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 […]
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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.
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I burnt out in third year university. The nail in the coffin on top of school and work and everything else was the effort and time I’d put into organizing a day of panel discussions about ethical consumption. I booked the best minds of our university, matching them with on-the-ground activists in the community and a good smattering of ethical producers and consumer representatives.
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Inscaping is too broad a concept to explain some of the variation we see in the capacities of different organizations to become true social innovators. Many organizations might reasonably describe themselves as good at inscaping. They are relatively open and honest. The members of the organization care about each other and are willing and able to share their experiences. Yet these organizations often struggle to fully develop their capacities for meaningful, resilient social change. Why?
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Now that Organization Unbound is old enough to walk, we thought it would be a good time to create a Facebook page for it. It is a place where people can go to share their impressions, ideas and questions about the project. We’d love it if you would take a moment to visit and let us know what you think of Organization Unbound.
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During the Organization Unbound workshop in Delhi, I was honestly struggling to distinguish form and experience, until Warren gave what was a really helpful example I have felt and seen many times. When we talk about participation and equality in an organization or a meeting, many go to the easiest form of making it happen […]
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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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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.
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i am part of what feels like a new kind of team-work – it’s not so much that we are working as a team, but more as a “Field.” We call ourselves the “Amoeba”, and we work in partnership with others in large-scale systemic transformation processes…what is showing up is actually that one of the really important innovations towards systemic change could actually be our ‘Field”, this way of working together […]
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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 […]
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