Happiness Alliance and the Gross National Happiness Index

hi_logoThe Happiness Alliance, home of The Happiness Initiative and Gross National Happiness (GNH) Index, is a deeply grassroots organization.  Their mission is to improve the well-being of society by reducing emphasis on economic growth and focusing on the domains that lead to life satisfaction, resilience and sustainability. Their purpose is to provide tools, resources and knowledge to foster grassroots activism for a new economic paradigm. The Happiness Alliance is a volunteer driven organization.

The Happiness Initiative

Gain the knowledge and resources to conduct a happiness initiative in your city, community, business or other organization and use the GNH Index.  Receive a Happiness Initiative Leadership Training certification for full attendance of the course.

Happiness Initiative Leadership Training

Learn and share in an interactive and compassionate setting. This training will give you the tools, knowledge and resources to conduct a happiness initiative in your city, community, business or other organization. We will cover all the steps to conduct a happiness initiative. Topics range from the logistics of conducting a happiness initiative, to trouble shooting and taking a project to the next level. Areas covered include: team building, conducting the survey, media and communications, objective metrics, data gathering, report writing, town meeting planning and facilitation, project management, individual happiness projects, community happy projects, public relations and marketing and fundraising. You receive a Happiness Initiative Leadership Training certification for full attendance of the course.

Gross National Happiness Index

How to Use the Gross National Happiness Index is a simple and short guide to using a subjective well-being indicator at any scale for the grass roots activist at any level. It was first published in 2011, and has been used by over 110 cities, communities, campuses and companies in the US and internationally. Musikanski, L., Goldenberg, E, and Flynn, T., 2011, The Happiness Alliance.

Resource Link: www.happycounts.org

This resource was submitted by Laura Musikanski, Executive Director of the Happiness Alliance via the Add-a-Resource form.

Announcing Next Stage Facilitation Intensives in Montreal and Boulder

We are happy to share the announcement below from NCDD Sustaining Member Rebecca Colwell of Ten Directions. Rebecca’s announcement came via our great Submit-to-Blog Form. Do you have news you want to share with the NCDD network? Just click here to submit your news post for the NCDD Blog!


Integral Facilitator® Next Stage Facilitation™ Intensives are 3-day workshops introducing the core competencies of an Integral approach to facilitation designed to enhance your capacity to generate greater coherence and increased collaboration and dialogue in the groups you work with.

In this three-day workshop, you’ll learn:

  • How to maintain presence in the face of challenging situations.
  • How to work effectively with group energetics and emotional states.
  • How to effectively build connection and working with tension to deepen coherence and intimacy.
  • How to engage tension, power dynamics and conflict in a group.
  • How to increase the positive impact you have on others.
  • How to bring an integral approach to your work.

As a Next Stage participant, you’ll learn directly from master facilitator, mediator and former Director of Dispute Resolution for the Utah State Judiciary, Diane Musho Hamilton.

Your participation will include a deep dive into your personal presence as a facilitator, including how bring an Integral approach to your work with groups, and opportunities to practice new approaches that will stretch your development as a skilled facilitator. Masterful facilitators with depth and presence are more responsive to the subtleties of group dynamics and can create more rewarding and effective dialogue and collaboration.

Next Stage Facilitation Intensives will be taking place September 8 – 10 in Montreal, Quebec, and October 6 – 8 in Boulder, Colorado.

Sign up for an upcoming Integral Facilitator Next Stage Facilitation Intensive.

Praise from workshop participants:

“The workshop has shifted my perception of issues such as power, and allowed me to understand where my choices lie. I feel confident to run with those issues now as opposed to fighting against them and using up all my energy.” – Marissa Moore, Senior Finance Executive

“This has been my best experience ever in a 3 day training. Diane is an amazing facilitator! I’m currently figuring out how to get myself in the 1 year program as the 3 days were so exciting and promising in terms of my personal growth.” – Tremeur Balbous, Consultant & Integral coach

“Take facilitation to a whole other level. The Next Stage Facilitation three day intensive shakes you out of conventional and stifled facilitation modes and expands your view to multi-perspectival, grows your competencies toward integral–exploring what it means to work with individuals, the collective and the topic at hand in a balanced, elegant and effective way, and, it strengthens your intuitive faculties to sense and trust the energetic field of the room and respond.” – Michelle Elizabeth, Consultant

Watch Integral Facilitator Lead Teacher Diane Musho Hamilton’s recent Google Book Talk on conflict resolution:

For more information, visit https://tendirections.com/next-stage-facilitation-3-day-intensive.

From the Idea Incubator: Our Very Best “Hello”

The following idea was shared by NCDD member Eric Smiley as a submission for NCDD’s Idea Incubator – a great way for ideas to grow into action. We encourage you to learn more about how the Idea Incubator works, or to submit your own idea by clicking here.


