The Province of British Columbia runs an amazing Aboriginal Youth Internship progra. The program takes young ABoriginal people (under 30) and places them in a 12 month program featuring nine months of working within the provincial government and three months of working with Aboriginal organizations and governments. The chief architect and steward of this program is Sasha Hobbs, who is sitting next to me in a fog bound Vancouver harbour. She is working with another friend of mine, the amazing Priscilla Sabbas, and together they are working with 25 amazing young people in their second year of operation. Intake is done in the spring, so if you are interested in applying, or know someone who is, check the website in March or April and get your application in.
The cool thing about this program is that it is most definitely not a token position. These are real positions with government ministries and Aboriginal organizations, and by all accounts the sponsors in the BC government want interns to be able to build their capacity and knowledge in working within the BC Government’s new relationship with Aboriginal communities. Furthermore, the interns that go through the program meet three times a year with each other and stay in touch afterwards, moving towards a cohort model for their community of practice, working and learning together across ministries and organizations.
So here’s a plug for a great little government program that is working, under good grounded community leadership and making a practical and positie difference for the capacity of our communities.
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Delayed at the Vancouver Harbour by a beautiful fog bank this morning. Turning to my feed readers, here’s what friends have been noticing this week.
- The Mars Lander Phoenix bids farewell via Metafilter
- The New York Times I want to read.
- Rob Paterson on why the current market crises may not be a blip
- Dustin Rivers, who always writes illuminating posts on the deep history of my region, is appearing on a panel about First Nations – South Asian relations in the Vancouver area.
- Jeremy Hiebert muses about Manufactuared Landscapes.
- Jon Husband, from one of his periodic trips to Europe, muses on top-down organizing systems in France.
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To Be of Use
By Marge Piercy
The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.
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I’ve had a Toshiba laptop for a could of months now running a 64 bit version of Vista. Loved it until last week, when it suddenly started crashing and freezing up for no reason. Restore doesn’t work. All the fixes I’ve tried have only staved off the annoyance, but it still keeps happening. I have tio hard reboot several times a day.
They must have called it Vista because you get to gaze out your window so much while it crashes and reboots.
Sucks. I’ve finally gone off Microsoft. The OS was the last piece of sotware I used by them. Ubuntu here we come.
Thanks Microsoft. Your products are unpredictable, heavy and come with no support. And they don’t do what they say they do which is OPERATE as a SYSTEM. Sayonara.
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Apropos of the fact that Tim Merry, Monica Nissen and I are hosting a module on the Art of Intergernational Hosting at this year’s Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership in Action, comes this quote from Jack Ricchiuto:
Every aging generation questions whether the generation coming of age has what it takes to learn into maturity as defined by the aging generation. Easy for each to think it knows better than the other. The fact is that they will always know more together than they could in isolation or competition. Hierarchy has the relevance of fossils. In an age of wisdom, life is a circle and we dare to be peers.
We dare to be peers indeed.