HumanKindMedia

Community

Some of our friends have huge extended families, from full compliments of grandparents, aunts and uncles, to swarms of cousins, in-laws and people to whom they know they're related, but don't know exactly how. When a big event comes up for our family, I feel particularly wistful for my kids who have a total of 7 of us family members that we can conjure up to celebrate (and that involves lots of miles and airfare). So, for my son's graduation, I did what I always do. I called upon the "relatives" we've germinated the past 20+ years-- the friends we've made from babies through high school, our neighbors who have watched us grow as a family, the teachers we have loved, and dear friends we made through our kids along the way.

When we were all in a room together last week, celebrating my son for his graduation, I realized what community means, in the deepest way I have ever understood it. It's how we honor our collective past, how we create possibilities for the future, how we send our kids off, how we help each other grow, and how we support one another beyond the family unit.

When I was writing about sustainability, I watched the film, The End of Suburbia, an alarming but informative look at post-oil America, which was an eye-opener for me. After the End of Suburbia I fretted for a few weeks until I noticed what communities do when they need to: Iowa, New Orleans, China, Indonesia. Now, I see strong communities as an even more important link in our survival and evolution.

All along at HumanKind Media, we've been looking at communities--local, international, on-line and on the front lines--for what they offer for healing the world. From the Millennium Villages to the U.S. community Braden's building for a school community in Zimbabwe, from Cami's and Nipun's giving communities, to Dave Egger's pirate supply grassroots education community, I have seen what's possible when people come together around a common bond.

In 1993, John Kretzmann and John McKnight's groundbreaking study of communities, Building Communities from the Inside Out, A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets, proposed a move from focusing on a "community" or region's problems (the deficiency model) and focusing instead on developing and using the unique skills, and assets of the community members (the asset-based community model).

I have been appreciating the on-line communities I belong to more because of the assets people bring--the vast burgeoning community of new media bloggers, change makers around the world, our 29-Day Giving Challenge group, and especially our little band of HumanKind Media readers. And, I've also been paying attention more to the communities I am physically, locally part of--a neighborhood, a small unincorporated town, a school district, a community of parents and kids of my kids' ages, a coaching community, a meditation community.

In this recent post, I talked about the human universals--commonalities all of us humans on the planet share. Among the human universals are: collective identity, coalitions, reciprocal exchanges, food sharing and gift giving.

I've been actively imagining the community I could live out my post-oil days in, with a community garden, tutoring centers for kids near every school, multi-media library centers, and local music spots for spontaneous jam sessions and concerts that everyone can walk to. I've been thinking of that asset-based model, where everyone contributes their own unique skills and assets, and the whole is better than the sum of its parts.

I have some plans for the next few months to explore communities around the world that are creating and building new possibilities for a future worth passing on. As you can tell by the delays in my recent posts, I can use all the help I can get. If you have ideas for posts on cool communities, please e-mail me or leave a comment. Stay tuned.

Cami's response to difficulty: give

I've always found great wisdom in the counsel that you can't control what happens to you, but you can control how you respond to what happens to you. In development circles, they call this response-able, able to respond with grace and ease. In the mainstream media these are usually heroes--people who respond in ways that are heroic.

The great mainstream example of responding with grace and ease these days is Randy Pausch, Carnegie Mellon professor, Imagineer beyond the Disney sense, and the man who has given us the Last Lecture. He has inspired millions with the video, his book, and his continued show of courage in the face of pancreatic cancer. Though I'm inspired and moved by Randy's Pausch, I also believe there are millions of untold stories of equally inspirational people who respond to difficulty in equally powerful ways that we don't get to see on the front page or in prime time.

Lately the person I'm most amazed about is Cami Walker. In March, during "dark days" Cami took out an old journal and read what Mbali Creazzo, spiritual guide and leader of her women's circle, had suggested months back: "Give something away for 29 days." Cami decided right then that 29 days of giving, focusing on others, might be just the thing to help shift the weight of her problems. I'd tell her story here, but I'd really like you to visit her 29 Gifts site and read it yourself--it's inspiring.

