Tag Archive: vision
July 16, 2012
In this post, Jeremy Liu (an esteemed IISC Board member) encourages the community development field “to figure out how to embrace the strengths of our past as a movement, even more so than becoming more established as an industry.” I think this is wise advice for many fields in the nonprofit sector, where so many organizations and institutions emerged from resistance movements and have passed through various stages of institutionalization and even bureaucratization. Jeremy ends with an important invitation for the community development field that could easily be for all of us: “it will continue to be important for our field to question itself, to ask itself what we want to create for our communities, to ask ourselves how to best achieve that vision for the future. We must be prepared to put aside past industrial practices and perhaps embrace emergence and people once again.”
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July 9, 2012
We spend a lot of time at IISC thinking about how to talk about and practice love as a force for social change. Mike Edwards claimed in 2003 that “that the future of our world depends on how successful we are in developing and applying a new social science of love… applied in and through the systems that are essential to the functioning of all successful societies…[This kind of love is best illuminated by Rev. Dr.] Martin Luther King’s philosophy of the “love that does justice”, signifying the deliberate cultivation of mutually-reinforcing cycles of personal and systemic change…
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July 3, 2012
Last Thursday we celebrated almost 20 years of visionary leadership by our founding executive director, Marianne Hughes. Today we welcome Ceasar McDowell as the new President of the Interaction Institute for Social Change.
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June 12, 2012
I’m a big fan of “Open Space,” I like trusting people who have passion. I believe in the power of connection through self-organization. It is too often that the most interesting conversations at the conference actually happen at the break or at the bar or at the after-party. Let’s move what matters to the center! Here is a helpful reflection by my friend Chad Jones.
Open space is a way to break up the mundane, old ways of conferences. Just as we are realizing that rote memorization does not work in the classroom, and education needs to be shaken up. Our meetings and multi-day conferences need strong winds of new ideas and currents of new ways.
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June 5, 2012
Last week we started to take a look at Kevin Kelly’s take on the benefits of swarm systems. We are wondering what are the implications for movement builders. We looked at how important it is for us to be adaptable.
Kelly also says that swarm systems are evolvable. He says that these are:
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May 29, 2012
I’m a huge fan of Kevin Kelly. I really think of him as the prophet of the digital age. He has done lots around complexity. And he has spent time looking at swarms. In “Bootstrapping Comlexity,” Andrea Lloyd’s “remix” of Kelly’s book “Out of Control” we find a useful list of benefits and apparent disadvantages of swarm systems.
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May 21, 2012
I just read a helpful Upmarket blog post on the distinction between strategy and tactic. It was almost a relief to know that the business sector also struggles with the distinction. Confusing these two terms has led to a lot of trouble in our work for social change.
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May 21, 2012
You’ve heard that “it takes a village to raise a child.” It also takes a village to make an IISC engagement happen. I want to raise up a shout out and express my grateful for the excellence with which our colleagues do the detailed behind-the-scenes work that makes IISC’s practice possible.
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May 15, 2012
I’m just coming out of a mind bending, heart expanding retreat with Orland Bishop, Rachel Bagby and the Barr Fellows Network. It was one of those experiences that is hard to put into words. For lack of a better word, and I hope Orland doesn’t mind this, it was more like being with a shaman than with a facilitator.
Orland led us in an exploration of intention and attention as he invited us to question how we relate to reality itself. He led with the idea that our relationships – and therefore our human experience – can be radically redefined if we make it our purpose to truly understand the other; and to do it with radical acceptance.
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April 25, 2012
Last weekend I had a most unique privilege. I facilitated the final retreat of a three-year process. I have been working with the Barrboletas, the Barr Fellows cohort of 2009, since their inaugural learning journey to Brazil in June of that year. We have a book worth of documentation. The fellowship as a whole will be highlighted in the May issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review. This post is a celebration of their last retreat as a cohort – they will continue to participate in an exciting plethora of network activities as they are moved and able.
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April 24, 2012
The following post are 5 tips that will help in your Social Media strategy for any organization. These are just 5 easy tips out of 10 that can be used in order to strengthen any social media platform. We hope that you find these extremely useful.
Why should businesses bother with social media? From Twitter and Pinterest to Facebook and Google+, the social realm can bring the human element to a product or service. A Facebook page enables a company to share behind-the-scenes photos or answer consumer questions. On Twitter, that same company can offer coupons, or get in touch with a person immediately over a complaint.
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April 23, 2012
Wonder why I’m passionate about collaborative process and strong, creative process design?
Join us at Fundamentals of Facilitation for Racial Justice Work on May 8-9 in Boston to explore these ideas and more!
You can’t have peace or justice without it. Consider the following:
“Peace comes from being able to contribute the best that we have, and all that we are, toward creating a world that supports everyone. But it is also securing the space for others to contribute the best that they have and all that they are.” So says Nigerian human rights and democracy activist, Hafsat Abiola. Her words echo those of John Paul Lederach , who wrote in The Moral Imagination that peace is not a condition—a process through which people can build relationships conflicting parties and continually engage to create a reality where “the other” continues to exist.
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