Community engagement through education

Posted on November 13, 2011 by MikeG

In the Peace Corps in Niger, our education volunteers focused on community and youth education, rather than teaching in classrooms.  Part of this was government mandate, but much resulted from the observation that education involving the whole community is a powerful antidote to poverty.  Just this past week, Nicholas Kristof wrote about the ways libraries at home and abroad change lives.  As the digital world marches forward, investing in the construction and maintenance of these invaluable community centers must not wane.  In some of the most remote parts of America and the world, the physical presence of a library cuts down the social and economic divide in ways that placing a laptop or tablet PC in the hands of every child cannot bridge.  Access to information without a community focal point neglects the social nature of human beings.  We need a place to share what we have learned with others, and we need a place to organize.

I was pleased to learn this week of the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists and their efforts educate communities around the world and connect the Unitarian Universalist denomination globally.

Community education can happen through libraries, places of faith, and after school programs that reach beyond walls.  In Good Magazine today, Meg Malone of City Year New York tells her story about empowering community members to turn a school into a hub. She reflects on a principle of City Year:

One of the principles that City Year corps members look to for guidance and perspective is Ubuntu, a shortened version of a Zulu proverb that means, “I am a person through other people. My humanity is tied to yours.”

Ubuntu is without borders.

Posted in Education, Stewardship | 1 Comment

Organization Spotlight: Greenfaith.org

Posted on November 6, 2011 by MikeG

I recently learned about GreenFaith.org, Interfaith Partners for the Environment, and found many themes resonating with the content of Cultivating Bridges.  In addition to offering environmental statements from multiple denominations, GreenFaith also has useful resources on Stewardship, Spirit, and Justice. Modeling behavior is a powerful form of activism, and the resources on this page, http://greenfaith.org/resource-center/stewardship, show simple steps a religious institution — no matter how big or how small — can take to both improve their bottom line and generate ripple effects as individual members adopt sustainable practices in their own homes and work places.  Collective and collaborative organizations are invaluable in spreading the message that small changes when done by many, create a deep, positive impact in strengthening our communities and building bridges towards a more compassionate future.

Posted in Organization Spotlight, Stewardship | 3 Comments

Megachurch trends, and what it means for traditional faith-based communities

Posted on October 31, 2011 by MikeG

Megachurch, LA 3
Megachurch, LA 3, by gruntzooki, Creative Commons 2.0

An infographic featured on Good Magazine is very telling and potential reason for concern among communities of faith.  As indicated in the Pew Forum Report on the Religious Landscape (2007), movement in and out different denominations characterizes the transformation of the American religious landscape, with the group of unaffiliated people being of similar influence to swing voters.  Furthermore, appeal for traditional places of worship is waning, while enrollment in these megachurches, sometimes with weekly attendance over 4,000, is on the rise.  The financials of these megachurches indicate that faith as a form of Sunday morning entertainment is a booming business strategy.

As someone who grew up in a very small Unitarian congregation, I appreciate the value of knowing everyone on the coffee receiving line.  We build relationships through the most personal of interactions: social volunteer activities of around twenty people, pot luck suppers with an attendance between 50 and 100, and summer services numbering in the teens.  Community worship allows for organic capacity building, but unfortunately, it can rarely go to scale by definition.

When these megachurches promote large-scale communities of faith and large-scale collections of dollars, and tend more often to lean toward the right side of the aisle, traditional faith-based communities must ask themselves: what is our role in the new economy?

Communities of faith serve multiple purposes.  One is individual, the sensations a person receives during each service by internalizing the weekly sermon.  The other two are collective: first, to create a community of spiritual pursuit beyond the level achieved by an individual; second, to be a body focused on a singular purpose to the world outside the congregation or parish.  While individuals may opt out of actively pursuing this shared purpose, the purpose itself lives on through the faithful.

Looking at the Dunbar number, it seems questionable whether a megachurch can organize beyond the first or maybe the second purpose.  Can four thousand individuals hold a shared community vision with intent and intelligence, or does megachurch social action become more like sheep herding?

