jess November 28th, 2007
(Frances) Sitting here just after sunrise in a Sonoma, California coffee shop, I’m filled to the brim with the presence of the extraordinary people I’m encountering on this tour.
The themes of power and peace surround me. Just two nights ago, at San Francisco’s legendary City Lights bookstore, there in the front row were Jan and Dave Hartsough—friends of 30 years. I was overjoyed to see them. Dave is a founder of Nonviolent Peaceforce — a nonpartisan and unarmed peacekeeping force of trained civilians. In conflicts, members use proven nonviolent strategies to help protect human rights, thereby enabling local peacemakers to carry out their work.
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admin November 28th, 2007
(Mark, Media Marketing Director) Bernie Sanders posted an interesting article on global heating on The Nation today. It’s worth a visit, but the gist is: we can fix our climate problems with new technology.
“[T]he situation is by no means hopeless.”
I resonate with the content of Sanders’ article, especially the need to keep a positive frame of mind and to strive after solutions that are substantive, not what Frances calls “random acts of sanity,” but which are genuine efforts made with every belief that we are, indeed, hope in action. Still, there is an even deeper need I fear Sanders doesn’t address.
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mark November 26th, 2007
(Mark, Media Marketing Director) Here is a special feature. In 2002, Frances and her daughter, Anna, collaborated to write Hope’s Edge. In the process, they traveled far and wide, seeking out examples of Living Democracy. This is a “trailer” of sorts, an introduction and an invitation to explore their work and the world they witnessed.
Watch more videos like this at www.quantumshift.tv
Learn more about the book at the Small Planet Institute. Support their continuing work through the Small Planet Fund.
Peace, Mark
admin November 19th, 2007
(Frances) We’re just above Nova Scotia, says the flight map on the seat-back facing me, so I’m nearly home after an exhilarating week in England.
An hour ago, I was totally exhausted, but then I started reading the book they handed me as I left last night’s extraordinary 3rd annual Be the Change gathering in London’s Central Hall, where the response to the message of Getting a Grip moved me deeply.
The book – also titled Be the Change - that’s picked me up on this long flight is simply a collection of the voices of people who’ve spoken at previous “Be the Change” events, each telling their story—from Taddy Blecher, who started a free university in South Africa (simply by inviting poor students to apply and taking it from there!), to Gill Hicks, whose legs were blown off by the London “tube” bomber, and who loves her new life working for the organization PeaceDirect to teach everyday people the skills of peacemaking all over the world.
I am not doing the book justice…just trust me! If you want to start bouncing off your seat, order Be the Change, and whenever you start to slide down, read another of its amazing first-person stories.
Central Hall was super-charged last night. I arrived to deliver the next-to-last speech, just before Vandana Shiva’s. The excitement of the young people in the hall thrilled us both. We we’re both members of the co-sponsoring organization, the World Future Council, earlier in the conference had shared its campaign to spread the reward-renewables model legislation that has proved itself in Germany, moving 12.6% of the country’s electricity to renewal sources in only 7 years!
That morning I’d had enjoyed a three-hour train journey with Vandana from a gathering at Schumacher College in Devon. She described for me her organization’s stop-the-farmer- suicide campaign in central India.
Vandana and me
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admin November 16th, 2007
(Mark, Media Marketing Director) John Zogby, of Zogby International, posted an interesting letter to the editor in his hometown Utica Observer-Dispatch (find the entire article here). Zogby reads government’s consistently poor performance in polls [congressional democrats fair worse now than OJ in ’95?!] to suggest that the next president will have to redefine federalism.
“Voters are angry and disillusioned. Their faith in governmental institutions is at a record low. Much of that has to do with failure in Iraq and our damaged image abroad, but even more it has to do with Katrina and a pervasive sense that government at all levels is disconnected from Americans’ needs and from the capability of handling a major catastrophe.”
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admin November 15th, 2007
(Mark, Media Marketing Director) Frances will be the featured speaker for the 14th Annual Berklee College of Music Liberal Arts Symposium next April. Both faculty and students are gearing up to consider where art and action meet, in the words of Camille Colatosti, Chair of the Liberal Arts Department, “to use our creative energy to build a world that promotes ‘living democracy,’ that empowers individuals and emphasizes community.” In the process, Berklee is reaching out to the entire Boston educational community.
University outreach has been on my mind for some time, and this is a sign of much more to come. You‘ve read Frances’ posts about Suffolk and Worcester. She has also visited the University of Connecticut, Portland State, Denver and Washington in St. Louis. Just after Thanksgiving, she is going to Calgary and to Santa Clara. Frances has tremendous rapport with students, creating tremendous synergy.
I, however, have a slightly clandestine interest in university outreach (cue the lightning flash and thunder clap).
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mark November 13th, 2007
(Mark, Media Marketing Director) This morning I was following up on some media. Two weeks ago, Frances submitted this great article to the Capital City Hues in Madison, WI. Since she was on the road, a few of us were shepherding the piece. In editing, we did a word count. What had begun as an almost 1,200 word essay had dropped to 700 words.
That was pretty amazing, but we had made some cuts, and if MSWord told us there were 700 words, there were 700 words. A few days later, we reflected on the drop, but didn’t question the count.
Today I went to the Capital City Hues website, but something seemed amiss. Seeing the text on one page, no way that was 700 words. Uh-oh, could we have sent the wrong file?
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admin November 9th, 2007
(Frances) There’s a special place in the middle of Massachusetts where elders study alongside college students and where high school students are invited in, too. Together, they’re working both to alleviate the pain of hunger in their community now and to “create a hunger-free community” tomorrow.
That place is Worcester State College, and I was lucky enough to get invited to speak there this week as part of a series called “Food for Thought.” My host was a professor whose last name captures her perfectly: Maureen Power, founder of the Intergenerational Urban Institute.
In the photo above, you can see some of them with Getting a Grip in hand.
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mark November 7th, 2007
(Mark, Media Marketing Director) Thom Hartman posted a wonderful piece on The Nation. It begins as a story about a personal political revolution, a conscious migration from conservative to liberal. Yet, like every good story, there is more than meets the eye. Hartman uses the story as a call for more effective personal communication.
You really ought to read the article, but here is a pivotal point:
“To be an effective communicator, we learn how to tell a story, with whom to share that story and why.”
“Everyone is a communicator, and we all communicate constantly. Some of us … are born storytellers and natural communicators. The skill of communication and persuasion seems innate and effortless. Folks like that are unconsciously competent at communicating. Most of us, however, are not very competent at communicating; what’s more, we don’t know that. We are unconsciously incompetent.”
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admin November 2nd, 2007
(Frances) I head for Burlington in two hours—while still absorbing all I’ve learned from Boulder, Denver, Portland, Seattle and near home last night in Jamaica Plain.
In Portland an extraordinary trailblazer, Jeff Goebel, who I had not seen for at least 15 years, came to my dialogue with students. It was as if I’d planted him there to prove my point about the power of frame! Jeff shared his experiences in Mali working with poor farmers. He told us that he first asked the village to come up with all the reasons they could not increase food yields without buying chemical fertilizers, pesticides and seeds from global agrochemical giants. They listed 41. Then, he asked that they change their frame to “possibility thinking.” They then began to see all the ways open to them. Four years later they had increased crop yields 78 percent!
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