Thus began a journey that she has turned into a movement in a few short months. When I signed up on June 1 as part of HumanKind Challenge #4, I was #340-something. At last count today, the giving community (the ones who have signed up to be counted) is at 486 and growing. I haven't counted the countries but I know there are some 29-day givers from the UK, Canada, Japan and the US. Though the majority of members up until now are mostly women, Cami knows men to be very giving and she's looking for more to join the challenge.

I talked to Cami last week the day before she completed her third round of the 29 Days. You can see the photojournal of her latest "29th Day" here. She said that though the Challenge was not her first experience with giving (her mother is a philantrhopist at heart), it has been the most dramatic. She is amazed at what she has received, tangible and intangible, as a result of something so simple.

I'm guessing there's no question that you already give every day. The 29-Day Challenge just invites you to check out what happens when you do a giving "project" for 29-days, where you've shifted your intention to search out new opportunities, and when you do it as part of a world-wide giving community.

I hope you'll watch Cami's video and read her story. If you haven't joined her 29-Day Giving Challenge yet, click here now. It's never too late to start your own 29-Day challenge. You can read stories from the giving community where people have submitted the mundane and the miraculous for inspiration and new ways to think about generosity. And, after you've joined the 29-day challenge, add yourself to our HumanKind Group if you'd like.

If you like imagining a world where giving is the default shared intention everywhere, pass this along (to the guys, too). I don't think Cami will have trouble getting to her goal of 2,000. Her response to her life's challenges was to give a gift that I and others are now receiving--a reminder to hold generosity in our hearts and minds when we wake every day. If I could have my wish, she would get to 20,000,000+ in the next year or two, changing the world one small gift at a time.

Carpe Millennium: The Long Now Foundation putting things in perspective

At the Long Now Foundation museum in San Francisco there's a sign on a staff person's computer that says, "Carpe Millennium". For some of us on the planet, Carpe Diem is a tough one. Carpe Millennium, Seize the Millennium, puts every issue, every question, every intention into uncommon perspective.

The Long Now Foundation began as an e-mail from MIT PhD computer genius (paralell processing), Imagineer, inventor and thinker, Danny Hillis. He wrote to some friends,

"When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 2000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium."

In 01996 (the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years) futurist Stuart Brand, musician Brian Eno, former Wired Magazine editor and author Kevin Kelly, and a long list of other amazing humans, joined Hillis to form the Long Now Foundation. In their words, the Foundation would provide "a counterpoint to today's 'faster/cheaper' mind set and promote 'slower/better' thinking...creatively fostering responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years." On New Year's Eve, 01999, this prototype (a much smaller version) heralded the second millennium by chiming twice.

I'd like to write an essay marveling at the Long Now, but Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon wrote this a few years ago, and I'll admit right now, there's no way to top it, unless maybe Michael Chabon does a follow-up piece when they install their 10,000 year clock in the Nevada desert.

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Donna and I visited the Foundation's museum not far from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, wandering among the prototypes, browsing through the mind-expanding bookstore, and skirting around the researchers working on Long Now projects. It was a great outing, but not essential as there is almost more to savor on their site on-line.

There's more about the clock--for philosophers, engineers, and dreamers. The Foundation sponsors regular seminars by many interesting people and there's a treasure trove of blogs and essays pondering the possibilities of the future. On one of my recent re-visits I discovered this essay by Danny Hillis about working with Richard Feynman on thinking machines and learned why my space-ship can't go faster than the speed of light.

At LongBets you can read about long-term predictions and bets, or place your own Long Bet. Here, you'll get a sampling of bets and predictions spanning from 02003 until 02203. Though Ted Danson won the bet about whether the US would win the World Cup before the Red Sox won the series, the jury's still out on Warren Buffett's bet about the S&P or the bet that the US Constitution will be ammended to cede to a global government by 02025. Pilotless air travel by 02025? Will at least one human alive in 02000 be alive in 02150? It's a fascinating glimpse into possible futures by some of our brightest minds, and a reminder that everything changes.

I must say thinking about the Long Now and their projects has had an impact on me. I'm pondering small things like imagining some unknown being finding my plastic water bottle during an excavation in 10,000 years. I'm conscious of larger concerns about how my children will contribute to a developing evolution of humans, rather than how much money they can make after college. I'm reimagining my responsibility for electing stewards of a larger future during this election. I think of that clock ticking away back only a few hundred miles from where I grew up, and my imagination goes wild. I am at once excited about the possibilities, and remorseful that I won't be there. What a great job for a person of the future to be a caretaker of the clock! (Maybe I'll come back.)

