|Photo by DownTown Pictures|http://www.flickr.com/photos/raylopez/485753391|
Last month I was asked to present to the Children and Nature Network’s Grassroots Gathering in Princeton, New Jersey, along with Ginny McGinn of the Center for Whole Communities. We were invited by a common acquaintance who knows both our respective organizational work and our recent collaborative endeavor in developing and offering a training entitled Whole Measures: Transforming Communitiesby Measuring What Matters Most (the next public workshop will be in Boston from November 16-18). Both IISC and CWC work to build the collaborative capacity of social change endeavors, albeit in slightly different and complementary ways. The topic of our presentation was “Collaborative Leadership,” and what became core to our joint plenary address was the story of our own partnership. Read More
|Photo by RandomChu|http://www.flickr.com/photos/randomchu/251646898/sizes/m/|
Just yesterday in a meeting of the Senior Associates at the Interaction Institute for Social Change, Gibrán Rivera made a comment about the ways in which being too fixed with an identity prevent us from getting to a place of liberation. I’ve heard him talk about this before – and am challenged by it every time he says it.
Erich Jarvis is a professor and head of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics of Language at the Rockefeller University and a specialist in bird songs and calls. Called a “scienfic artist,” Jarvis was raised in New York City, attended the School for the Performing Arts (where he was an accomplished dancer), and went on to study birds while a student at Hunter College and Rockefeller University. His research has suggested that birds are more intelligent than most give them credit for, and Jarvis hopes that his focus on the complexity behind bird songs will lead to therapies for human beings with speech difficulties.
There are those in the scientific community who had objected to Jarvis’ and others’ assertions about avian intelligence, in part because the terminology used to describe a bird’s brain had long emphasized its primitiveness. This is precisely what Jarvis set out to change a number of years ago. He took it upon himself to pull together colleagues from around the country and across disciplines to collaboratively rename parts of the avian brain.Read More
|Photo by exfordy|http://www.flickr.com/photos/exfordy/1184487050|
Had you visited the IISC Cambridge offices a couple of weeks ago, prior to our staff putting all of our belongings in boxes and pink (yes pink) crates in preparation for our move, you would have seen a piece of paper on my computer stand with the following word in bold letters:
FOCUS
This has been my mantra for the past year, and there is is increased urgency around it these days, not simply because that paper is now sealed in some box on its way to Boston’s Seaport. With so much in flux (including our move), with so many possibilities and so much to be done out there, with so much information flowing through the various channels into which I am tuned, I can easily find myself getting distracted – “Oh Look, A Squirrel!”. And I know I am not alone.
|Photo by suchitra prints|http://www.flickr.com/photos/chitrasudar/2721323275|
. . . or three blogs and a book. That’s what I asked my fellow weekly IISC bloggers to recommend. What are they finding particular value in reading or re-reading for our work supporting collaboration for social change? Here’s what I got (not the complete list from everyone, as there was some overlap and vacations in there): Read More
“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
This often quoted comment by Dr. King forms the foundation of Adam Kahane’s new book, Love and Power: A theory and practice of social change. Melinda Weekes and I attended a recent book talk by Adam, attracted to the topic because, at IISC we’ve been thinking through and practicing the connections among power, love, networks and collaboration for years now. Much of what Adam shared resonates with our thinking. The book builds on the thinking of theologian Paul Tillich. His definitions are worth taking a closer look:
This past week marked the release of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations’ newest action learning guide – Do Nothing About Me Without Me: An Action Guide for Engaging Stakeholders. IISC is pr0ud to be a co-publisher of and contributor to the publication, which builds on our work with GEO staff facilitating Engage for Results. Essentially this seminar walks foundation staff through a series of strategic questions and tools for engaging grantees, community members, and other stakeholders in their grantmaking. Worth highlighting here is what GEO and IISC identify as being core to the case for funders doing more to involve others in their work: Read More
|Photo by Lee Adcock|http://www.flickr.com/photos/leeadc/2821894989/sizes/m/|
A few of us at IISC have been talking recently about network governance – trying to gather what we’ve learned about what kinds of governance structures have worked with networks. It’s sparked a lot of questions – and I had the great fortune of meeting with the amazing Jessica Lipnack recently to ask her advice about what she would suggest. For those who don’t know Jessica, she and her husband Jeff Stamps have been working with and studying networks for over 30 years and have literally written the book (actually the BOOKS) on networks and working with virtual teams over these many years.
|Photo by Kevin Krejci|http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinkrejci/4217559275|
“Good design is a renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need, and beauty to produce something the world didn’t know it was missing.”
-Paola Antonelli
The other day I was clearing out some file drawers at the office in advanced preparation for our impending move into Boston this summer, when I came across a 17 year old paper written by Interaction Associates founder David Straus. This paper’s date times with the founding year of the Interaction Institute for Social Change and speaks to the longer historical roots of the Interaction methods that IISC and IA share. As I read the paper, what struck me most was David’s very early recognition of the interconnections between design, thinking, and cognition.
More about power and group processes. There have been a mountain of books written about the “bases of power” and the “types of power”. I’ve done some work to try to boil it down – and find thinking about this very useful in moving forward the conversation about how to address power issues in group processes.
|Photo by Qoncept|http://www.flickr.com/photos/37418570@N03/4488784822|
With another public offering of Pathway to Change on the horizon (May 4-6), I’ve been putting my thinking towards how best to encapsulate this robust course, which focuses on skills and frameworks for designing and facilitating collaborative change efforts. The genius behind IISC’s courses in general (for which I can take absolutely no credit) is the simple elegance of the visuals that capture many of the essential ideas and steps. That said, we can sometimes find ourselves awash in images and wanting something a little more to the point to guide us. For these purposes, I’ve boiled the course down to a series of key questions that stand behind the various models. So here is the Curtis’ Notes version (which also applies to a related course, Engage for Results, that we offer to foundations in partnership with GEO):
|Photo by Great Beyond|http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonyjcase/2759363747/|
A few years ago, I researched and wrote a masters’ thesis on addressing power dynamics in collaborative process design and facilitation.? I was doing the study based on great questions raised over the years by Cyndi Suarez (Co-Director of Northeast Action) – and with the belief that if power dynamics are not well understood and addressed, group process facilitators are likely to unknowingly reinforce the status quo – a scary thought for those of us working on social justice and social change!
