Communities can give us a sense of purpose and meaning. They can help us tackle challenges that are bigger and more complex than anything we can take on by ourselves. But communities can also break under stress, or lure us into further polarization and extremes. So how can all of us who have a calling to make the world a better place harness the power of communities to be a positive force for change in a world of increasingly existential challenges?
This video explores this question, building on the ideas about anti-fragility we explored in a previous post. Anti-fragility goes beyond resilience--it's about getting even better, even stronger in the face of challenges. The more unstable the world around us seems, the more important it is for all of us with a calling to make the world a better place to lean into our own anti-fragility as individuals, and in the...
We are living through a perfect post-modern storm of our own making. Three recent books have some great insight on this. adrienne maree brown's Emergent Strategy, Steve McIntosh's Developmental Politics and Jamie Wheal's Recapture the Rapture.
There are three intersecting issues that make up this perfect storm.
None of us has a crystal ball, but this post focuses on some questions to ask yourself and others as you navigate your way forward in a world where we will likely have to live with the presence of Covid-19 for the foreseeable future.
If herd immunity is probably out of reach, at least in the immediate future, the path forward seems to be about living in a world in which we transition from pandemic to endemic Covid...We already live in a world in which the flu is endemic. The flu virus is always out there in the world but most of the time it's not spreading rapidly or unpredictably. Most...
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So many of us with a calling to make the world a better place see a future that is better and different, but more than we can bring about on our own. So, if there's a change you want to see in the world and many people are not yet embracing that vision, what can you do about it? This post is about field leadership--sharing 5 different ways you can show up to help bring about lasting systems change by positively engaging and influencing others.
An important starting point lies with research on how innovations of all kinds tend to spread across a society. The "innovation adoption curve" shows that there is typically a chasm between innovators and early adopters and everyone else--innovations that truly sweep through a society have to jump that chasm and attract support from the majority.
This post is addressed to social entrepreneurs, but whatever role you play in the ecosystem of philanthropy and social change, if you care about doing philanthropy differently and better, a great leverage point is getting more curious about what's really going on for funders and social entrepreneurs as they engage with each other.
The video begins by walking through a taxonomy of the different kinds of funders--and the different roles that staff and advisors play within the funder world. It goes on to explore frameworks for understanding donor motivations and concludes by sharing a tool for engaging in "powerful conversations" that...
This post is all about cultivating the somatic connection between your mind and your body in your journey of joyful impact. Check out the video and proceed at your pace of grace to cultivate your own intuitive wisdom about what works best for you, your body and your relationship with food.
Inspired by Emily and Amelia Nagoski's book, Burnout: Completing the Stress Cycle, the video and worksheet for this post are all about processing and releasing stress so that you can be more resourceful and more present and break out of the burnout cycle. This is especially important for all of us with a calling to make the world a better place. We tend to accumulate stress from living in tension with a world we want to be different than it is, and from constantly questioning whether we are doing enough to bring that better world into being.
…and Fear is the Gear that Drives the Burnout Cycle
First, we want the world to be different than it is, and we are constantly confronting the tension between what's real and what's ideal--the world we hope we can help make happen. Second, there's the tension within ourselves: am I doing enough in the face of what's wrong in the world? Or am I doing so much that I'm getting to the point of exhaustion, overwhelm and unsustainability?
The video in this post is an opportunity to explore two ways of expanding your perspective that can help you navigate these tensions and reclaim both your joy and your impact as you seek to answer your calling to make the world a better place.
Your worldview and your moral intuitions are lenses through which you view the world at an instinctive, often...
In America and around the world we seem to be getting more and more stuck in entrenched, high stakes conflicts. In these high stakes conflicts, power dynamics come into play, and people often end up using coercion and violence to enforce their will on others. When a conflict is rooted in abuse of power we often have no choice but to respond as forcefully as we can to defend ourselves. But what if the root of the conflict is actually a misunderstanding, or a mistake for which genuine amends can be made?
Inspired by recent work from adrienne maree brown, as well as Amanda Ripley, Jonah Berger and Jonathan Haidt, the video for this post is about looking for ways that we can get better at conflict, particularly when the conflict is grounded in a mistake or a misunderstanding. These ideas are aspirational, but hopefully not beyond the realm of possibility...
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These are the same materials we use with the social entrepreneurs in our accelerator program and the funders we coach one on one. The world has never been more in need of a new, greatest generation of change agents and that's why we're opening up free access to these materials to anyone who's ready to make use of them!