By the numbers, these megachurches seem to pose a threat to faith-based social action (scale of dollars versus scale of intent), or do they?  Can smaller churches use the intimacy of shared vision to demonstrate to the world that movements and dialogues start from the actions of a few, not from a stadium of thousands?  Perhaps these “right-sized” communities of faith can take notes on the practices of the megachurches, implement “right-sized” entertainment and spectacle (inspiring speakers giving calls to action every Sunday, using social media to extend the conversation beyond the pulpit) and regain the engagement of those parishioners who left for bigger ball games.

The future of social action and social activism depends upon a faith-based revival of the power of community.

Posted in Activism, Faith | 4 Comments

Organized to Cultivate Cooperation

Posted on October 21, 2011 by MikeG

Today and tomorrow in Seattle is Strengthening Local Independent Coops Everywhere, SLICE 2011, a conference sponsored by Central Coop and several other partners representing Cooperatives throughout the Puget Sound and beyond.  In today’s climate of Occupy Wall Street, the Cooperative movement deserves more attention, as it represents a way to change the system through action, rather than through protest.  With increasing crack downs on Occupy Wall Street throughout the country and world, its success or failure is still unknown.  As the weather gets colder, will the protesters resolve waver?  Will Occupy Wall Street have a lasting impact on conversation amongst policy makers now and on election night?  Will it change the game?

Building bridges to strengthen communities is about harnessing existing assets, rather than letting them bleed out of the neighborhood and into the pockets of large corporations.  Of course, not every good or service can be provided locally. However, many of them can, and cooperative business models keep money in the community and allow these assets to grow.  If we all invest locally, we will both support each other and show Wall Street that consumer behavior is still a key stone of the economy, and a shift to the local dramatically alters the power structure.

Keep up the movement, buy local, invest local, and through action, change the rules of the game.

Here are a couple links and a video about cooperatives and buy local movements:

http://www.madisonmarket.com/

http://www.livingeconomies.org/

Posted in Activism, Organization Spotlight, Stewardship | Leave a comment

Cultivating Bridges video slide show

Posted on October 20, 2011 by MikeG

Please check out my first video slide show for Cultivating Bridges:

Posted in Stewardship | Leave a comment

Bridge Building Organization Spotlight: City Repair

Posted on October 17, 2011 by MikeG

I learned about Portland, Oregon’s City Repair back in 2009 and have been inspired by their vision ever since.  Hope you enjoy learning about them, too.

http://www.youtube.com/CityRepair

 

Posted in Organization Spotlight | Leave a comment

Blog Action Day: Food Security, Stewardship, and Cross-Cultural Bridge Building

Posted on October 16, 2011 by MikeG

Today is Blog Action Day, a day when bloggers worldwide speak as one voice around a single topic.  The topic this year is food.  There are many angles from which to write about food – from cuisine to nutrition to farming and more. I’ve experienced firsthand the complexity of food security while in the Peace Corps in Niger.  The media portray the famines in Niger and other parts of Africa with images of starving children, distended bellies, and flies swarming around swollen eyes.  This imagery produces a heart-wrenching gasp from the viewer, but does little to bridge the cultural gap in understanding how food scarcity and food security are two different yet interconnected issues.  If our only response is to descend on famine zones with food aid during times of crisis, we will achieve little success long-term.  Food security means preparing for the worst during the best of times and establishing an infrastructure to buffer farmers from the impact of poor crop yields and from each other – specifically the income disparity and power differential that occurs when local merchants have financial reserves to buy large quantities of the harvest when prices are cheap, only to sell grain back to the community during the “hunger season” at many times the original price.  The ROI for these merchants is huge, and the loss to society is even greater.  This dynamic perpetuates a vicious cycle of poverty and hunger.

From 2007 to 2008, I worked with a women’s cooperative in the village of Tonokossare, in the Dosso region of Niger, to develop a grain bank – a cement structure to house grain contributed by the cooperative and be sold back at a less-than-market-value price when grain is scarce.  Through Peace Corps Partnership, I raised the funds from friends and family to build the structure, pay for a skilled mason and a small group of apprentices, train the cooperative in grain bank management, organic fertilizer cultivation and application, and to purchase sacks of grain to match the donations from the women themselves (around one sack of corn per family).  All of this took about a year to complete, for building the cement structure and purchasing the grain is the easy part.  The hard
part is educating villagers on how to build an organization that has staying power, financial viability, and all the elements of good management, while still being culturally appropriate.  In other words, my role as a Peace Corps volunteer was not to be a development agent; rather, I awoke every day as a cross-cultural bridge builder.

