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Convening - Less Art than Science
Spend a couple Google-minutes and look up “convening.” After the requisite bad matches and charlatans, Google, Bing or your search engine of choice gets you to some worthwhile information. I did this recently to reassure myself of what I know to be the basics of convening, something SCOPE works hard to be good at.
First [...]
Money and Community
After a meeting the other day, I talked with a woman about what she’d heard and how it relates to her work in her neighborhood. The meeting was called by government and focused on developing the community. I said something about how money is not the building block of a thriving community – communities start [...]
Age Bias - It’s Everywhere
Guest post by Nancy K. Schlossberg, See www.transitionsthroughlife.com
Nancy Perry Graham, an editor of AARP The Magazine wrote in the January 2010 issue: “Just listen to the late-night comics. Scarcely an evening goes by that David Letterman…doesn’t mock a certain 73-year-old politician with lines such as ‘During the presidential campaign, Sarah [Palin] had to cut up [...]
Engagement and the Digital Divide
We are trying to be savvy regarding social media approaches to connecting people. It has power and potential to cross boundaries in ways that other media does not and at a volume and speed unlike anything before. We want to push to the front of the line regarding the possible connection between innovation and civic [...]
Theory of Change
We have been thinking at SCOPE about our “theory of change.” How do we think communities get better? This isn’t rocket science - but not of little consequence either. My attempt to explain this - SCOPE’s theory of change is based on the premise that transformative community change occurs when citizen-directed thinking and action are [...]
Reflection - Projection - Inquiry
It’s the end of the year. It’s that one time when reflection is frequent and broad. We all know that reflection is vital to each of us throughout the year and it also matters to the organizations we engage as well as our neighbors, families and the community. It just seems like [...]
Jobs and Civic Engagement
There has been a long-standing claim that in those communities where residents are civically engaged there is a better life as measured by many things including more employment – jobs – economy. It strikes me now that with the national and local economy suffering and with so many people out of work, the impact on [...]
Lime Lake - First and Second Investors
I took Euline Myrick to the Tiki Hut at O’Leary’s last week. We talked about a meeting that Euline invited me to attend the previous week at the Newtown Rec. Center. This meeting, half-celebration and half “next steps,” was the culmination of several years of work aimed at turning a retention pond into a community [...]
Full, Empty & the First Lady
A few weeks ago, I followed an email link to this speech by Michelle Obama, delivered on June 16th in Washington DC. It does a wonderful job at describing the spirit, orientation, and aim of what we at SCOPE care about and work to practice locally.
(Follow link and scroll down to the bold text.)
http://www.abcdinstitute.org/faculty/obama/
This part [...]
Running in the Grocery Store
I’ve got a confession: sometimes I see someone I know in the grocery store and I purposefully head down another aisle. Not because I don’t like that person, but because I simply don’t feel like making that nice smalltalk that is required of grocery store interactions.
At a networking event, I would never do that. In [...]