This post was submitted by NCDD member Hina Pendle of New Economy Coalition via our Submit-to-Blog Form. Do you have field news you want to share with the rest of us? Just click here to submit your news post for the NCDD Blog!
NCDD members are invited to join the New Economy Coalition’s Hina Pendle and Ben Roberts for an online conversation tomorrow, October 15th from 9-10:30am Pacific/12-1:30pm Eastern time. The conversation is part of the New Economy Week, and the theme will be “Growing Resilient Organizations, Leaders, and Culture.” Make sure to register ASAP by clicking here.
Join an online conversation and connect with other New Economy Week participants from across the nation around the theme of resilience.
“Build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” — Buckminster Fuller
Those of us growing a new, co-prosperous economy amidst the old, crumbling, unsustainable system know that it’s not only what we do that matters, but also how we do it. How can we build long-term resilience? How do we turn setbacks into powerful opportunities? How do we prevent suffering unintended consequences? How do we maintain organizational energy when it often seems like the deck is stacked against us, there’s too much to do and not enough time to do it?
Join us to consider these questions and the key dimensions of a resilient enterprise and a resilient culture.
A resilient enterprise…
In a resilient culture, people are…
IMPORTANT: Vist the following URL to register for the call: http://myaccount.maestroconference.com/conference/register/P8U32VBQXOZWUG19
This conversation on resilience is just one piece of the New Economy Week. New Economy Week is
…an opportunity to shine a light on the thousands upon thousands of things that everyday people are doing right now to build a new kind of economy. These innovators are all around us engaged in the work of growing co-operative and independent enterprises, democratizing and stabilizing finance through credit unions, finding new ways to share skills and goods, new ways to measure success, and new ways to meet growing human needs on an all too finite planet.
From October 12-18, we will be highlighting events, actions, reports, works of art, and other projects across the United States and Canada. By calling attention to the thousands of things people are doing right now to build a new kind of economy, we hope to inspire more participation in this movement and catalyze a conversation on the need for deep, systemic change.
You can learn more by visiting www.neweconomyweek.org.
Anm: dieser Artikel wurde von D.Marwecki aus dem Englischen übersetzt. Das Original findet sich auf der englischsprachigen Participedia.
Ziel und Problem
Mark your calendars and be sure to join our partners at the National Issues Forums Institute and the American Library Association for their upcoming webinar on Tuesday, November 5th, from 4-5pm Eastern Time. You can read more about the webinar below, or find the original NIF blog post by clicking here.
Guides for Community Discussions:
National Issues Forums (NIF) and Others
Webinar
Tuesday, November 5th, 2013
4:00-5:00 p.m. EDT; 3:00 – 4:00 pm CDT; 1:00 – 2:00 PDT
Please join us for this one-hour webinar about issue books, videos, and other guides available to help librarians bring their communities together to talk in productive, civil, and interesting ways. A growing and diverse array of nonpartisan, non-agenda-driven materials about important public issues are available from the National Issues Forum Institute and other sources.
Presenters for this webinar include: Patty Dineen from the National Issues Forum Institute, and Carolyn Caywood, and Nancy Kranich, both from ALA’s Center for Civic Life. They will review and show examples of available materials; describe how these guides can support engaging library programs; and give examples of how librarians have used them in their communities. Time will be available at the end of the webinar for Q&A as well as Suggestions/Stories.
This webinar is the fifth in a civic engagement series produced by Programming Librarian and is sponsored by the ALA Center for Civic Life. Check out Webinars 1-4 by clicking here.
Don’t forget to register today for the call by visiting the following URL: www.programminglibrarian.org/online-learning/guides-for-community-discussions-nif.html.
NCDD would like to join our partners with CommunityMatters in congratulating the winners of the Successful Communities contest! The contest encouraged local groups to create projects to improve their communities, and awarded $500 to four winning communities, and the winners were recently declared:
Last month, CommunityMatters asked people to come together, listen to our August call on the Secrets to Successful Communities with Ed McMahon, then decide on one completely achievable action for making their community more successful. To sweeten the deal, the Orton Family Foundation offered $500 to four communities that came up with an idea or strategy for success. Sixteen of the 17 parties came up with a next step for taking action.
Public voting helped us select the following four entries to win $500. Congratulations to Discover Downtown Middlesboro, Upstream Arts Collective, the Medfield Cultural District, and Old Time Ozark Traditions! We’ll keep an eye on these projects over the coming months and share their progress with yo
We encourage you to learn out more about the winning projects here on the Community Matters blog, and check out the Successful Communities Gallery by clicking here. Congratulations again to the winning communities: Middlesboro, KY, Silverton, OR, Medfield, MA, and Mountain View, AR! Here’s hoping your projects continue to grow and improve you communities!
