Tag: CM
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Forest Rangers in Community
A kind of entity that may exist in a community: one that sees its role as developing the capacity of the community to address shared problems and opportunities. Note that the role is developmental, and not focused on execution. There are a myriad of entities in any locale that are working directly on projects. This…
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Naming Public Issues: Economic Concerns Illustrated
Two reasons that people find it difficult to work on shared problems are that the way they are talked about obscures their nature, and an assumed course of action is implied even though there is not broad agreement on either. When developing materials for people to deliberate together on shared problems, we try to mitigate…
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Leadership Paradox
I recently began formally mentoring someone, and so I have been thinking about the nature of leadership. There’s a bind that “leaders” face. It has to do with the expectations of those who are led, and of the person who is trying to be a helpful leader. Consider the teacher of yoga class. They “lead”…
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Ways of Addressing Political Division
Broadly speaking, I am in a field in which many are trying to address the political division that appears to be increasingly engulfing our nation. One way to make sense of all these efforts is to explore what appear to be the assumptions underlying their approaches. What do the designers of an initiative think will…
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A Theory of Community
Human beings are innately social. We live together in groups. Living together brings a number of benefits: we can protect ourselves, we can pool resources, we can find safety when vulnerable due to illness, we can raise children, we can better shelter ourselves from elements. These things motivate our group life. In part, they…
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Explanation Day
For his column commemorating Independence Day, my friend and Hofstra University professor Michael d’Innocenzo points out that in fact July 2 was the date that the Continental Congress took the decision to become independent. And indeed, in a letter to his wife, Abigail, on July 3, John Adams predicted that “The Second Day of July…
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The Problem(s) With Facts
My friend, David C. Barker of American University sent me a copy of his new book, One Nation, Two Realities: Dueling Facts in American Democracy. It is an important addition to the current questions about “facts,” “truth,” “interpretation,” and “polarization.” Co-authored with Morgan Marietta of UMass Lowell, the book is quite a comprehensive and I commend…
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A Personal Mission of Agency
Each year-end I look back and reflect. I look at all areas of my life: family, professional, personal, spiritual, physical, financial. Across all of the major areas of my life, this has been a pivotal year of conceptual progress for me. I developed great clarity on my personal mission. And three ideas that began to…
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Two Competing Mythologies
Many people speak of a “tribalism” that seems to be on the rise in America and in our communities these days. By this they appear to mean, for the most part, a bipolar set of group identities, locked in conflict with one another and whose boundaries are based in large part on antipathy toward the…
Brad Rourke 