Yesterday we were walking an incredible cliff top trail in East Sooke Park, in Scia’new territory on Vancouver Island. The Coast Trail there is rugged along the Juan de Fuca side of the park and although it is well travelled, there are sections across bare rock cliff top when the path is all but invisible. It requires a deeper kind of seeing to discern where the path is, especially if you follow what looks to be an obvious route which can take you to some dangerous places. As an experienced trail walker, I find myself in moments like this looking …
Today Ontario goes back into lockdown, complete with curfews and the enforcement of the situation by police officers with the discretion to charge people with a violation of the public health orders. This is all being done without any significant new programs to support those who otherwise have to travel or move to non-essential jobs – including night shifts – because while the work may be non-essential, living without income is not. It is a situation that is going to impact marginalized people of all kinds. This is an unprecedented public health crisis. We are battling an easily spread, lethal …
I sometimes feel like I’m repeating myself here, but please indulge me. When I get my teeth into learning about something I come back to it over and over, finding new ways to think about it, polishing it up. I love blogs because they offer us a chance to put drafting thinking out into the world and get responses, forcing me to think more deeply and more clearly about things. Likewise teaching, which for me is always the best stone that sharpens the blade, so to speak. Tomorrow I will rise at an ungodly hour – 4am – to teach …
Last month Caitlin and I worked with our colleague Teresa Posakony bringing an Art of Hosting workshop to a network of social services agencies and government workers working on building resilience in communities across Washington State. To prepare, we shared some research on resilience, and in the course of that literature review, I fell in love with a paper by Michael Ungar of Dalhousie University. In Systemic resilience: principles and processes for a science of change in contexts of adversity, Ungar uncovers seven principles of resilience that transcend disciplines, systems and domains of action. He writes: In disciplines as diverse as …
A couple of days I ago I shared a link on twitter from Rob Hopkins about a community meeting held in Totnes in the UK which brought together the community to discuss what to do now that the town had declared a climate emergency. The design of the meeting was highly participatory and I’m grateful that the organizers took time to document and share the results. The design had all the hallmarks of an effective participatory gathering, including having a well thought through harvest strategy so that the gathering was in service of the work and that it left people …