The Long View

These truly are perplexing times. Days and nights filled with confusion. When we are able to settle down a bit, there is also a sense of deep possibility. Please explore these powerful insights from our friends at Commonweal....

Community Resilience Planning Guide

The Berry Creek fire in Northern California in September, 2020 was heartbreaking. Not far from the Camp Fire of November 8, 2018 which decimated Paradise, CA, Berry Creek fire was a reminder of devastation and destruction. So what do we ...

Finding Our Next Now

A momentous time in the Divided States of America. How will we find our way forward now? Diversity and difference are critical ingredients for creativity. Rough surfaces – jumbled, scratchy, uneven — give better handholds than smooth. Wh...

Just Before the Dawn

Otto Scharmer offers a thoughtful and comprehensive analysis of where we are and how we might move ahead in this time of turmoil and confusion in the USA and all over the world.  He suggests that we must: Listen with Humility: Let Reali...

Mental Health Issues Facing the Black Community

Our friends at Sunshine Behavioral Health have put together this thoughtful review of both the mental health challenges present in the black community and the sources of those challenges....

NAACP’s In The Eye of The Storm

This 2018 publication from the NAACP describes how environmental justice and climate justice are civil and human rights issues. They started the Environmental and Climate Justice Program in 2009, after decades of civil rights advocacy, ...

Principles of Life Affirming Leadership

In the first decade of this century, NewStories and The Berkana Institute worked close with people and communities throughout the world and primarily in the Global South to discern and articulate core principles for life-affirming leader...

Introducing Nice White Parents

We know American public schools do not guarantee each child an equal education. Two decades of school reform initiatives have not changed that. But when Chana Joffe-Walt, a reporter, looked at inequality in education, she saw that most r...

Cover Your Freakin’ Face

A Randy Rainbow song parody about the necessity of wearing a mask....

STEP UP CONFERENCE: MOVING RACIAL EQUITY FORWARD – FRIDAY JULY 24, 2020

Organized in Snohomish County every year for the last five years, the 2020 Step Up Conference is entirely virtual. It’s inexpensive and can is even available for free, if you ask. They’ve created a pretty remarkable learning event for th...

White people know racism exists. Now it’s time for them to finally do something about it

Bearing witness to Black life only when it ends in a death is a white tradition. It is lynching, but now it is digital. White people, statistically less likely to be in diverse friend groups and more likely to know only other white...

Listen: The Racial Contract, from The Atlantic

When you look at the coronavirus world, it is entirely shaped by the structure of the before world. All of the racial inequities that were in the before world, they are naturally being reproduced in the coronavirus world because the...

21-Day Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge

These recommendations come to us from Dr. Eddie Moore, Jr. For 21 days, do one action to further your understanding of power, privilege, supremacy, oppression, and equity. Here are suggestions for readings, podcasts, videos, observation...

Resources for White Boomers

So you're white. Maybe you were out there on the streets in the 60s and the 70s and helped to start some of the progressive work of the last 50 years. You think of yourself as a progressive and now you are feeling hammered. Perhaps you...

Heather McGhee on Confronting the Denial of Racism

McGhee describes how the election of Barack Obama resulted in both a racial backlash and the illusion that we were suddenly living in a post-racial society. She also shares a hopeful story that demonstrates a pathway towards healing...

Another Important Message: From Nicole Walters

Please listen to this clear, kind, compassionate message and invitation from Nicole Walters she shares with those of us white her everyday, common, non-political experience as Black. And invites us to do better.  Some of what we’ve shar...

Kimberly Jones: How We Can Win

Kimberly Jones, co-author of I’m Not Dying With You Tonight offers powerful commentary in this video. She says there are protestors, rioters, and looters out in the demonstrations of June, 2020 and the tendency is to focus on the what, ...

There There

Tommy Orange’s wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. Among them is Jacquie Red Feather,...

A Quick Read for White People Who Don’t Consider Themselves Racist

An article from Ola Caracola, first published on Medium on June 5, 2020 My newsfeed turned into a sea of black squares over the last couple of days, as I’m sure is the case for many of you, reading this. Initially, this warmed my heart...

My White Friend Asked Me on Facebook to Explain White Privilege. I Decided to Be Honest

I truly thank you for wanting to understand what you are having a hard time understanding. Coincidentally, over the last few days I have been thinking about sharing some of the incidents of prejudice/racism I’ve experienced in my...

Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right

Strangers in Their Own Land in an insightful book by Arlie Russell Hochschild from several years ago gives a glimpse of some of the experiences in our wider culture which sustain racism in the United States. When Donald Trump won the 20...