I’m interested in how can we begin a large collective participation model in hopes of generating some positive results for all of us. I know many approaches have been in use on various scales and demonstrated great potential. I believe that if we want to use the web/internet to engage in community relationships, we need to have a solid starting point – even a simple “Hello.”

If an online event for everyone with access to say “Hello” to each other were staged would that be a start? Would it be revolutionary? Would the data about who participated where be of any interest? Who would want to participate? 1? 10? 100? Happy people? Friendly people? Angry people? The rest of us?

The idea I have is to create an NCDD event in which everyone with online access has an opportunity offer their best greeting and salutation to one another as a way to begin a collective online resource to advance online dialogue and deliberation in the global community. Although it would be a NCDD event anyone and everyone would be welcome to particiapate. Part of the plan is to have those who are connected to personally offer their best greeting to those who may not be connected.

Creating an event of this kind would be unique opportunity to answer some of my questions and take a step towards providing a structure for collective engagement. One goal in the design is to make the engagement as simple possible to enable the greatest number of people to participate. We could do something as simple as learning the variety of ways people say “hello.” But part of it is also that I like to speculate about global consciousness, what shape it is in now, and how it will evolve. This is a kind of experiment with what would happen if we try and imagine we are saying “hello” to all the people we cared for in the past, all the people we care for today and the future. I expect our collective consciousness would grow, but I also wonder how much we will partially divide into different realms and how connected we will still remain.

I will be reaching out to NCDD members to participate in the event, and also to assemble online resources to conduct the event. I am hoping the participants location will be recorded in order to get an understanding of just how connected we are, and to communicate to everyone who is not an NCDD member what we are trying to do. The resulting data would be made available to all.

This will be the first chance all the connected people in the world to connect at once.  This is an opportunity for people to see that they do make a difference.

What does the NCDD think? Could we all give it a try and support in such an exercise?

If you are interested in learning more or collaborating with Eric on this idea, you can reach him at ewsmiley1964@gmail.com

A Glimmer of Hope in Pew’s Polarization Report

The Pew Research Center recently released a report on polarization in the US that has important insights for our field. The report is huge, but luckily, NCDD Board of Directors member John Backman created a wonderful overview of the report’s findings, with an eye toward what it means for our work. We highly encourage you to read John’s thoughts below and add your reflections on the Pew study in the comments section. 


How Far Apart Are We, Really? A Closer Look at Pew’s Polarization Report

by John Backman

The findings look dark, no doubt about it. Play with the numbers, though, and you can begin to see glimmers of hope—and opportunities for D&D practitioners.

The report from the Pew Research Center bears the ominous title “Political Polarization in the American Public,” and the first sentence in the web version is no better: “Republicans and Democrats are more divided along ideological lines – and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive – than at any point in the last two decades.” The nationwide survey of 10,000 adults found that:

  • The two ends of the spectrum are growing. 21% of respondents now identify as “consistently liberal” or “consistently conservative”—double the percentage in 1994.
  • Overlap between parties is in steep decline. Twenty years ago, 64% of Republicans were more conservative than the median Democrat, and 70% of Democrats were more liberal than the median Republican. Today those figures are 92% and 94%, respectively.
  • Hostility is more intense. The percentage of respondents with a highly negative view of the other side has more than doubled since 1994. Worse, most of these “high negatives” believe the opposing party’s policies to be “so misguided that they threaten the nation’s well-being.”
  • The silos are hardening. Half of consistent conservatives and 35% of consistent liberals value living in a place where most people share their views. Nearly one-third of consistent conservatives and one-quarter of consistent liberals would be unhappy if one of their family married into the other side.

In other words, the American public is moving in a direction diametrically opposed to the bridge-building instincts of most D&D practitioners. On the whole, it’s hard to be happy about the situation.

Until you dig deeper. Some of the under reported findings and unexpressed facts hold more hope for both our public square and our ability as practitioners to make a difference:

If 21% of Americans are now firmly ensconced in their worldviews, then 79% are not.

That leaves roughly 250 million people who, in theory, might be open to an exchange of views with others of different opinion. One key strategy for ensconcing dialogue in our public square, as I see it, is to build a critical mass of people who are (or become) oriented toward dialogue. It’s easier to find participants for that critical mass in a pool of 250 million than it would be if the middle were actually vanishing instead of declining.

The middle of the political spectrum is quiet. Dialogue and deliberation could change that.