(Ft. Lauderdale, FL, en route to Austin, TX) Here are six types of freedom. Isaiah Berlin cited the first two as part of his argument for pluralism. He believed that genuine goods were distinct and incommensurable. For instance, a reasonable person could value two types of freedom, but no social order could maximize both simultaneously. We would have to choose, not only between the two types of freedom that he described, but also among freedom, happiness, equality, and other worthy goods.
Much in the spirit of his work, I extend the list of freedoms to six:
1. Negative liberty: freedom from constraint in the form of tangible action against the person or her property or (much more commonly) the threat or fear of such. Because fellow human beings can threaten violence, anarchy poses dangers to negative liberty. (Think of failed states flooded with AK-47s.) Although parents must constrain the negative liberty of their children, they can abuse that power. To combat anarchy, intra-family abuse, and other forms of violence among citizens, states are probably necessary. Yet in most of the world, it is the state that can threaten violence most effectively and pervasively. It must be curtailed in the interest of negative liberty.
2. Positive liberty: the freedom to do something. You are not free to travel, for example, unless you can afford a fare. Positive liberty is a matter of degree, since human beings are simply not able to do everything we want. But there may be a list of fundamental capabilities that everyone should be able to exhibit, and they require external support. You can’t learn to read unless someone teaches you. If one has a meaningful right to a positive liberty (e.g., the right to read), then some other person or community has a duty to provide it; and the state may be the best means to enforce that duty. But if I must pay taxes for your kid’s education or face imprisonment, then my negative liberty has been curbed in the interest of her positive liberty.
3. Individuality: the freedom to develop and express a unique personality and life-story in both the public and private spheres. Individuality may require a degree of negative and positive liberty, but it also faces threats not yet mentioned. The social norms that are strongest in tight, traditional communities and the mass culture that dominates today’s global society both inhibit individuality. Mass culture already worried de Tocqueville, but it has been hypercharged by advertising and technology. The global mass exercises its power less through majority rule at the ballot box than through search algorithms, trendy catchphrases, and addictive tunes.
4. Freedom from manipulation: I am treated as a means to someone else’s ends when the other person sways, threatens, or pays me to do what he wants. I am treated as an end when the other person tries to decide with me what we should do. States and markets arrange people as means to each others’ ends, perhaps unavoidably. Freedom (in this fourth sense) exists in ethical communities whose members treat each other as ends in themselves. Neither positive nor negative liberty guarantees such communities.
5. Freedom to make the world (or to live in a world that we make). Society is an artifact. We are born into the society of our ancestors, with all its flaws. But we are not compelled to replicate it. We become freer in this fifth sense the more that we design and fashion the world that we inhabit. That is a collaborative task, so it requires some limitations on negative liberty. But it is also not the positive liberty of being given an education or an airplane ticket. It is a matter of active co-creation.
6. Equanimity: freedom from the dread, doubt, disquiet, and sorrow that are consequences of being vulnerable and mortal creatures who care about other fragile living things. Although it is harder to achieve equanimity under conditions of extreme duress (e.g., given a complete lack of negative or positive liberty), and although mass culture threatens equanimity, inner peace seems to have different conditions. Indeed, when positive liberty means incessantly choosing consumer goods, it is incompatible with equanimity, as is individuality when it turns into narcissism, or co-creation when it becomes a vain yearning to build wholly new and permanent things.
The post six types of freedom appeared first on Peter Levine.
In a recent post on her blog, Fearless Heart (a post that also appears at Psychology Today), Miki Kashtan, cofounder of Bay Area Nonviolent Communication, brought forward some fascinating connections between Gandhian economics and the commons. She focused on two key themes – the satisfaction of human needs and the idea of trusteeship for things that exceed our needs. Kashtan writes:
The fundamental basis of Gandhian economics is a commitment to universal well-being. Like so many who are interested in universal well-being, Gandhi was led, inexorably, to looking at the difficult question of need satisfaction, since physical finitude makes it clearly impossible for everyone to have everything they want all the time. Like many others, he attempted to address this challenge by supporting a shift from the multiplication of wants to the fulfillment of needs.
Kashtan notes that this is a highly complex issue, however. What is a need? How do we answer this question individually or collectively, and actually allocate resources to meet our needs? It first bears noting that much of Gandhian economics is based on his particular circumstances and those of India in the early 20th century. Still, certain fundamental principles such as simplicity, localism and decentralization should remain a beacon for us today.
When Gandhi wrote, “The spinning wheel and the spinning wheel alone will solve, if anything will solve, the problem of the deepening poverty of India,” he could have been talking about the commons. His point was that we need to devise new collective forms of self-reliance and self-sufficiency that will let us disengage from oppressive forms of provisioning and invent more humane and satisfying alternatives. Isn’t that precisely the lesson of the free software, local food and hackerspace/maker movements (and countless other commons)?