Here we go again. It is the Quadrennial Quest for the next "great" leader of the United States. It is too bad we are fixated on a Presidential leadership model that has not worked well in the recent past and increasingly holds little hope for the future. Are we ready to embrace a different approach to leadership that is a better practice now and in the future?
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When I think of a "wellness" centre, I imagine a place where one might be able to exercise, see a nutritionist, take a course on personal development, learn more about parenting, or see a counselor. Some of you might imagine a wellness centre as something akin to a health spa where you can spend an arm and a leg to get your arms and legs massaged or exfoliated or poked with acupuncture needles.
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It's not that we do so on purpose. Our intentions are good, but how we go about trying to help the poor often ends up keeping them poor.
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Last year I joined the Collective Impact Summit after completing a Masters in Africa and International Development from the University of Edinburgh. Having lived, studied and worked abroad on and off for the previous three years gaining insights and experience regarding international development initiatives within southern and eastern Africa, I came home feeling disappointed and disheartened by the track record of the field and lost by the complexities of the issues I had faced in both my practical work and my theoretical studies. Frustrations around top-down approaches to community development initiatives; the saturation and overlap of NGO’s working in silos on similar issues within the same regions; the neglect of context-specific, place-based solutions and the proliferation of silver-bullet ideas to ‘save the world’; the privilege and power of the western voice over the strength and wisdom of community actors. It felt as though one could not take a step forward in this field, without taking two steps back.
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Social media platforms connect us with people around the world. But how do we start a conversation with our neighbours? Enter 18Blocks - a free, hyper-local, online network designed to help neighbours connect around common interests.
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I became aware of the power of networks in the 1990s while working in the field of community economic development (CED) overseas and in Canada. While the majority of the microenterprise programs were supporting individual entrepreneurs to establish their own businesses to generate additional income for their households, the pioneers at the Appalachia Center for Economic Networks were weaving together small and medium enterprises into mutually supporting economic networks. The difference in revenue, profits and economic activity was dramatic: networks really exemplified the old adage that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.
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