Tag Archives: Purpose

Posts Tagged ‘Purpose’

How the spotted owl can save us
October 1st, 2012 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson & Tana Paddock | 14 Comments
What does it mean for an environmental organization to work expressively, to live out the values of sustainability and deep ecology in its day-to-day work? Most environmental organizations striving to be coherent focus on behaviour. Do we recycle? Do we compost? Do we use energy-efficient light bulbs? Do we reduce our use of water and paper? Do we bring our own mugs? Sustainability is not this tame. Sustainability requires [...]
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Welcome to our first podcast- “Daring to hibernate”
May 31st, 2012 | Expressive Change | Podcast | 3 Comments
A couple of months ago I received an intriguing note in my inbox from The Berkana Institute. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Berkana, you might know one of it’s founders Meg Wheatley, a well-known author who writes about [...]
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Cleaning for a change
May 1st, 2012 | Expressive Change | Tolu Ilesanmi | 1 Comment
It took courage to start a cleaning company when Ronke and I did. I was an MBA student at McGill, having worked as a star banker at GT Bank, an elite Nigerian bank, and in Nigeria’s oil and gas industry. Being slightly rebellious, I proceeded partly because being a cleaner was contrary to everything my society expected of me. The clients, friends and associates who have engaged with us have had a sense that there was something different [...]
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City of Sanctuary
December 15th, 2011 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock | 1 Comment
Casper ter Kuile shared this City of Sanctuary clip with us as a beautiful example of a social change initiative that is completely rooted in meaning and experience. On the City of Sanctuary blog, Giuilia, a newly arrived volunteer from Italy, shares how surprised she is to see so many asylum seekers and refugees [...]
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Expressive campaigning
December 7th, 2011 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock | 2 Comments
An increasing number of NGOs are turning to conventional marketing methods to convince the masses to adopt more environmentally-friendly behaviours. These campaigns motivate people to turn down their central heating by suggesting they follow the latest fashion trends in winter clothing, persuade people to reduce flying by suggesting they take the train for their next luxurious pleasure trip, and encourage parents to “spoil their little monsters” at Christmas with the latest trends in eco-friendly toys.
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Turning John McKnight inside out
October 25th, 2011 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson | 3 Comments
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?
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Whole person, whole system
August 14th, 2011 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson | No Comments
What is less well understood is that treating each other as the patchwork, unruly human beings we are, rather than the zippered office functionaries we pretend to be, is also the only way we can really come to understand, let alone affect, the larger institutional patterns we are trying to change [...]
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When our first instinct is to run away . . .
June 11th, 2011 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson | 2 Comments
I once asked a guy named Pedro, who had spent his life founding and working in one of the Mondragon industrial cooperatives, what his most engaging organizational experience had been. He gave me a kind of half-smile. “It was when we went bankrupt.”
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“Interviewing” Gandhi
May 11th, 2011 | Expressive Change | Tana Paddock | 2 Comments
Many of us are familiar with the phrase “Be the change you want to see in the world,” so much so that it has become a bit of a cliché. I’ve been wondering for a while now what else Gandhi said that relates to expressive social change, a concept that is at the heart of [...]
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A simple practice that caught our attention
December 10th, 2010 | Expressive Change | Warren Nilsson | 9 Comments
We are in Cape Town for a few weeks and just got back from a meeting with Nathan Heller at The Hub, a co-working space for social innovators. Although The Hub Cape Town only recently opened its doors, the model has been around for a while and there are over two dozen Hubs worldwide in [...]
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