the people who already like it. And risk brings fear, because that means someone is going to be held responsible, and so the lizard brain wants out.
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The following post has been reblogged from our amazing friends at Seth’s Blog. We hope you like it as much as we did!
Improvement comes with many costs.
It costs time and money to make something better. It’s risky, as well, because trying to make something better might make it worse. Perhaps making it better for the masses makes it worse for the people who already like it. And risk brings fear, because that means someone is going to be held responsible, and so the lizard brain wants out.
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Something BIG happened on Monday, January 21, 2013. In his second inaugural address President Obama made an unapologetic link between the struggles for liberation and our nation’s evolutionary thrust.
We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths—that all of us are created equal—is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on earth.
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The following post has been reblogged from our friends at yes! Magazine. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did!
Nature surrounds us with expressions of the organizing principles that make possible life’s exceptional resilience, capacity for adaptation, creative innovation, and vibrant abundance.” Read on as David Korten outlines how paying attention to natural systems can help us develop human systems that will sustain us for the long haul.
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