We Need Each Other

I spent this past Saturday with an amazing group of people, mostly women, leading transformational grassroots change in their community. It nourished me to be amongst such experience and wisdom, and to be in a creative, family-friendly space to learn.

As part of the reflection towards the end of the day, I felt the need to voice the need for connection amongst us and painted this banner.

Thanks to Shilpa, Anna and the whole Ayanna team.

Take A Pebble

“Don’t ask the mountain
To move, just take a pebble
Each time you visit.”

Haiku – Yangon, March 2003

h/t On Being

Silence Is Betrayal

Link Loving 17.01.12

• Turns out our Facebook personalities are pretty much as we are in ‘real’ life. Megan Garber.
• Warren Buffet and Google are getting serious about investing in solar. Michael Graham Richard.
• A German village produces 321% more energy than it needs. Timon Singh.

Link Loving 16.01.12

• How Martin Luther King learned about non-violence, and the bridges between Gandhi and King. Mary Elizabeth King.
• Why disability campaigners are a model for the broader left. Sunny Hundal.
• Italy: racism and risk. Judith Sunderland.
• 2012: the international year of co-operatives. Rhizome.
• Tory feminists: the true blue sisterhood. Gaby Hinsliff.
• Shit My Students Say. Hilarious.
• Women plan protest against diet industry. Sophie Atherton and Rebecca Smithers.
• Facebook is partnering with Politico – so who needs voting anymore? Kashmir Hill.

What Is An Online Organiser?

Is an online organiser

• an offline organiser with an internet connection; or
• someone different altogether who works on things like Carbon Brief.

Because it’s probably important to know the difference.

 

What Would MLK Do?

Today is MLK Day across the pond – and this is an absolutely brilliant video retelling his story, and what it means for us today. We so often talk of the need for more stories, sharing people’s histories and the power of narrative – how about this?

• (Re)New information: 1968 had an Occupy movement? MLK’s house was bombed? He organised for cross-racial economic justice? He was 25 when he set up the SCLC.
• Change takes time – 10 years passed between the Montgomery Bus Boycotts and race equality legislation in 1965
• Today’s heroes were yesterday’s controversial boat-rockers. So today’s radicals are likely to be tomorrow’s heroes too.

h/t Billy Wimsatt

Link Loving 15.01.12

• Occupy Davos – reclaim the slopes. Robert Shrimsley.
• What Movement4Change is doing in Walthamstow. Agnes Hoctor.
• Storytelling makes the heart grow larger. Heather Box.
• Gender, privilege and blogging. Alyson Macdonald.
• The best newspaper front page this year. Richard Gowan.
• What’s your influencing style? Tammie Plouffe and Chris Musselwhite.
• RAN activists change all of Bank of America’s San Francisco cash machines to tell the truth.
• Cian O’Donovan is taking a Hippocratic oath and thinks others should too.

How Progressives In Congress Can Work With The Occupy Movement

A great strategy memo from Joe Brewer, focusing on;

• The appearance of new language for the Progressive Movement
• A new political reality that is global in scope and yet locally grounded in cities and towns throughout the United States
• A cogent “cross ideology” platform for visioning the future.

Download the memo here. (pdf)

An in case progressives inside the Capital don’t work with Occupy – Occupy is coming to the Capital. On Monday.

(Forgive the Coldplay, they are Americans.)

Link Loving 14.01.12

• Protestors in Nigeria take a signage to a whole new level. Richard Gowan.
• The HuffPost Good News has launched. Arianna Huffington.
• The Daily Express stepped out of the Press Complaints Commission because it failed to stop them lying. Shamik Das.
• Greenpeace volunteers in Germany are given the thumbs up by the fantastic Engage Network. Michael Silbermann.
• State of the British nation in 2012. Gareth Young.
• Beautiful portraits of the over-100s. Karsten Thormaelen.
• Do you have the moral compass of a todler? Megan Erickson.
• The top 20 US progressives. Mehdi Hasan.