*Note: I'm not currently accepting freelance gigs--building Purpose Portfolio has me pretty much at capacity :) Thanks for your interest, and feel free to drop me a line if I can help find the right designer for your project. `sj
All tagged Changing the World
From Geoff Wolley (of HuntsmanGay Capital Impact) keynote at the BYU Economic Self-Reliance Conference
I don't think I have ever heard someone say they want to "do" social entrepreneurship...or "work in" it...or "try" it. The language of social entrepreneurship is fundamentally different. They want to BE.
Like junkies, successful change agents fixate on their cause. They crave it, sacrifice for it, and are willing to expend ever greater effort, against ever greater odds, to move it forward.
The problems we’re working to solve are enormous, intense and insistent. They demand speed, stamina, and collaboration. They demand we ride as a peloton.
Why can't we have some kind of genuinely objective perspective? The answer's pretty simple: the genuinely objective observers don't CARE enough to do the careful analysis.
I haven't the slightest idea how I'm going to accomplish most of the items on my list, but that's never bothered me. Far more vexing have been the times I've been tempted to "revise" my dreams.
Development is about releasing potential energy. Like a drawn bow or a loaded spring, developing communities are FULL of potential energy—they vibrate with it. But there are things about living there that prevent this force, this generative energy, from being released.
Perhaps the problem is not so much that we fail, that our efforts fall short of our goals (and the needs of the people we work with). Perhaps the problem is with how we fail.
Just started what may be the coolest class of my graduate experience. I am the ONLY American! (I'm also the only woman. Somehow I don't find that quite as exhilarating...)
I've been vexed all week. Really, vexed. Here's a selection of the blog posts I didn't write this week: "Why Open Education Won't Save the World," "Lurking and Ignorance in Qualitative Research" and "The Malignant Delusion of Educational Assessment.” Like I said... vexed.
The tools of hard power are force, sanctions, payments and bribes; the tools of soft power institutions, policies, culture and values. Hard power is authoritarian and self-serving. Soft power is neither. And HOPES development is built on soft power.
"Draft a plan to help Zimbabwe if Mugabe were removed from power and your NGO were invited in to help." That was the prompt for my Third World Development class final. No joke.
