City of Sanctuary

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 […]

Expressive campaigning

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.

A quick dip into anarchy

When I heard that the first-ever South African Anarchist Book Fair was being organized in Cape Town, I jumped at the opportunity to check it out. I had been to the anarchist book fair several times in Montreal, but never with a specific goal in mind. This time, I was going with a more tailored curiosity: How do anarchists go about […]

So what happened next, you ask?

During the two months that it took me to get my experiences at Rayat-Bahra down on paper, I often wondered how things were progressing at the College. I had not heard much since the retreat in April and so started to worry that nothing had come of it. Maybe the teachers decided it would be too big of a change to handle or maybe unforeseen external factors came into play that caused the process to be derailed…my mind hatched all sorts of reasons for the silence […]

From the archives: “Something like that happened to me recently…”

We are talking to our friend Andrew Woodall, someone we can always count on for a spirited conversation. He has spent the last five years running the Millennium Scholarship Foundation. After a pleasant, wintry morning tramp up Avenue du Parc in Montreal, we are hanging out in Em Cafe, discussing […]

Rayat-Bahra Teachers College

The landscape turns from deep green to sepia-yellow as we drive out of the tree-lined streets of the city and onto a dusty road lined with wheat fields. At some point we return to pavement and I glance out the back window to see a horse gallop across the road in our wake. Our taxi slows and turns onto a smaller road, meanders through an enclave of large white-washed structures, and comes to a stop in front of a cheerful looking building with students streaming through its front doors.

The experience of Inter Pares

I just finished reading a really interesting paper written by the staff of Inter Pares, an organization that I’ve drawn much inspiration from over the past several years. Founded in the early 1970s as a way for Canadians to support social justice organizing abroad, Inter Pares has always been strongly influenced by feminist thought. Yet in its early years, it was hierarchically structured and […]

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.

Taking the revolution forward

My friend Vanessa recently sent me a spirited reflection on her experience of the people’s assembly that has been taking place in the streets of Athens, Greece over the last 25 days. She describes how the larger vision for direct democracy and healthy communities wasn’t simply a slogan to be shouted

Dancing with Zenith Cleaners

I was reading through the Zenith Cleaners blog recently and came across a reflection written by our friend Tolu Ilesanmi titled Invitation to the dance. In it he describes the kind of reciprocal relationship he works hard to create with his staff, clients and suppliers.