Posts Tagged ‘Community organizations’
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 once asked a guy named Pedro, who had spent his life founding and working in one of the Mondragon industrial cooperatives, what his most engaging organizational experience had been. He gave me a kind of half-smile. “It was when we went bankrupt.”
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I once worked at an advocacy and training organization where, in an effort to look more professional in the eyes of our funders and partners, it was decided that all correspondence would have a uniform look- even down to the font that we used in our emails. I could handle the idea of uniformity for […]
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Gregory Branch is a doctor and public health official who also happens to direct an unusual gospel choir in Baltimore. We knew Gregg a number of years ago when we lived in Maryland, and for a little while we even sang in the choir. Gregg is a fiercely kind man with a large spirit and […]
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At Kufunda Learning Village, we’ve recently experimented with a powerful exercise called ‘Appreciative Feedback Triads’ or ‘Kupa humbowo muhutatu’ in Shona. Here’s how it works…
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The most catalytic organizational practice I’ve encountered lately is humblingly simple. It involves nothing more than pausing in the middle of a meeting or discussion and going around the room to hear from each person how they are actually experiencing the issue at hand – right now, in the moment. It seems like an obvious […]
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Tana’s recent post on “unbinding” reminded me of some reflections I had made in a paper I wrote a few years ago. In a section that was actually called “The Unbinding,” I was thinking about how difficult it can be to recognize exactly what it is that binds us. For someone like Tana (disciplined, orderly, […]
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Several years ago, when I was in the thick of major organizational shifts at COCo, I came home one evening in a fit of tears and with a back full of knots. I felt horrible about how things felt at work and frustrated that my attempts to move things to a better place seemed to […]
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Just thought I’d share this article that I wrote for the Centre for Community Organizations (COCo) last June. ——– A couple of years ago when we first began our restructuring at COCo, we considered the possibility that COCo had run its course and asked ourselves the question: Was it time for the organization to end? And while we ultimately […]
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We are in Cape Town for a few weeks and just got back from a meeting with Nathan Heller at The Hub, a co-working space for social innovators. Although The Hub Cape Town only recently opened its doors, the model has been around for a while and there are over two dozen Hubs worldwide in […]
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