I’m reposting this list holus bolus from Peter Levine’s blog. It’s an excellent summary of what we can expect from volunteer networks, and very top of mind for me at the moment: 1) Volunteers will plan and run meetings and conferences, even doing hard, detailed work on invitation lists, agendas, and menus. But they will not reliably write up the results of meetings for public distribution. After a meeting, writing feels like a chore, and there’s usually no specific deadline. Therefore, many meetings leave no tangible public record.2) Volunteers will write grant proposals, because proposals are plans that determine the …
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Submitted for your consideration, as they used to say on The Twilight Zone… I am a newcomer to the notion of “morphogenetic fields” – basically fields that contain information whereby social or biological structures take shape (see more at Wikipedia)- but whether they exist or not I’m keenly aware of something like that happening in working with groups. Yesterday I was working with a small group and we saw something happen that surprised me. The field within which we are working is philanthropy and we are designing a program that will help Aboriginal non-profits develop capacity. This work is supported …
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Before I took off to the Evolutionary Salon last week I blogged about Sarvodaya. Today I have been scouring recent postings at the Sarvodaya blog and I find this, from Deepak Chopra’s comments to a Sarvodaya Peace dialogue: Today we are shifting from the industrial age to the information age. Today wealth and power come from Information Technology. And Information Technology has become very powerful today. In a few years it will become even more powerful. It will be possible for anyone to have this kind of computer in their pocket and interfere with air traffic. It will be possible …
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A friend sent me a piece called “There has to be a Big Crises” by Michael Kane about what it will take for Americans (and I would say Canadians too) to wake up to Peak Oil. The article paints a disparaging picture about the ability of North American leadership to wake up to the creeping decline – James Kunstler’s “The Long Emergency” – before it’s too late. Having spent the past two weeks in the States, and the better part of next week there too, I agree that the signs are not good. In Maui the radio is filled with …
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I’ve been facilitating groups for as long as I can remember, going back probably 20 years to high school when I ran both informal and organized youth groups with my peers. It has probably been about twelve or thirteen years ago that I started to actually pay attention to what I was doing. But only in the last five or six years, as I have been facilitating full time, have I noticed a deepening in my practice. Work as practice. And by practice I mean something akin to a spiritual practice, whereby one undertakes a life of value and meaning …