Politics & The Sharing Economy, by Adam Parsons
the sharing economy movement address the root causes of the world’s converging crises? Unless the sharing of resources is promoted in relation to human rights and concerns for equity, democracy, social justice and sustainability, then such claims are without substantiation – although there are many hopeful signs that the conversation is slowly moving in the right direction.  In recent years, the concept and practice of sharing resources is fast becoming a mainstream phenomenon across North America, Western Europe and other world regions. The internet is awash with articles and websites that celebrate the vast potential of sharing human and physical assets, in everythi... posted on Mar 2 2014 (11,620 reads)

The Spirit of Service, by Nipun Mehta
is a transcript of a talk delivered in February 2000, at an event hosted by AHIMSA in Berkeley.] As I was coming today, I was trying to think of an introduction, and I realized that my voice is sort of gone (as you can probably tell) -- we had an orientation meeting over the meeting and I probably talked too much. [laughs] So, I thought of an episode in my life where I was really sick. A few years back, I was down with 104 degree fever. I mean, I was sitting down on my sofa somewhere and that was it -- I was just sitting down since I couldn't move or do anything else. Everyone in my house happened to be out at that time and I was all by myself, stationed comfortably on the s... posted on Mar 7 2014 (46,188 reads)

Food As Bridge To Jobs & Hope: Green Bridge Growers, by Jan Pilarski
is so much a part of the fabric of our lives, reflecting our health, lifestyle, time, and values. Like so many of us, my childhood memories of specific events revolve around food and meals shared. Sunday dinners with my Polish grandmother preparing pierogis and czarnina. Luscious cream puffs eaten greedily at the Wisconsin State Fair. Ruby red tomatoes and thorny kohlrabi plucked from our backyard garden, fried fresh for that evening's dinner. Food was a bond of love, care, and connection to our families and the wider community. But what if we re-imagine food today? In what new ways might food bring meaning and purpose to our busy, fragmented lives? And how might food make us w... posted on Mar 11 2014 (13,792 reads)

Pop-Up Clothing Swap for the Homeless, by Beth Buczynski
Levitan and Max Pazak work in an advertising agency in Cape Town, South Africa. The area around their workplace is hip, but like many urban areas it has a large homeless population. "People often want to donate but they don’t know how, where or are a little frightened of the unknown. We’re often told by city officials not to just give, as they worry that it will perpetuate the problem of begging," explained Levitan. They wanted to connect those who have clothing to give with those in need, but in a way that gave recipients back some control, allowing them to feel on an equal footing with their peers. "We wanted to bridge the gap... posted on Apr 1 2014 (20,617 reads)

What Does A Grateful Organization Look Like, by Emily Nauman
to recent research, gratitude in organizations is important—for starters, it can boost morale and increase productivity. However, some evidence suggests that it’s less likely to be expressed or felt in the workplace than anywhere else. To learn more about this dynamic, the Greater Good Science Center developed a quiz that measures the level of gratitude in an organization, in consultation with researchers from our Expanding the Science and Practice of Gratitude project and Kim Cameron of the Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. The quiz asks people how much gratitud... posted on Mar 31 2014 (17,631 reads)

The Calling of Delight: On Gangs, Service & Kinship, by On Being
Tippett, Host: Father Greg Boyle makes amazingly winsome connections between things like service and delight, and compassion and awe. Amazing because he works in an urban setting others describe in terms of crime and despair. He landed as an idealistic young Jesuit in a gang-heavy neighborhood of Los Angeles over two decades ago. Now he heads Homeboy Industries, which employs former gang members in a constellation of businesses from screen printing to a farmers market to a bakery. An op-ed in the Los Angeles Timessaid of Homeboy Industries, "How much bleaker and meaner would LA be without it?" Father Greg says service is not an end in itself but a beginning, towards f... posted on May 4 2014 (20,659 reads)

New Lessons From Leonardo, by Fritjof Capra
essay is adapted from a talk in which Fritjof Capra discusses some of the findings described in his latest book, Learning from Leonardo: Decoding the Notebooks of a Genius (2013: Berrett-Koehler Publishers). Leonardo da Vinci, the great genius of the Renaissance, developed and practiced a unique synthesis of art, science, and technology, which is not only extremely interesting in its conception but also very relevant to our time. As we recognize that our sciences and technologies have become increasingly narrow in their focus, unable to understand our multi-faceted problems from an interdisciplinary perspective, we urgently need a science and technology that honor and respect ... posted on Apr 21 2014 (20,099 reads)

