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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When I first began doing community development work, I was attracted to the ideas and experiences that were the most creative and radical in my eyes. I dreamed of worker cooperatives and local currencies. I dreamed of green buildings and urban agriculture. I dreamed of free schools. I dreamed of boundary-shattering dialogues on poverty and […]
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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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The theme of vulnerability that Tana introduced a few posts ago is an important one for me. Like Tana, I have noticed that one of the strongest threads running through expressive organizations I have spent time with is their willingness to face up to and explore their vulnerability. At a personal level, people share their […]
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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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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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My friend Alex Megelas has been organizing a monthly Geek Out event that I’ve had the joy of going to a few times over the past year. The idea is pretty simple: gather a bunch of interesting people and a bunch of games and crafts in the same room on a wintery Saturday afternoon and […]
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