One of the key problems with international development, particularly food aid, today is that few organizations create programs for the long haul.  Sustainable development means
living at the village level during good times and bad, listening more than talking, and embarking on a project only when you can envision its life cycle.  This work is not about building things, nor is it even about teaching.  Success depends upon compassionate listening and slow but steady action towards a goal that surpasses a single lifetime: Stewardship and Balance.

From Psalm 104.14:

You cause the grass to grow for the cattle,

And plants for people to use,

To bring forth food from the earth…

Constructing the Grain Bank in Tonkossare

Posted in Food Security, Stewardship | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Planting seeds to cultivate new thoughts…or bring existing ideas to the front lines

Posted on October 15, 2011 by MikeG

My post last week introduced The Green Bible.  This release of a green text version brought some controversy, but through discussion, it also pulled environmentalism and faith into mainstream dialogue.  Carefully crafted media and activism often make stories out of issues that otherwise go under the radar.  For example, Nicholas Kristof’s follow-up on his Occupy Wall Street piece in the New York Times offers a hope and a dream that this community of activists will set the issue of income inequality on the national agenda and build a bridge towards a more compassionate dialogue in the 2012 election.

What do you think?  Does the Green Bible or Occupy Wall Street champion an issue to the attention of a wider audience successfully?  What are some other examples?

Posted in Activism, Stewardship | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The Green Bible: building the bridge between faith, stewardship, and sustainability

Posted on October 9, 2011 by MikeG

Hello readers, for the next nine weeks I will venture into the intersection between faith and sustainability, shedding light on faith-based organizations putting forward a sustainable agenda, and illuminating areas of religion where sustainability advocates have yet to tread deeply.  If nothing else, faith and religion are about fostering a community of compassionate neighbors who understand and gaze in awe on the web of life.  The Green Bible, published in 2008, prints those words from the New Revised Standard Version that evoke a deep care for creation in green ink (rather than the more common red ink used for the words of Jesus Christ).  Perhaps even more evocative than the colored text are the forward and introductory chapters.  The forward, written by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, says the following:

“We’re made to live in a delicate network of interdependence, for we are made for complementarity.  I have gifts that you don’t have.  And you have gifts that I don’t have.  Thus we are made different so that we can know our need for one another.  And this is a fundamental law of our being” (pg. I-13)

As the world grows increasingly smaller through globalization, technology, and geographic and demographic shifts, these guiding principles as to why the Bible and all documents of faith from other religions must become blueprints for a sustainable society ring loudly.  The Green Bible is a bridge from faith passing through individuals and finally to the community  as a treatise on empathy and compassion.  Without compassion for one’s neighbors, without the recognition that misfortune on one of us is misfortune on all of us, without the deep sensation that community is a system of interlocking parts and not a field of silos…without all of these elements, we cannot be good stewards.  Without stewardship, the future is bleak.

Living in Niger for three and a half years as a Peace Corps volunteer, some of my richest conversations revolved around concepts of faith and being in a community with limited resources.  While few people in the village of Tonkossare, my post for the first two years, had many material possessions or even enough food to last a season, if one family faced hardship, others pitched in to support.  Regular community work parties strengthened the notion that, for whatever larger purpose, we are all here together.  Every morning I greeted my villagers with the saying “Mate n’dunya goray.”  How is the sitting of the world?”

“Tali kulu si,” No problem… or perhaps, “Tali bobo si no,” no big problems.

In community, the world sits fine.  In isolation, the world sits on a two-legged, crooked stool.

Posted in Faith, Stewardship | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Welcome to Cultivating Bridges

Posted on October 5, 2011 by MikeG

Hello, this is my BGI “Beat” blog for the Using the Social Web For Social Change class at Bainbridge Graduate Institute.  For this beat, I’m focusing on the intersection of community economic development and religion, as they relate to local food systems, housing, and cooperatives.  Here is my philosophy for creating this space:

I am building bridges to create compassionate, diverse communities. When we resolve conflicts, we strengthen our understanding of best practices toward collective well-being.

More to come…

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 2 Comments