Here we are On September 22 in Vancouver. Tens of thousands of people walking in the rain across the Georgia Street viaduct, down one side and up the other. My family and I stood in the rain very near the front of the walk that morning listening speakers talk about what we doing there. Chief Robert Joseph, who we all call “Bobby Joe” had a dream and here we were living it. As a longtime voice of the victims of residential schools and then a champion of reconciliation, Bobby Joe had glimpsed a possibility: that if enough Canadians could come …
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Over the past few years Jerry Nagel and a group of practitioners in Minnesota have been working deeply with the Art of Hosting in the state. The Bush Foundation, who has supported a lot of this work, helped create 10 fantastic videos on the Art of Hosting and some of the methods of the process. You could look through these and get a great foundation in what it’s all about. Enjoy! 1. Art of Hosting – introduction: https://vimeo.com/72614471 2. AOH Community Conversations for the common good: https://vimeo.com/40679035 3. AOH Four-fold Practice: https://vimeo.com/69785461 4. AOH Harvesting: https://vimeo.com/69785465 5. AOH Collective Story …
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I have been working a lot with churches over the past few years. One of the things that is interesting about working with mainline churches is that they are a little ahead of the curve in terms of the change of social institutions. What they are experiencing now is similar to what we might experience in the next decade or so with other social institutions like education and health, the non-profit sector and the way we organize community. There is a massive shift underway. Thom Rainer gives a list of 11 ways you can tell a church is dying – …
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Although I have worked for years in the United States including in and around health issues, I have never fully understood the ways in which Americans pay for their health care, or why their insurance company-based system is so important to them. This article explains how complicated it is to choose a medical plan and how expensive it is not to have one. And fundamentally this doesn’t change under Obama’s new plan. The premium this family pays, even now under the plan they want to keep, are more than twice what I pay for a family of four in a …
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Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless put together their brilliant collection of participatory methodologies called “liberating structures” a few years ago. I had occasion to visit their website this week and notice that it is even more brilliant than before, containing detailed descriptions of the structures tools and processes and elegant minimal instructions for using them. For seasoned facilitators, this is a gold mine of reference, and I’ve added it to my Facilitation Resources page.