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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admin November 2nd, 2007
(Mark - Media Marketing Director) I want to begin by sharing some thoughts John Nichols posted on The Nation website:
“Frances Moore Lappé has, for the better part of four decades, done her very best to guide the United States toward a more rational relationship with the planet and its inhabitants … to renew civic and democratic values, to restrain corporate excess and governmental abuse, to stop fearing fear itself and to start embracing the radical responses that will make America and the planet as peaceful, as healthy, as humane and as fulfilled as our knowledge and our technology makes possible.”
“That’s the “gospel” Frances Moore Lappé preaches in her terrific new book, Getting a Grip: Clarity, Creativity and Courage in a World Gone Mad.”
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admin October 26th, 2007
(Jess, Small Planet Institute Editor and Tour Manager) A recent Identity Theory post brought my attention to this TomPaine.com article – titled ‘Green Yields Green’ by Frank O’Donnell. O’Donnell cites the prevailing wisdom that dealing with the threat of global warming in a meaningful way will wreak havoc upon the market, and then he argues that it ain’t necessarily so:
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admin October 25th, 2007
(Frances) Okay, I apologize for my pun, but it is how I feel this morning at the break of Boulder dawn.
Last night at the Boulder Book Store I spoke to a standing-room-only, caring, attentive audience—an author’s dream come true. This community already had a special place in my heart for because I’d used its gorgeous library some years ago as a writing retreat when I was finishing You Have the Power. And Boulder brings back memories of rich time with close friends here over the years.
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mark October 22nd, 2007
(Mark) A story came to my attention over the weekend that brings out every reason why Clean Elections as the only way forward. This Wired story spotlights two batches of questionably-motivated—and extremely-poorly-timed—political contributions. With a bid for immunity heating up the political wires, executives from Verizon and AT&T wrote some dubiously-intended checks to Senator Jay Rockefeller, the reported hand-on-the-wheel of the Senate Intelligence Committee & a key player in whether the telecoms’ collective head goes on the block for unwarranted wire-tapping
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admin October 18th, 2007
(Frances) From past experience I’d seen the challenge of a book tour as figuring out how to repeat my key messages over and over while always sounding fresh. But this time around, with Getting a Grip, the challenge is not the similarity of experiences but the rich differences. My head is spinning.
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mark October 17th, 2007
(Mark) I’ve had an article from a local paper sitting on my desk for a few weeks simmering. “Student loan costs stifle economy:” an AP story about the debt college grads are accruing. For many, it probably seems like just another ripple in the tsunami of fiscal concerns: sub-prime, predatory lending, housing worries, and fuel prices. “Oh, and students are taking their lumps, too,” the piece seems to say.
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admin October 15th, 2007
(Jess) In a remarkable October 11th article, the New York Times tells the story of Pascasie Mukamurigo, a Tutsi woman, a weaver, and a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. In the aftermath of the country’s devastating violence, Ms Mukamurigo – who lost her husband and a child in the attacks, and who was in hiding from Hutu militants for months – adopted 13 orphans. To help support them, she created a weaving group of surviving widows, all of whom had also adopted children orphaned by the genocide. And she invited Hutu women, members of the families who had committed the atrocities, to join the group as well. The baskets produced by the resultant, mixed-ethnicity group- beautiful, detailed, painstakingly created – were an “embodiment of reconciliation.” Today, the baskets are distributed by Macy’s, and the weavers have been lifted by their work out of poverty. Continue Reading »
