co-create a collaborative, sustainable world

A wonderful young woman, whom I knew through the club Voices for Planned Parenthood and who graduated from my college this spring, created an event in April called The Sustainability Connection. It strove to educate and move to action 100 participants about the connections between health, family planning, and the environment. I’m not sure that the action part necessarily happened, but the education part certainly did. But she did an amazing thing in less than a month, and the local activist powers that be took notice. People from the Sierra Club, Washington State Department of Health, and Planned Parenthood came from as far away as Olympia to participate in this. And as a member of the coordinating team (publicity) I, along with many others, learned to coordinate a large event and gather feedback from the participants. In the future we will strive to answer their own questions and pursue local interests, streamlining our abilities and making action the final result.

But of course no one event will do this. I count this goal as finished, upon reflection, even though it is an ongoing process, because I have achieved a state of mind, an urgency and energy that will force me to pursue it. For now, I can see a little in the future and if I do nothing else (which I know I won’t-I will do many other things as well) I will help create future Sustainability Connection Summits and in that way try to change others’ behavior for the better. I’ve written about other things I have done and will do-well, improving the world is a desire in my bones. And finally, too, I have certain skills that will serve me in a variety of future endeavors.

so whats the goal here? to create a co-op? to make the world a happy collective? if so, you all need to start talking, collaborate, join the other (similiar) goals on this great website. such has Save the World , Start a Revolution , and Start a Commune . if the goal is different, please inform me, i would like to help obtain such goals if others are willing to help out aswell.

Race Readers—a group that gets together and talks about racism. Not only have I gone to every session of it, now I am a co-facilitator. Currently we’re protesting my school’s discriminatory, questionable behaviors related to the admissions office’s treatment of local kids who want to tour. Usually they’re non-white. There was a specific outrageous incident where they refused to provide a guide (and then provided too few for the group), schedule a time for the group though they were calling weeks ahead, or even provide lunch, with the lamest of excuses. Only when the group’s leaders (tutors and alums) pushed their alum status did they get a grudging response. Not acceptable.

But beyond that, we just ask critical questions and try to let the discussion flow organically. People get uncomfortable. It’s wonderful.

Also, I’m getting really into Amnesty International. And I’m also helping out with sexual education on campus, among my dormmates, for myself, and for the student group VOX.

with the folks on my floor, which is called officially the Social Justice Residence Program. Basically we all volunteer together, but not only that (as I discovered), we build a community.

We traveled to Camp Indianola. I am as yet unfamiliar with the Washington landscape; I am surprised at being in the mountains, with ferns and blackberries and rotting tree stumps and then seeing a glimpse of salt water between the trees. And I am also unused to this solidarity that we have already built and that we cultivated this weekend. We talked about what inspired us—many people had active parents. It ran the gamut of going to protests with parents to being aware of injustice when an Iraqi classmate was beaten up for putting a flag on her backpack to feeling the injustice of one’s third grade teacher be scorned because he came out. I learned a lot about the dreams and passions of my dormmates; we discussed in depth some values in social justice and had widely varying opinions on, say, the importance of passion or faith or understanding.

We established, though, that we are the ones that will work for change, and we shall commit (and we have committed) to supporting each other as well.

mini-jam for small children where we talked to them about peace for a few hours. I ran the Nobel Laureates station and hung out with the “big” kids (4th to 6th grade) in the early part of the day. The big kids each got a picture of some recent, living Laureates and had to go around and talk to each other about what they did and where and when. They had a pretty good grasp of what it all meant, but I still had to explain apartheid to them. I hope there weren’t other questions like that; I suspect perhaps they were embarrassed to ask? Next time we will have better, more in-depth info.

The stuff with the littler kids was the most fun, though. First they played with balloons, and popped them to find inside the name of a country. They then went to a map, found the country and the year next to it. After that (we were helping them along the way) they went to a board with colored years and found their year’s color, and finally went to a box of that color to find a picture of a Nobel Laureate and his/her/their information. Then we talked about it. I’m sure they didn’t really take that in so much, but their parents will and they will have the pictures to keep for future reference. Probably they were more impacted by the arts and crafts “peace lanterns” they got to make. Peace=fun.

My friend Raisa did a distribution of wealth event for the big kids, wherein they guessed how much each continent had, population-wise, and how many resources they had, and then got to see what it actually was. Then they recieved chocolate as the “resources” and were told they could do whatever they wanted with it. The North America people ended up giving handfuls of their massive bag of chocolate to the Africa people. Little kids making up US foreign policy! Yes!

I hope that one will stick with them for a while.

Volunteer at the Food Bank, yo. Just got my orientation down and a group of classmates (the Gay-Straight Alliance, in fact) to go also. Snap.

Once again a goal that needs to be quantified. A few ideas:
-worm bin for compost stuff
-recycling more
-buy foods that aren’t unnecessarily packaged
-reuse shopping bags
-buy fair trade goods from around the world
-join the food co-op or the local farm thingy here where I work for three hours a week and get x amount of fresh food
-make my really old ‘70’s-era toilets flush more efficiently
-use vinegar and hot water to clean the bathrooms instead of chemicals
-bike/use bus more
-walk more
-carpool more
-figure out my ecological footprint so I can pinpoint areas that need work
-encourage everyone around me to do it too! (without annoying them, because then they get surly and refuse)

I’m so thankful for the opportunities I have in my area to live more sustainably and promote community. Between our farmers’ markets, public transit, and numerous grassroots organizations, I’m on my way. But someday in the near future I want to be living totally sustainably and being a good example for others.

I see online social networks, such as 43things.com, as playgrounds where our toddler collective intelligence (CI) is crawling around and slowly getting ready to stand on its feet and learn walking. Raising that child will ask for all of us, and those already engaged in it are receiving its early gifts. I am one of those lucky ones because I’ve been a “professional CI babysitter” since 1982, the year when I started studying, participating in, and facilitating online communities. (The boldface quote is from my online workshop on Boosting the Collective Intelligence of Your Network.)

My current passion is to facilitate a transformative shift in the effectiveness of change champions and their communities in and across organizations. I pursue it by coaching, giving workshops, consulting, blogging, and currently, designing a new kind of online university. In my work, I combine European values, American dynamism, ancient wisdom traditions, and emerging social media.

My academic posts included: Université de Paris, California Institute of Integral Studies, UC Berkeley, and more recently, Senior Research Fellow at INSEAD, and Visiting Researcher in the Complexity Programme of the London School of Economics. In 2002, I founded CommunityIntelligence, an organizational transformation agency and network of change facilitators. I authored The Quest for Collective Intelligence, a chapter on Liberating the Innovation Value of Communities of Practice, and chapters on communities of practice and collective intelligence in the forthcoming book on Evolutionary Leadership by Peter Merry. I speak English, French, Hungarian, Russian, and very beginner Dutch. My slightly outdated professional bio is here.

this goes hand in hand with my wanting a sustainable house, co-op housing would be fine too..