The following is a letter by Akaya Windwood, President of the Rockwood Leadership Institute and member of the IISC Board of Directors.
As you can see from my new photo, I’ve decided to stop dyeing my hair. I am now officially a gray-haired woman. When I turned 55 last year, I made a deeper commitment to authenticity, and that included looking in the actual mirror (and not just the mirror of my conscience).
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I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections
– Stowe Boyd
Today, Curtis Odgen and I will be hosting an LLC Webinar on Collective Leadership. We are talking about a significant shift in how we organize our work for social transformation. Stowe Boyd, the net’s social anthropologist, recently posted what he calls the beginnings of an elevator pitch on “New Mutualism.” I found it resonant, relevant and tremendously exciting; here it goes:
4 CommentsThis is the 26th official celebration of the national holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I remember the struggle to establish the holiday and wonder what Dr. King himself might think of what it has become.
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The following post is reblogged from Seth’s Blog. We hope that it will enrich your life and much as it has ours.
The pain of a lousy boss, of careless mistakes, of insufficient credit. The pain of instability, of bullying, of inadequate tools. The pain of poor cash flow, corrosive feedback and work that isn’t worthy of you.
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What has been the most important epiphany in your life?
Today is the Feast of the Epiphany and I’m from Puerto Rico where we celebrate it as Three Kings Day. In fact, I’ve just heard it argued that Puerto Rico is the country with the strongest tradition of “Día de los Reyes.” Our Christmas gifts used to come on this date instead of December 25. We would leave grass under our beds so that their camels could eat as they went from house to house. I grew up in a nationalist household, so my family was among the last hold outs as “Americanization” (which was really commercialism and marketing) led more and more people to get into Santa Claus. To this day my father hates Santa – it’s actually kind of funny.
Comments Off on EpiphanyI have written a few times in this space (see “Right from the Start” and “The System is Us”) about our work with the Graustein Memorial Fund and stakeholders from around Connecticut to re-conceptualize and change the early childhood development system in the state so that all families and children are thriving. We are currently in the midst of a visioning process, whereby members of the System Design Team are engaging various constituents in conversations about what it would look like if the system were truly providing equitable and excellent support and opportunities to all children, regardless of race, ability, and income. In addition, we are asking what foundational beliefs, or values, would under-gird such a reality brought to life. This phase kicked off with a series of interviews with participants in the Memorial Fund’s annual Stone Soup Conference. This included parents, child care providers, elected officials, advocates of all kinds, and the keynote speaker – Ralph Smith. Check out the series above, along with others posted on the Right from the Start site. There is an emerging picture forming here, that speaks to the power of collective visioning. What do you see?
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One of the many things I like about celebrating New Year’s Day is that for a moment in time the awareness of millions of people is simultaneously focused on the same point of transition. We conspire to create an opening. We align ourselves with the cycle of the planets. We leap into a future that is necessarily new.
I’m not big on apocalypse or fear mongering. But I am often in awe of the stars. 2012 is going to be a big year for the stars. We’ll hear a lot of silliness, but creative are good alchemists. Let’s allow ourselves to toy with the idea of transition – of shift, of developmental leaps.
Leave a commentThe Black Mesa Water Coalition is an inspiring group of Navajo and Hopi young people who organized to protect the Navajo aquifer which was being depleted by coal production and transportation processes. They are a great example of people power, coming together and winning important gains for their community. And, they are an important reminder about the many ways in which Native people in the U.S. continue to face structural barriers to their own well-being. As we move the conversation about structural racism forward, I have to ask myself, as a black woman who grew up on land that was taken from the Wampanoag people, how can I be an effective ally?
Leave a commentWe’ve been having a good conversation at IISC about ways to challenge and re-frame race discourse in ways that are truthful, loving, compelling, welcoming and so much more. Last week, I posted a video from Jay Smooth about shifting from a discussion about “being” to a discussion about “doing.” Let’s keep the conversation going.
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The following post is from Founding Board Chair, Thomas J. Rice. It is a little longer than we post, however, we hope that you will find it is rich in content and helps continue to challenge the way we think about various systems and movements.
Historian James Truslow Adams defined the American Dream when he coined the term at the depths of the Great Depression. What we seek is “a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone.” If there’s one thing we could all agree on, we have lost our way in this quest. And there’s no GPS to find our True North, or the way home.
Enter the Occupy Movement, a spontaneous cri de coeur from a millennial generation that feels betrayed and abandoned by the people and institutions they believed in. No American Dream for them. Their prospects are bleak, in no way better or richer or fuller than their parents. In spite of great effort and expense to move up and out, the millenniums are back in the nest, in serious debt from college loans and working at some menial or dead end job with no health benefits.
Leave a commentHere at IISC we talk about having three lenses for the work of collaboration. One of those lenses is the lens of love. I have worked and played with Anasa Troutman in all kinds of formations over the years, most recently as part of the same Networks and Decentralized Organizing Community of Practice.
I thought that her stance for Love is a very real call for those of us interested in the practice of social transformation. What do you think?
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All right friends, it’s time. I’m going to write my first e-book. I’m going to do it in 30 days using the process outlined here. Today is day 1. I will be posting daily updates to my Facebook and twitter feeds.
I need your help. I want to write about “teams, work and complexity,” I don’t have a title yet. But it doesn’t matter what I want to write about if you don’t want to read about it! The first two days of the process are about asking you for a topic. See what copyblogger says:
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