The social web is a brand new way of doing very old things with still emerging implications. The nature of change has always been connected and collective but our recent history and the infrastructure of the nonprofit sector and our social change organizations has been much less so. We as a people, and our communication tools, are on a path to bring the individual and the collective back into balance and planning for this is both impossible and necessary. A document in progress examining this shift is available here.

Join the Bay Area LLC on May 16th, 2008 (save the date!) to discuss this topic live and in person at the next Bay Area circle gathering.

What’s love got to do with it? Catchy, isn’t it? Well I thought so when I saw this as the title for a GEO conference session (www.geofunders.org) I read on, “This session will question the current paradigm and hypothesize that we are not fully tapping the power of inner resources and human relationships for social change.” As I read this I thought about a speech I heard last summer at a national reunion for Kellogg fellows in Estes Park, Colorado. The speech by Parker Palmer made the trip worth while, and yes, of course it was fun to gather with close to 200 former Kellogg fellows in a stunningly beautiful place. (BTW, the Kellogg Fellows Leadership Alliance is an interesting and well developed model of alumni organizing for those who would like to take a look (www.kfla.org). The speech by Parker Palmer has been reprinted as a chapter, “The Politics of the Broken Hearted” in the book, Deepening the American Dream, Reflections on the Inner Life and Spirit of Democracy, a Fetzer Institute publication.

His speech and article were devoted to the practices that open the human heart enabling us to hold tensions honestly, patiently, and persistently as part of bolstering a democratic culture. When I think about the training component that is a critical piece of most leadership development work I find myself realizing that without sharing the content of our trainings we are not in a conversation about what we believe is most fundamentally at the heart of leadership, i.e. if there are any universal tenants of leadership that cut across our various contexts. Parker Palmer suggests that “deep inner work” is so fundamental that the work we do or don’t do as individuals will be expressed in our organizational and political life. He had a lot of interesting ideas about what this would look like. I definitely recommend his article.  read more »