The other day I was quite struck by a seemingly ordinary sentence at the end of a job posting that I received from Santropol Roulant. “We encourage applicants to drop their CVs off in person.” I was a bit taken aback, less by the statement itself than by my own reaction to it. It felt [...]
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Cameron’s recent post made me think of my friend Jonathan Glencross. That’s his picture on the left. Jonathan is a student at McGill who is disarmingly gifted at sparking visible, large-scale change. Last year he was the catalyst for the creation of a $2.5 million sustainability project fund, financed and governed by students and administrators [...]
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“Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t give an ‘I have a plan’ speech. He talked about his dream.” It’s perhaps the most effective way that Simon Sinek, in his TED talk on powerful leadership, makes his point about the power of belief to inspire action. Most of his examples centre around business innovation and business success, [...]
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Last Saturday, Tana and I went to the funeral of Penny Parkes. We had gotten to know Penny through our work with Santropol Roulant. She was a client, volunteer, and board member there and reflected the spirit of the place in a beautiful and charming way all her own. Penny struggled with a degenerative disease, [...]
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Let’s talk about soccer. World Cup fever’s over and for all the emphasis on laudable value, ex – cross-cultural dialogue, athleticism, this is still a display that’s largely exclusionary. For one thing, this is a game that thrives on competition. To play, you normally have to try and be good – moreso – you have [...]
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The following is an edited transcript of a conversation that Tana and I had with my sister Turi Nilsson. She is the Director of Instruction and co-founder of Southwest Baltimore Charter School, a place of great inspiration and learning for us. We’ve written about it in previous posts. RENNIE: What would you say are the [...]
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What would it look like if my life was an organization? This is the question I was left with last evening. Friends from different circles had come over to talk about sustainability in the home (windowsill gardening, composting, etc.) It was a nice, lively discussion that I’d been inspired to organize for a few months [...]
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We’re happy to introduce our first guest blogger Alex Megelas. Alex is an organizational change consultant and a personal and professional coach based in Montreal, Canada. He is a guiding spirit behind Geek Montreal and Anarchist Soccer, in addition to many other innovative community projects, and works at COCo. Alex will be doing a series of posts [...]
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In the late 90s I was involved in getting a grassroots school reform movement off the ground in Baltimore City. One of the first schools that agreed to participate was exceptionally low performing and lacked really basic resources like textbooks, a library, a gymnasium, and a cafeteria. Its team of dedicated teachers and administrators were [...]
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Learning in Relationship, by Ronald Short, is a book that I find myself re-reading again and again. I quoted from it in my post Inscaping at COCo a couple of months ago, but feel it’s worth revisiting because I think it contains a tremendous amount of wisdom. It spells out in simple and concrete language [...]
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