The promise of the square: A conversation with Motaz Attalla

Warren: Can you take us back a bit to how you experienced the early days of Tahrir Square?

Motaz: There was this sense of rediscovering pure community- with all its good and bad. Knowing what it means to receive gifts and give gifts, to receive care and give care between absolute strangers and with a totally open heart. And feeling just a sweetness of courage. And to know that we don’t have to worry about the consequences of stepping out- not because things won’t turn out bad but because there is a lot of support for the act of bravery itself. And to me that’s the glue of society. Feeling like people are for you and you are for people.

Turning John McKnight inside out

In workshops and classrooms I frequently hear some form of the question: “But how do we deal with those people who just don’t get it?” The ‘it’ is usually undefined, but everyone in the room understands it to be some combination of justice, sustainability, compassion…Heads nod. How can we hope to move forward when so many people don’t see the world from this perspective, when so many people don’t seem to care about the things we care about?

Invoking Jim

My father-in-law, Jim, is a great destroyer of walls. Every house he has lived in will bear me out. Each is filled with reclaimed open space, the air laced with the cheerful scars of what has been removed. To create such space, a man needs to have a strong desire to see the world – the whole thing – from the chair where he sits. He also needs a hammer.

Bringing minutes to life

“At this point there was a terrible cow manure smell that came across the lake.”

I came across this sentence as I was reading through the minutes of an annual general meeting that I attended some time back. It appears as its own paragraph, in the middle of the document, in italics.

The unConference

They are scattered about the steps and lawns. A knot of people puzzling over the relationship between education and politics. Sari-clad women practicing Brazilian martial arts. A group of home-schooled 10-year-olds selling handmade paperweights. A young man recounting with artistic precision his transformative experience on the front lines of the Egyptian revolution. There are workshops [...]

“That’s how the light gets in”

One of the things we’ve gotten used to in meetings at Kufunda is ants. Also millipedes. Also sitting on rocks. Dogs. Five-year olds. The occasional bat. Weird little crabbish things that dash about randomly in a panic. Straw. Wind. A careening traffic of odors – of bodies, blossoms, life. Tana’s last post was about reclaiming [...]

Social identity and the paradox of oneness

In my last post, I talked about the enlivening effect of seeing every person as belonging to our social purpose organizations. I mentioned Social Identity Theory, which explains how difficult holding such a universal intention can be. Social Identity Theory offers a particularly dispiriting explanation of how crudely we construct our identities through the groups [...]

Oneness

I’m seeing it again. The tilt toward everything. Most people say it is impossible. That community is always closed. That we only know where we belong when we know whom and what we have barred. In a review of several books on community participation, Malcolm Payne argues that community identity is necessarily formed through a [...]

The shores of Kufunda

Rennie and I have spent an emotion-filled couple of weeks leaving our home and friends in Montreal and flying across the globe to our new temporary home in Kufunda Village, Zimbabwe. Contrary to the title of this post, Kufunda is quite land-locked, nestled under a large canopy of trees on a farm outside of Harare, [...]

Boundary crossing

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 [...]