I have an approximately $300 credit with WestJet for sale. It’s good until the end of April, and fully transferable. If you are interested, drop me a line (chris AT chriscorrigan.com) and I’ll make the arrangements to transfer it to you. Just to plug WestJet for a moment: I made this booking back in the spring for a conference in Edmonton which I had to cancel at the last moment. WestJet’s transfer policy is this: your credit is good for a year. Transfer it to anyone you like, just call us and let us know. The whole procedure takes less …
Following on from the last posting on the labour of gratitude, I’d like to take a slight deviation back to the introduction of “The Gift” where Lewis Hyde is writing about how we receive the fruits of artistic gifts: The spirit of the artist’s gifts can wake our own. The work appeals, as Joseph Conrad says, to a part of our being which is itself a gift and not an acquisition. Our sense of harmony can hear the harmonies that Mozart heard. We may not have the power to proffer our gifts as the artist does, and yet we come …
Here is a brief interlude from “The Gift” to give a real life case of how the gift theory at work. Susan Kerr convened a session at the Giving Conference in Chicago on July 10 on the book “The Gift.” I attended the session because of a conversation we had during which she pulled out a copy of the book and read some passages about the gift creating bonds and commodities creating boundaries. I was so taken with the book that Jill Perkins gave me her copy. I took that copy, cracked it open on the el train heading to …
The Homeless World Cup of Soccer is about to start this week. The tournament brings together national teams from around the world composed entirely of homeless soccer players. Alongside the tournament are meeting on strategies to combat homelessness. At an Aboriginal youth gathering I was at yesterday, this grabbed a little bit of attention. Some ideas got kicked around, including a British Columbia Aboriginal homeless soccer tournament and maybe the entry of a First Nations team in the 2005 Homeless World Cup in New York. Check the rules section of the website, where you will find how soccer has been …
Chapter three of “The Gift” is called “The Labor of Gratitude.” In it Hyde examines the nature of the transformative gift, the gift that works a transformation in the recipient. These kinds of gifts are very close to my heart, for they include teachings (received from Elders, mentors and other teachers) and, in a purely prosaic context, the kind of information received from people in processes like stakeholder consultations and organizational change initiatives. Here’s Hyde: In each example I have offered of a transformative gift, if the teaching begins to “take,” the recipient feels gratitude. I would like to speak …