Posts Tagged ‘Montreal’
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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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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“The smallest divisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.” –Tony Kushner, Angels in America A few weeks ago, Rennie and I had the pleasure of convening a conversation about expressive change with a handful of folks in Montreal’s […]
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Michael Lenczner recently posted a comment that got me thinking a bit more about specific practices of expressive change. He mentioned “check-ins” as being a pretty reliable practice in his experience and pondered on the potential of the Quaker tradition of “speaking from silence”. One that I find to be particularly helpful is a process […]
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I recently finished reading the book Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change, by Adam Kahane. A number of the themes he raised in the book have had a kind of haunting effect on me. One point that I keep revisiting is the idea of approaching vulnerability as a source of wisdom rather […]
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One doorway into expressive change seems to be to turn your practice on yourself. What are your outwardly-aimed tools and approaches – the things you use to help your clients or further your mission? What would happen if you inverted these and used them to help your organization? Tana worked with a counseling organization in […]
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