I am fond of blogging about the teachings I receive from Elders and the wise people in my life. Putting them here in this space gives them a kind of public life and memory that they wouldn’t otherwise have. Over this weekend at the giving conference I was privileged to meet Debbie Gleason. Debbie brought something absolutely essential to the my experience of the conference. She talked about love. Pure love, the love that connects a mother to a daughter in a myriad of unspoken and intuitive ways, that constructs a language of shared understanding. In the midst of all …
Talking with Phil Cubeta and AKMA this morning about enforcing the moral claims that support the resources that support local action. The dark side of community organizing, decentralization and local action is that those who are aggregating resources are hoping that this trend continues, in order to keep energy focused at the local level and money flowing to the centre. Releasing these resources to support meaningful change, including stuff like building infrastructure in First nations communities. In First Nations, there are actually a number of tools that help to express power and enforce claims. Access to litigation, treaty negotiation, self-government …
Giving conference is happening, and we have just finished the first sessions. I attended a session offered by RuthAnn Prange who was floating the idea of convening a conference of facilitators who work for the common good.. The idea came out of her work with the Listening to the City project in New York in 2002. Basically Ruthann’s idea is top convene a conference of facilitators who work for the common good, whether that is within business organizations, communities or elsewhere. It seems as if there is a community evolving of facilitators who do this and a gathering of some …
Chicago on the Skeena, photoshopped by GlobalChicagoAgitPropEnterprises Ltd. Light blogging ahead. Over the mountains and off to Chicago for the Giving Conference to join folks like Michael Herman, Ashley Cooper, Jon Husband, The Happy Tutor, AKMA, Tom Munnecke, Lenore Ealy and others for three days of very interesting conversation. If you aren’t joining us live (and why not? eh? eh?) then follow all the action on the conference wiki, or through Phil Cubeta’s postings at the GiftHub blog. See you out there!
Michale Valpy of the Globe and Mail ran a series about a 23 year old Saskatchewan voter called Chandler. Turns out that he felt like I did on June 28.: “Having voted, Chandler felt no satisfaction with what he’d done. He still saw no real connection between his vote and how Canada is run. Democracy, as he said repeatedly, has different dynamics: consensus building among citizens around a specific issue; informed and well-researched submissions to civil servants and cabinet ministers; influence from lobbyists. ‘I am not drawn to electoral politics,’ he said simply. And if you don’t vote, you can’t …