Resisting in our free time: The state of civil society today

What happens when you get 900 civil society groups in the same room at over 8,500 feet above sea level? Excitement is guaranteed you’d think, along with a bit of oxygen deprivation and a whole lot of partying. That’s what lured me to Bogotá late last month for International Civil Society Week—the annual conference of an NGO called CIVICUS, the ‘World Alliance for Citizen Participation.’

Hot off the press!

Check out our feature article in the latest issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review- “Social Innovation From the Inside Out”. In it we explore the concept and practice of ‘inscaping’ and highlight three organizations that we’ve learned tons from over the years: Santropol Roulant, Southwest Baltimore Charter School, and PLAN. We’d love to hear your thoughts!

How we gather

At Kufunda Learning Village we had fallen into the rut of our weekly meetings having become very task oriented. They were the least inspired place of our village (mostly), and several issues were being discussed with only a few voices repeating themselves. There was little collective wisdom at play, and oftentimes we left our weekly Village Circle feeling drained and tired, although we might have managed to tick off many items on our to-do list. One day – after one too many such meetings – I decided, no more […]

The form trap

Check out this talk that Warren gave at Tedx Cape Town on an idea we feel is worth spreading!

The biggest challenge the world is facing is not how to create change but how to sustain change, and if we want to sustain change we are mostly paying attention to the wrong things, particularly inside our social purpose organizations and social movements…

Gross organizational happiness

Over the past several years, there has been a great deal of international focus on the notion of happiness. While there are many definitions of happiness, here is a composite of my favorites: “emotions experienced when in a state of well-being that range from contentment to intense joy.” This is not a new notion. Thinkers from Aristotle to Alice Walker to the Dalai Lama have written much about […]

Multiply wounded

We recently came across an illuminating talk by Nicaraguan psychologist Martha Cabrera- Living and Surviving in a Multiply Wounded Country. In her talk, she describes the uniquely holistic approach to societal healing that she and her team developed over a decade of experimental work in Nicaragua.

The Bike Shed

Once members get past the initial challenge of putting together a jigsaw puzzle of missing parts, they quickly realize that something greater than bike repair and the inhalation of kerosene is happening here; a sense of purpose and community is beaming through the interaction of those involved in the repair.

Social innovation from the inside out

We are excited to share this talk that Warren gave last month at University of Cape Town exploring the organizational dimensions of social innovation. In our experience, few social purpose organizations spend much time looking at how their own organizational cultures support or hinder the kinds of changes in the world they are working so hard to create. In this talk, Warren challenges us to consider how much of our current difficulty in fostering and scaling social innovation is bound up in this disconnect. What kind of change might we create if […]

Transcending discontent

We aim to make more people see that Nigeria is not “them” but “I” and “us”, bringing closer to home the urgency and the responsibility of change. We aim to show that change begins when many more Nigerians stop being frustrated at the government, the polity and the society and channel the same energy into becoming the bigger change they seek, in day-to-day interactions with family members, friends, colleagues, clients and other Nigerians and non Nigerians.

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 […]