Hillis had a conversation about the clock with Jonas Salk before he died. Salk asked him about the clock and what problem he was trying to solve, or what he was trying to preserve. I like his response because it mirrors what the whole Long Now Foundation mission evokes in me:

"OK, Jonas, OK, people of the future, here is a part of me that I want to preserve, and maybe the clock is my way of explaining it to you: I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it. I know I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me. I sense that I am alive at a time of important change, and I feel a responsibility to make sure that the change comes out well. I plant my acorns knowing that I will never live to harvest the oaks.

I have hope for the future."

If you're a new reader, welcome to HumanKind. You can get free updates here. Wonder what we're up to? Click on the links on the upper right, or scroll through the topics and archives on the left. If you're a regular, thanks for your support! Let us know what HumanKind can do to keep the media you'd like to see coming your way. You can e-mail chris (at) humankindmedia dot com. And please do share HumanKind with your friends.

Tuesday Links: Little blogger goes to the big media conference

Well, if you're still with me, thanks for your patience. We have proven that I can't write blogs and attend conferences at the same time.

Last week I was like Charlie at the Chocolate Factory of new media, having attended a Journalism That Matters conference put on by Media Giraffe at UMass and then the very amazing National Conference on Media Reform put on by freepress.org. Now I am suffering from an embarrassment of riches in the arena of people doing great things against what seems to be the impossibility of recapturing the media for the public.

Local place-bloggers, traditional journalists, policy makers, Senators, new media mavens and scholars all came together to represent thousands upon thousands of grass-roots and alternative media proponents around the US. Among revered reporters (Bill Moyers, Dan Rather, and Phil Donahue were speakers) and internet media experts were hip-hop bloggers serving marginalized youth, new media filmmakers, local youth radio supporters and on-line journalists and bloggers like me. We all shared a common intention: representing the voices of all the people--the raucous, cacaphonous, dissenting, diversified public the way that the American forefathers envisioned in the First Amendment--in media.

Though our constitution is faded, it's still a great set of guidelines for a thriving democracy. I love that so many people care so much to travel to a conference to learn more about how they can contribute to a free press remaining free, and how we can use stories to transform our society towards its full promise.

I heard later that Bill O'Reilly, a main face of Big Media, called our gathering "fringe left lunatics". I've never subscribed to labelling people right and left, blue and red, right and wrong, (or sane or lunatic for that matter) myself, but it's kind of fun to see how threatening a group of 3000+ who want to read and see news that's relevant, varied, and informative can be to the likes of O'Reilly.

In January I wrote a piece about what I was learning about the media and being the change in the media that I'd like to see. I hope we "new media" people can remember that all "media people" are people. I hope we can steer away from the pitfalls that have turned so many of us off to fear-driven, celebrity-filled infotainment as our primary media diet.

I hope we can remember that even mainstream media, for all its flaws, is filled with people like us who deserve respect even if we disagree with them. I hope we as readers and writers can choose against the pundits who are bent on right/wrong, left/right, red/blue, safe/threatened, with/against polarities in their reporting. I hope we demand of our media to hear more sides than one side, more stories about problems and people fixing them, less about what we should be afraid of or hate.

The conferences were filled with people just like you and me trying to make a difference in the world. It was fabulous. I have a long list of stories I hope to share over time if changing the media to change our world is as interesting to you as it is to me. In the meantime, watch this video now or save it for some quality viewing. It's a compelling explanation by Bill Moyers about "communitainment", why we should care about what's happening in the media, and what we should do about it.

Theme Tuesday: Giving Community Links

(Writing to you, late, from rainy Minneapolis) I'm starting to think that when we shift our media to stories about people helping people, giving is naturally invoked in us. Just as our fears, cynicisms, frustrations, and disappointments can be triggered by mega-media and news entertainment, I think our best selves are summoned by the changing-the-world stories, and we become more connected to our generosity.

