March 12, 2015
“We add value to society-at-large when we dare to connect.”
This week I was in a conversation with someone who asked me what the difference is between “networking” and “network building.” I’ve been asked this before, and certainly do not purport to have the right answer, but it became an opportunity to deepen the conversation that has been evolving in my work and head about what it means to develop potential through and in networks. Here is what popped to mind as a response, actually in the form of a series of questions
Are you thinking about others?
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August 15, 2011
I ended my last post with the question: What do we want badly enough to pursue it? Barbara Kingsolver gives us some ideas in Animal Dreams.
“The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what to hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof.”
All the wisdom and spiritual traditions give us beautiful things to hope for—completion, salvation, an end to suffering, a world of beauty and peace.
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July 6, 2010
This past weekend Samantha and I went to what I would call a “movement wedding.” Our friends Justin Francese and Doyle Canning, who co-founded smartMeme, decided it was time to tie the knot. It was a beautiful event and there are many highlights to share, but there is something in particular that has stuck with me since. Towards the end of the ceremony they invited us to join them in praying “the liberation theology version of the Lord’s Prayer,” and I feel like I’ve been contemplating this line since – Read More
June 16, 2009
When was the last time you heard an Executive Director talk about dreaming and mean it? I don’t mean to be cynical, and I do in fact consider myself an optimist, but I don’t have the best perspective on the institutionalization of the nonprofit sector in the United States. I often feel like words such as “vision” and “dreaming” have become the stale objects of grant proposals. But over the last few days here in Brazil I have been reminded that these words speak of an essential power that makes us human, these are faculties inherent in our evolutionary thrust, and it is time to reclaim them.
Led by Edgard Gouveia Júnior and a team of brilliant architects Instituto Elos has set out to make dreams possible again. Over the last few days I have witnessed the underbelly of this global capitalist system and human beings surviving under some of the worst living conditions many of us could imagine. This is where Elos has chosen to work. Edgar told me that he deeply believes in the symbol of the Yin and the Yang, he said that it is where darkness seems immutable that we find the brightest points of light.
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