Author Archive
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, […]
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My friends Tolu and Ronke run a cleaning company that is unlike any cleaning company I have ever come across. They see Zenith Cleaners as a vehicle through which they can create the kind of world they want to live in, a world that is not just healthy and aesthetically beautiful, but deeply rooted in […]
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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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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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“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 of the reasons that I find the concept of expressive change so compelling is that it brings social change into a realm that I can engage with on a daily basis. It doesn’t deny that larger social and economic systems need to be changed, rather it recognizes that it is through our seemingly mundane thoughts […]
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