Between the Lines: Finding Balance in How We Communicate
You ever notice how sometimes you can feel like you said all the right words but still not be understood? Like, you spelled it out perfectly, you…
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How to Find Your Tribe; and why it matters
It might sound like a pretty odd question in this modern world of ours (how to find your tribe) but it really isn’t when you think about…
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Grace Sees What We Can Be, Not What We Have Been
We definitely need to rethink the way we measure a person – and ourselves. We tend to fixate on the worst moments, as if the sum of…
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Can You Hear Me Now?
If you’re old enough, you may remember the Verizon commercial where a guy wanders around with his cell phone asking, “Can you hear me now?” The gimmick…
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The Perfection of Imperfection: What Futtitinni and Wabi-Sabi Can Teach Us About a Simpler Life
There’s a Sicilian word I’ve come to love: futtitinni. It roughly translates to “don’t worry about it,” though that hardly captures its real essence. It’s often used…
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The Age of the Emotional Roomba
Sometimes it feels like we’ve stopped emotionally being people and started being more like appliances. Not the useful kind that make toast or brew coffee, but the…
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The Commons Economy: A New Blueprint for Human-Centered Prosperity
The idea of a “commons economy” sounds a bit quaint, like something out of a Jane Austin novel; like an echo of old village greens and shared…
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The Quiet Power of Associational Life
If you really want to understand what makes a community strong, you have to look between the cracks. Not at the institutions or the official programs or…
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The Art of Motivation: The Missing Ingredient in Community Development
When trying to employ Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) principles, there is one fundamental quality that must always be present in the community you’re trying to help develop.…
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The Hegelian Dialectic of Community Building
There’s this old philosophical idea that’s quietly at work in almost every successful community initiative, whether people realize it or not. It comes from Hegel: the dialectic.…