Jack Ricchiuto was writing about narrative the other day: We need to start reviving the narrative aesthetic where stories are more fields of countless possibilities than linear in nature, where the possibilities of meaning are more infinite than finite. We need to stop calling sound bites stories, which they’re not. We need to call stories the narratives that evoke a sense of wonderment more than conclusion. Stories are dear to my heart and storytelling is a practice that seems more and more about who I am. I think one way to help people become story tellers is to practice …
Tenneson Woolf from a harvest poem called How Are You Navigating in the Time of Dramatic Change?: I sound like I don’t know what I am doing, but I do know. I find my way in the immediately infront, the next simple elegant step. The next simple elegant step describes my approach to action. Recently, in our little consulting firm we have adopted a project status process that involves writing down only the next step for each of our projects. When you take the to do list and write it as one thing to do only, one elegant …
Received an email through the NCDD list asking for help in Texas… Galveston is in trouble. That is almost as much as I can say about the community here. My name is Jimmy Mai and I’m a Member with Americorps’ National Civilian Community Corps. We’re stationed in Galveston, TX doing needs assessment post- Hurricane Ike. In doing this, we are walking door to door and stopping people on the streets to see what they may need. From that we are making notes on whatever support they require and enter it into a nation-wide database called the Coordinated …
In many large group processes I use, small groups are asked to facilitate some of the process. Recently, on the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation mailing list, there was a call for easy guides to help people facilitate these kinds of groups. Turns out that there is lots out there, including: 37 guides collected on NCDD’s own website Some resources from a climate dialogue project in Seattle The Conversation Cafe guidelines Bare bones version of the Let’s Talk America guidelines More detailed issue guides from the Everyday Democracy project And a few more that I use: Hosting …
With tears of gratitude in my eyes, I point you to Nancy White’s passionate observation that the future for peaceful societies lies with the women and the girls. Since I was in Israel and Palestine last month, I have been struggling on how to write about my experience in a way that is not about judgement, but about reflecting what I saw. The tyranny of person over person is heartbreaking, regardless of the reasons and justifications we create. But from what I saw and learned about, women and children are victims as Israel and Palestine continue without a solution for …