A Conversation with John Upton: A Life in Photography, by Richard Whittaker
Upton grew up in the San Fernando Valley just north of Los Angeles. His father was a newspaper publisher and his mother ran a small advertising agency. Because of their work, Upton met many photographers. While still a senior in high school an unexpected encounter with a portfolio of Edward Weston’s original prints brought his interest in photography into clear focus. He soon moved to San Francisco to enroll in what is now the San Francisco Art Institute. The year was 1951. I first heard about Upton from Anne Veh who told me he had been a student of Minor White’s. She also described The Golden Decade—1945-55, a book that Upton is featured in along with ... posted on May 12 2014 (22,664 reads)

Ten Things Creative People Know, by Peggy Taylor, Charlie Murphy
creative activities like knitting and cooking can boost your levels of serotonin and decrease anxiety. Photo by Asife/ Shutterstock. Do you consider yourself creative? If the answer is "no," you are not alone. We have been working as creativity facilitators for close to two decades, and whenever we ask people this question, shockingly few hands go up. It turns out that you don't have to be a great artist to be creative. Creativity is simply our ability to dream things up and make them happen. Cooking breakfast, planting a garden, even developing a business plan are all creative acts. But here is where the arts do come in. Participating in the ar... posted on Jun 5 2014 (1,874 reads)

Taking Back The Time, by Margaret Wheatley
we equated productivity with speed? Margaret Wheatley explains how slowing down just might be the difference between ideas and action. Photo © flickr.com/Robert Schoble As a species, we humans possess some unique capacities. We can stand apart from what’s going on, think about it, question it, imagine things being different. We are also curious. We want to know “why?” We figure out “how.” We think about what’s past; we dream forward to the future. We create what we want rather than just accept what is. So far, we’re the only species we know that does this. But as the world speeds up, we’re forfeiting these wonderf... posted on Jun 20 2014 (21,366 reads)

10 Open Hardware Projects To Save The Earth, by Tristan Copley Smith
the coattails of the rise of intellectual property and economic monopolies, the Open Source movement is thriving, expanding public access to knowledge, culture and tools. Advocates have opened up everything from software to science, media to politics...and of course, data. Now we even have an emerging model in which to implement and develop this openness, as Michel Bauwens describes in the following video. As Alastair Parvin of WikiHouse put it: “This increased access to knowledge is hugely important...it acts as the foundational infrastructure on which we can start to build a whole new economy.” 'Open' stands as a definitive yet diverse move... posted on Jun 10 2014 (17,954 reads)

Transforming Trauma Into Creative Energy, by Ted Comet
of giving in, the deepest thing we can do with trauma is to transmute pain into actions that heal ourselves and help other people. A powerful meditation on love, loss, recovery and resistance.   In 1998 my wife Shoshana was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. An accomplished artist and psychotherapist who worked with Holocaust survivors (of whom she was one), the woman who once spoke eight languages could barely speak at all. Did Shoshana know who I was? There were good days and bad. During the bad days I would say that the ‘light was definitely out.’ On the good days, I would come to her and embrace her. I w... posted on Jun 15 2014 (23,649 reads)

The 6 Essential Conditions of Creativity, by Maria Popova
like discriminating taste, grows on its use. You more likely act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action.” One of the greatest preoccupations not only of our culture but of our civilization is the question of what creativity is, dating back to the dawn of recorded thought. But it wasn’t until the advent of modern psychology in the early twentieth century that our answers to the question began to take the shape of something more structured and systematic than metaphysical hunches — there’s Graham Wallace’s model of the four stages of the creative process from 1926, a five-step “technique for producing ideas” from 1939, ... posted on Jul 31 2014 (21,409 reads)