We've been telling a lot of those stories the past 9 months, so for Theme Link Tuesday, I cavalierly thought I could come up with a "quick" list of cool links to give our 29-Day Challenge participants for ideas for places to spread their money, their time, or just to share with others. But, I can't top the ideas and touching reflections on giving that you'll find if you flip through the blogs and the forum on the 29-Day Giving Challenge community page. It's so fun to be part of a virtual giving community.

In fact, my hopes for the world rest largely on the phenomenon of virtual, web-based communities of smaller physical communities--groups of like-hearted clusters banding across the airwaves with other similar groups to create critical mass in healing the world...like you and me, joining the 29-Day Giving Challengetogether.

Change.org, Care2, Dollar Philanthropy, and, our friends at helpothers.org are just another few giving/changemaking communities I'm aware of. What are some of your favorite on-line giving communities?

It's officially Day 3 of HumanKind Challenge #4, the 29-Day Giving Challenge. People are starting every day, trying to help Cami get to her goal of 2000 participants. It's not too late for you to jump in. Here is where you sign up and here is our group page (please sign up here, too) and I'm posting my updates to the challenge on my page. Please join us. Did I mention it's so fun to be part of a virtual giving community?

If you're a new reader, welcome to HumanKind. You can get free updates here. Wonder what we're up to? Click on the links on the upper right, or scroll through the topics and archives on the left. If you're a regular, thanks for your support! Let us know what HumanKind can do to keep the media you'd like to see coming your way. You can e-mail chris (at) humankindmedia dot com. And please do share HumanKind with your friends.

Day 1 of HumanKind Challenge #4

Hooray, it's June 1, the first day of HumanKind Challenge #4. I'm pondering the little personal idiosyncracy of mine that made me have to start the 29-Day Giving Challenge at the beginning of the month. If I look back at my week, I "gave" my time, my energy, stuff, and love all week long. So did you probably. But, somehow, today, waking up with the intention of being generous, I feel a different lightness and connection, and I feel a little happier. I can't wait to hear how it's going for you. I expect the 29 days will be filled with ups and downs, dids and didn'ts, but most of all a sense of shared community and fun.

If you're on the fence about joining us, I'm invoking Mother Teresa here to give you encouragement:

"If you can't feed 100 people, then just feed one."

and

“We cannot do great things on this Earth, only small things with great love.”

If I needed a reason or a "goal" to do a giving challenge (which, apparently I did), my goal would be to help Cami, the amazing person who started this, meet her goal. She's looking for 2000 people to do the 29-Day Giving Challenge by the end of July. My goal is to help her by encouraging as many people as I can to join with me. I'm #349, and there are already several after me. Wouldn't it be cool if you all joined, and then invited 3 or 4 friends to join (who invited their friends?). More than 2,000, or 20,000 would be good. Not impossible. (You know my stance on "impossible".)

I guess the reason I waited until June 1 was so I could invite my HumanKind readers and my friends to join me. Now you've all received your invitation. I hope you'll jump in. Some of you already have signed up, I see, and I applaud those of you who started right away (thanks, Audrey) without that artificial June 1 hang-up I had.

Liz says informs me that signing up is a two-step process. If you've signed up at the 29-Day Giving Challenge community, but not the HumanKind Challenge #4 group yet, you have to click on our little "globe-in-the-hands" logo on the main page (on the lower right) or on the group page and "join" the group. You'll read our daily updates there, and can share some of your experiences, too, once you're in the giving-your-comments mood. If your browser is different and you don't know what the heck I'm talking about, e-mail me and I'll try to explain it differently.

I woke up pretty excited about my ideas for my first day of giving. You can read my recap on the 29-Day page. I'll just say that already before noon, I'm filled with that special kind of gratitude for the world that comes from doing a small thing for someone else.

Coming up on Tuesday Links: a myriad of links and ideas for your 29-Day Challenge. Stay tuned.

If you're a new reader, welcome to HumanKind. You can get free updates here. Wonder what we're up to? Click on the links on the upper right, or scroll through the topics and archives on the left. If you're a regular, thanks for your support! Let us know what HumanKind can do to keep the media you'd like to see coming your way. You can e-mail chris (at) humankindmedia dot com. And please do share HumanKind with your friends.