Cleaning myself, cleaning the world

“Oh and of course as part of the job you will also have to clean homes and offices too”, Tolu said, his twinkling eyes examining me. Mhm. Interesting. We were sitting in his office after my job interview to do the communications and marketing at Zenith Cleaners, which had turned into a 2-hour long conversation.

Networks: a love story

We recently stumbled upon the work of Interaction Institute for Social Change (IISC), one of a growing number of capacity-building organizations taking an ‘inside-out’ approach to social transformation. One of their associates, Curtis Ogden, wrote this piece a few months back reflecting on their journey of stepping more fully into their most deeply held value: “the love that does justice”.

I am a cleaner

So when we clean a school, we are not just cleaning the hallways and the bathrooms but if they permit us, there is a possibility of cleaning their system of education. When we clean a church, our intention is to introduce cleaning as a spiritual practice. When we clean for a real estate developer, we can work with them to […]

Podcast: A conversation with Sushrut and Tolu

In this podcast, we speak with Sushrut Munje and Tolu Ilesanmi about their experiments in transforming the underbelly of the cleaning industry. We met Sushrut last year at a workshop we gave in Mumbai a few months after he launched his new cleaning business Hammer & Mop. Recently he re-connected to see if we could […]

Cleaning for a change

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 […]

What if an art gallery was itself a work of art?

“Is it possible that creativity in arts organisations not be limited to the gallery space?”

Anne Bertrand has been flirting with this question for as many years as I have known her. When we first met almost a decade ago, she was asking it from a place of frustration. She had spent several years working for an artist-run organization and was feeling quite disheartened as a result. How can it be, she would say to me in exasperation, that […]

The promise of the square: A conversation with Motaz Attalla

Warren: Can you take us back a bit to how you experienced the early days of Tahrir Square?

Motaz: There was this sense of rediscovering pure community- with all its good and bad. Knowing what it means to receive gifts and give gifts, to receive care and give care between absolute strangers and with a totally open heart. And feeling just a sweetness of courage. And to know that we don’t have to worry about the consequences of stepping out- not because things won’t turn out bad but because there is a lot of support for the act of bravery itself. And to me that’s the glue of society. Feeling like people are for you and you are for people.

Turning John McKnight inside out

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?

Invoking Jim

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.

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.