Prince George, BC Four years ago less a month I was running a huge Open Space event here in Prince George, in fact in the building that right outside my hotel room window. Called “Seeds of Change” the event was a kick off for the urban Aboriginal Strategy, a community driven and led process intended to begin and seed projects that would make a difference in the lives of the urban Aboriginal community in this northern city of 80,000 people. One of the participants at that event was Ben Berland, who was at the time working with the Prince …
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 …
Robert Paterson is doing some interesting work these days: KETC, a client of mine, the Public TV Channel in St Louis, has been chosen by CPB to test how well a public TV station can be in Convening the wide community of its city to come together and help each other cope with a giant crisis. Here is a link to the background.I am writing today to offer up an early report. This week we held the first on air/web town hall meeting. For the first time St Louisans could see that they were not alone. The room was full …
Back in April, I got to be a part of one of the best hosting experiences of my life when I joined Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen, Phil Cass and Tim Merry and a bunch of others in designing and hosting the 2008 Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Conference. The other day Erin Caricoffe, one of the staff members of the core team we worked with sent out this summary of where we are now: By all shared accounts, the 2008 Food and Society Gathering for Good Food was a success, meeting planning Team goals of providing a …
I have never understood the idea that you can’t talk to terrorists. I don’t mean in the moment of vioence being committed. I mean the idea that negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan for example, are a non-starter for Canada. We have committed 6 years to the “war on terror” and the exit strategy seems to be “kill all the bad guys before going home.” This is an impossible condition for victory. At some point people have to sit down and talk about how they are going to leave each other alone, no? This interesting article …