Podcast: Emerging from hibernation

In 2012, we hosted a podcast with Aerin Dunford of The Berkana Institute about the organization’s decision to go into an undefined period of hibernation. Given its focus on promoting ‘living systems’ principles in social change work, we were curious to learn how they were putting these principles into practice internally. Berkana recently resurfaced from its restful state, and so we followed up with Aerin to find out what the experience has been like for them.

How the spotted owl can save us

What does it mean for an environmental organization to work expressively, to live out the values of sustainability and deep ecology in its day-to-day work? Most environmental organizations striving to be coherent focus on behaviour. Do we recycle? Do we compost? Do we use energy-efficient light bulbs? Do we reduce our use of water and paper? Do we bring our own mugs? Sustainability is not this tame. Sustainability requires […]

Daring to hibernate

A couple of months ago I received an intriguing note in my inbox from The Berkana Institute. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Berkana, you might know one of it’s founders Meg Wheatley, a well-known author who writes about […]

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 […]

When our first instinct is to run away . . .

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.”

Where do organizations go when they die?

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 […]

A conversation with Turi

The following is an edited transcript of a conversation that Tana and I had with my sister Turi Nilsson. She is the Director of Instruction and co-founder of Southwest Baltimore Charter School, a place of great inspiration and learning for us. We’ve written about it in previous posts. RENNIE: What would you say are the […]