Yesterday I had the great pleasure of working with the tireless staffs of various Neighbourhood Houses in Vancouver. Most of these people are involved in the work of Welcoming Comunities Initiatives, working with refugees and migrants to Vancouver. Yesterday we were in some learning about engagement design using the chaordic stepping stones and the collective story harvest tool, both developed by the Art of Hosting community of practice. In the collective story harvest, the group of about two dozen listened and witnessed the story of two prominent members of our community who left Guatemala in the early 1990s and came …
I’m a sucker for principles, because principles help us to design and do what is needed and help us to avoid bringing pre-packaged ideas and one-size-fits-all solutions to every problem. And of course, I’m a sucker for my friend Meg Wheatley. Today, in our Art of Hosting workshop in central Illinois, Tenneson Woolf and Teresa Posakony brought some of Meg’s recent thinking on these principles to a group of 60 community developers working in education, child and family services, and restorative justice. We’re excited to be working nwith these principles in the work we’re doing with Berkana Institute. Here’s what …
Phil Cubeta hits a home run with a lament for what lies at our collective centre: As you can tell, this post is not about venture philanthropists per se but about language. What saddens me is the impoverishment of our ways of talking about our shared lives in community with one another. To see the languages of love withering, or sequestered behind closed doors, while the language of money thrives in all venues is a cause and symptom of a decline in the moral imagination. We have become people for whom the master metaphor is finance, even as the markets …
I am helping to design an interesting gathering in June of next year that will be part of a bigger initiative to shift the values conversation around sustainability. It’s interesting for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is the conscious invitation of indigenous peoples, social entreprenuers and leaders who are firmly connected to the biggest and most influential systems in our world. We’re seeing what we can do together. The initiative is called Beyond Sustainability: Cultivating a community of leadership from a platform of reverence. After an intense and creative weekend of designing, here are some of …