The Pew report notes that the people at the ends of the spectrum have a disproportionate voice in the political process because they are more vocal. “Many of those in the center,” the authors write, “remain on the edges of the political playing field, relatively distant and disengaged.” Yet they don’t have to stay on the edges, and anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that D&D can draw them in. For how many people has a dialogue been their first experience with any sort of civic engagement? And how many of them have been delighted with the process?

Data to validate or refute these impressions would be helpful here, of course. But if the impressions are accurate, they point to the power of dialogue, not only to engage people in the civic/political arena, but to start them out with a civil, productive approach.

There is still common ground to use as a starting point for dialogue, and much of it involves one of our most powerful motivators: the drive to make a good life for ourselves and our loved ones.

According to the Pew report, even the most strident conservatives and liberals want to live near extended family, high-quality public schools, and opportunities to get outdoors. By and large, concern for those closest to us trumps political affiliation: for about three-quarters of respondents, a family member’s marrying across political divides doesn’t matter.

Yes, the trends are troubling. Yet there is more than enough “raw material” for D&D practitioners to advance the cause of dialogue and deliberation.

What do you see in the numbers? Please share your thoughts below in our comments section.

Constitutional Amendment for Campaign Finance Reform?

We are happy to share the announcement below from NCDD organizational member and NCDD Catalyst Award winner John Spady of the National Dialogue Network. John’s announcement came via our great Submit-to-Blog Form. Do you have news you want to share with the NCDD network? Just click here to submit your news post for the NCDD Blog!

Until June 14, 2014, the National Dialogue Network (NDN) is crowdsourcing ideas from as many people as possible about whether or not a constitutional amendment is necessary to either limit or protect current practices of election campaign spending. Please share this announcement and encourage participation using this link: http://ndn.codigital.com.

The Codigital process is the same one recently used by NCDD. Our own experience with Codigital can be reviewed at http://ncdd.org/14641

The purpose of the NDN project is to solicit statements from all sides, edit and rank them using Codigital, and create a summary of the results for delivery to the Senate Judiciary Committee that meets in June to debate the value of a constitutional amendment to limit (or not) election campaign spending.

After June 14 a follow on phase will repackage these results and create materials for local consideration, public engagement, and national feedback using the tools that the National Dialogue Network gives freely to collaborating individuals and organizations to roll up results from numerous local communities. NDN wants our political representatives to understand the opinions and values of those who care deeply about this issue — from all sides.

John Spady is a long time and sustaining member of NCDD. His vision for a National Dialogue Network received the 2012 Catalyst Award for Civic Infrastructure from NCDD voting members. Details about that award are available at: http://ncdd.org/10940. The website of the NDN is: http://NationalDialogueNetwork.org

If you have any thoughts or encouragements, please add your comments below.

Seeking Collaborators for Sustainability Workshop at NCDD ’14 in Reston

We are happy to share the announcement below from NCDD supporting member Adolf Gundersen of the Interactivity Foundation, which came via our great Submit-to-Blog Form. Do you have news you want to share with the NCDD network? Just click here to submit your news post for the NCDD Blog!

IF-logo-onyellowMy Interactivity Foundation (IF) colleague Dennis Boyer and I are looking for collaborators to develop a proposal for a workshop on connecting exploratory discussion (our mission) with decisional deliberation at NCDD’s ’14 Conference in Reston. We’d like to focus on sustainability as a substantive theme, as IF also has discussion materials on related themes of climate change, energy, and city planning.

If you are interested in collaborating, please contact Adolf Gundersen at gundersen@interactivityfoundation.org or at (608) 467-6224.

Discounted Registration for Master Class and Learning Exchange

The post below comes from NCDD supporting member Rick Lent of Meeting for Results via our Submit-to-Blog Form. Do you have news you want to share with the NCDD network? Just click here to submit your news post for the NCDD Blog!

FutureSearch-logoTake advantage of two great course offerings from the Future Search NetworkNCDD members can get a registration discount if they register early.

Change the World One Meeting at a Time: A Master Class with Sandra Janoff and Marvin Weisbord takes place Sept 9-10, 2014 in Philadelphia. The Master Class will explore the realms of practice beyond traditional models, methods and techniques, and go more deeply into personal and structural issues for leading interactive meetings. Together we will learn more about applying principles for meaningful, energizing meetings:

  • Working with polarized sub-groups
  • Using differentiation and integration as a key process in transforming group dialogue
  • Moving from individual intervention to system intervention
  • Knowing when and how to “just stand there” or when and how to actively intervene.

The Master Class will be followed by the Learning Exchange on Sept. 11-12. Join Sandra Janoff and Marvin Weisbord and members of the global Future Search community to explore how people are using the principles and philosophy of Future Search in meetings of all shapes and sizes in communities and organizations around the world.

NCDD members can register for both together for additional discount before June 1. You can learn more and register by clicking here.