The Hidden Joy of Waiting In Line, by Carolyn Gregoire
spend an estimated 37 billion hours waiting in line each year, much to our individual and collective distaste. Few things inspire as much universal frustration and ire as long queues and lengthy wait times -- many of us even struggle to wait for a sluggish web browser to load. In fact, according to computer scientist Ramesh Sitaraman, Internet users may be a particularly impatient bunch. His research has found that we're willing to be patient, on average, for two seconds while waiting for an online video to load. “After five seconds, the abandonment rate is 25 percent," Sitaraman told the Boston Globe. "When you get to 10 seconds, half are gone.”... posted on May 31 2023 (26,139 reads)

Life and Leadership, by Fritjof Capra
is not an individual property, but is a property of an entire web of relationships. It is a community practice. This is the profound lesson we need to learn from nature. The way to sustain life is to build and nurture community. A sustainable human community interacts with other communities — human and nonhuman — in ways that enable them to live and develop according to their natures. Sustainability does not mean that things do not change. It is a dynamic process of coevolution rather than a static state. Because of the close connection between sustainability and community, basic principles of ecology can also be understood as principles of community. In part... posted on Jun 17 2014 (18,682 reads)

Humor As A Tool In Conflict Resolution, by Michael Nagler & Karen Ridd
is a time-honored strategy in the repertoire of nonviolence, but we must learn to use it properly. Poke fun at the problem not the person. Credit: http://breakingstories.wordpress.com. All rights reserved. Five or six men stood over me yelling as I sat in a chair at the Ministry of the Interior in San Salvador in 1989. I was there to renew my visa as a member of Peace Brigades International (PBI), an NGO that provides 'protective accompaniment' for teachers, trade unionists, students, indigenous leaders, church workers and other activists when faced by threats of violence. I was on the verge of tears, with horror stories fresh in my mind about people who had b... posted on Jul 8 2014 (36,342 reads)

The Power of Hobbies, by Carolyn Gregoire
naturally love to play and explore and use their imaginations -- but as adults, we often get so sucked into work and the demands of daily life that hobbies and creative outlets completely fall by the wayside. When you ask the average working adult what their hobbies are, there's a good chance they'll say "none." But in forgoing hobbies and personal creative projects, we may be doing ourselves a major disservice. "Finding time for ourselves is key to our own sanity," Joyce E. A. Russell writes in a "Career Coach" article in the Washington Post. "It can actually improve all the other aspects of our lives. Having a hobby may be even m... posted on Aug 19 2014 (28,115 reads)

A New Model of School Reform, by Vicki Zakrzewski
Unified is transforming its schools by embedding social-emotional learning into the district culture—one adult at a time. Last week, The New Yorker reported that Mark Zuckerberg’s 2010 gift of $100 million to the Newark School District hadn’t really improved the schools—with most of the money having been spent on labor contracts and consulting fees. CASEL Meanwhile, on the opposite coast, Oakland Unified School District (OUSD), an urban district with demographics and challenges similar to Newark’s, has taken a very different tack to school reform—and it’s not costing $100 million: The district... posted on Aug 16 2014 (23,859 reads)

Jim Hunter on Servant Leadership, by Tami Simon
Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Jim Hunter. Jim is the author of two internationally bestselling books: The Servant: A Simple Story About the True Essence of Leadership, and The World’s Most Powerful Leadership Principle: How to Become a Servant Leader.Jim’s books are used in many MBA and other higher education courses, have been translated into two dozen languages, and have sold well over 4 million copies worldwide. With Sounds True, Jim has created an audio program called The Servant Leadership Training Course: Achieving Success Through Character, Bravery, and Influence, where he gives listeners the keys to leading with integrity... posted on Aug 7 2014 (30,245 reads)

Empty Hands, Full Heart: Music For The Soul, by Audrey Lin
the pinnacle of a dizzying career, Indian-American rapper Nimesh “Nimo” Patel was haunted by an unshakeable sense of emptiness. In his mid-twenties, he abandoned the limelight and found himself meditating in the foothills of the Himalayas. There, an inner voice nudged him to radically simplify his life and find his purpose in service to others. He moved to the Gandhi Ashram in India and dedicated himself to the children in the surrounding slums. Fast-forward to April 2012: Nimo and a dance troupe of sixteen of "his kids" toured the world with "Ekatva" – a performance whose ultimate message was Oneness. A year later, in the summer of 2013, seven... posted on Jun 16 2014 (48,555 reads)