One of the things I see as a Canadian working in the USA in these times is that politics takes a second seat to actually working on problems at the local and community level. My experience in the past few years has been working with diverse groups of people people on issues such as disability inclusion, the future of churches, anti-violence, social justice, immigrant and refugee services, health promotion, public education alternatives, fisheries policy engagement, and palliative care. Some of these groups have been made of of folks with shared politics, but many have included people from across the …
I’m in a period of recovering from travel and work, over what has been a very busy spring. This weekend I just took right off and did some reading, cleaning and planning for a major kitchen renovation we will be doing this spring. Reading-wise, it has been a luxury to sit on my front porch and spend hours in a book. My choice this week has been Kim Stanley’ Robinson’s “Aurora” which is a story about a human voyage to colonize a planet 11 light years away. It is an amazing book about problems solving and ontology and should be …
It’s good to have Dave Snowden back from his treks in the Himalayas. He’s been a big influence on my thinking and practice over the past few years and his near daily blog posts are always rich, irreverent and practical. He is in the process of creating an important body of theory and practice that is useful even if the language and the concepts are sometimes a lot of work to grasp. The payoff from wrestling with his ideas is rich. Today he’s discussing “dispositionality” which simply means that making change in a system is much easier when you have a …
Just finished out first day of work with Navajo Area Health Promotion practitioners and 30 community wellness workers, Elders and healers from across the Navajo Nation. We are blending an Art of Hosting workshop with content and process from some recent research in neuroscience, epigenetics, and adverse childhood experiences and with wellness and leadership models from our Navajo colleagues with whom we have a ten year relationship. One of the pieces of work we are doing is supporting these folks in launching or accelerating some community based projects using the social networks they have in place here. This will involve …
I’m in New Mexico this week where we will be back together with our colleagues from the Navajo Nation, working together to keep finding collaborative ways to address health and wellness and community resilience in the Navajo Nation. Doing this is an ongoing skill and practice. There are no answers, only different situations that require us to keep working together. A key skill in being able to address issues you don’t know anything about is to stop and ask for help. My friend Tenneson Woolf, with whom I spent the last weekend in Salt Lake City, sometimes tells a useful …