It’s Giving Tuesday and if you are in Canada and looking for places to donate money, I encourage you to head over to a new website launched and hosted by The Circle on Philanthropy which connects Indigenous communities and funders, foundations and donors. The new website is called The Feast House and it is a place where you can donate directly, abundantly and without restriction to Indigenous-led organizations and projects across the country. It also contains links to articles, podcasts and videos to hep you learn more about giving and philanthropy in an Indigenous context Donating money to Indigenous-led work …
Some interesting links that caught my eye this week. Why Black Hole Interiors Grow (Almost) Forever Leonard Susskind has linked the growth of black holes to increasing complexity. Is it true that the world is becoming more complex? “It’s not only black hole interiors that grow with time. The space of cosmology grows with time,” he said. “I think it’s a very, very interesting question whether the cosmological growth of space is connected to the growth of some kind of complexity. And whether the cosmic clock, the evolution of the universe, is connected with the evolution of complexity. There, I …
A couple of years ago I wrote a post that was critical of the way in which the Representative for Children in Youth in British Columbia drove practice changes among social workers. In short the reason had to do with apply too much order (rules and checklists) in a complex space (social work practice). At a certain point, when you are trying to prevent deaths that have occurred in the past, you end up outlawing all but the deaths that will surprise you in the future. We look at reviews of child deaths as if they were expected and predictable …
As Bronagh Gallagher and I have been musing about our offering on complexity, facilitation and social justice, we have been discussing the shift in activism from ideology to evolutionary. Ideological movements try to coalesce activities and people along a line towards a fixed end state. Evolutionary movements start with intentions, principles and move outward in multiple directions along vectors. They adjust and learn as they go, and they both respond to and change their context. This nice post from Network Centered Advocacy capgtues what I’m talking about by first looking at how a lacrosse player’s artistry evolves in changing contexts …
My friend and colleague Bronagh Gallagher and I are in the early stages of creating a learning offering around complexity, facilitation and activism, whereby we try to bring complexity and participatory tools to the work of social change. We’ve been assembling some very interesting sources for our work and she recently introduced me to the work of Micah White who has written about protest and activism from a complexity perspective. I’m working my way through some interviews he gave in support of his book, The End of Protest. Here is one juicy line: This is fundamental. All effective forms of protest …