Racial Justice, A List of Resources for White People Who Are Not on Twitter 24 Hours a Day

From Michelle Weber’s blog Perhaps you have noticed that America is on fire. Perhaps you have noticed that people of color are disproportionately dying of Covid-19. Perhaps you are starting to realize that America has been heaping violen...

The Response podcast: Inequality, structural racism, and the fight for justice after the Grenfell Tower fire

Shareable does incredible work which brings forth stories we must learn from. This Podcast is one of these stories On June 14, 2017, a fire started in a 24-story public housing apartment in West London called Grenfell Tower. The fire rag...

Online Course: Race and Cultural Diversity in American Life and History

Coursera at the University of Illinois has created this 11 hour, do at your own speed online course.  And it is free! Learners will deepen their understanding and appreciation of ways in which race, ethnicity and cultural diversity hav...

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF WHITE SUPREMACY CULTURE

These are some of the characteristics of white supremacy culture which show up in our organizations. Culture is powerful precisely because it is so present and at the same time so very difficult to name or identify. The characteristics...

Standing in Solidarity: The Work That Reconnects

  Frieda Nixdorf and the Weavers and Coordinators of the Work That Reconnects Network stand in solidarity with Black, Brown, and Indigenous Communities in the United States, Canada, and everywhere else in the world as uprisings gain str...

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

This book is just one of the powerful ones written by Ta-Nehishi Coates. It is available on his website as well as on Amazon In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate...

Get Involved: Youth Empowerment Action (YEA) Camp

Before we can share our own big news with you below: Wow. What a time in history this is. Hundreds of thousands of people are courageously rising up in defense of black lives, and police are showing off their brutality in cities all...

A Letter to My White Male Friends of a Certain Age

By Dax-Devlon Ross in the June 5th NonProfit Quarterly On Friday afternoon I got a call with a buddy I hadn’t spoken to in a couple of years. We met when we were 10 years old playing boys club basketball in Washington, D.C. Back then,...

When black people are in pain, white people just join book clubs

From the Washington Post  By Tre Johnson I am 10 and watching my grandfather’s back stiffen and shrink as an officer pulls us over on the way home from the mall. I am 16, facedown on the hood of a cruiser in Ewing, N.J. I am 22 and si...

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism

White Fragility is a vital, necessary and beautiful book, a bracing call to white folk everywhere to see their whiteness for what it is and to seize the opportunity to make things better now. DiAngelo joins the front ranks of white...

Be Heartened By This Amazing Video. Everyday People. We Can Change

RULES FOR PRIVILEGED STRAIGHT WHITE MALES

The social justice issues being addressed in our world at this turbulent time are mammoth, reflecting long-standing structural and systemic racism. Privileged straight white males have been guardians of such systems, purveyors of it,...

My Grandmother’s Hands

My Grandmother's HandsResmaa Menakem points out that one of two things will happen now. Ideally, America will grow up and out of white-body supremacy; Americans will begin healing their long-held trauma around race; and whiteness will...

Why are white people waking up now?

Courtney Martin, in this recent blog gets right to the point. We’re waking up because our attention is finally available, because COVID has taught us about interdependence and because Trump’s blatant immorality and ineptitude has force...

I Don’t Need ‘Love’ Texts From My White Friends

White guilt doesn't change anything. In fact it becomes just another thing for people of color to put up with as white folks work through their stuff. This short story brings that reality home....

Building a Just World and a Just Workplace

Racism and xenophobia are not new. And yet, this time, something feels different. We seem to have crossed a tipping point, one where enough of us, of all colors, nationalities, religions, occupations, and even political parties are...

COVID, Racism Are Dual Crises for Black Americans

Originally from WebMD.  June 10, 2020 African Americans were already disproportionately affected by COVID-19, the disease that has swept across the globe in just months. Then George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis. Even amid ...

Read This Call To Action from Oakland and CONTRIBUTE!

Many of us are working to discover what we can do right now to end systemic racism. One thing is to put our financial resources to use in supporting those, like Lead to Life. Please read this call to action in full. They will be gratefu...

Resources for Unlearning and Transforming Racism from Daily Good

Daily Good offer this compilation of resources as a starting point with the recognition that the work extends far beyond what’s included here and happens over the course of a lifetime. They share these resources as an invitation to...

How To Build an Anti-Racist World

The heartbeat of racism itself has always been denial. The sound of that heartbeat is "I am not racist." There is no such thing as "not racist." We are either racist or anti-racist. In each moment, one or the other. We either support...

How to Fight Racism Through Inner Work

Mindfulness meditation may hold the key to grappling with interpersonal racism, says Rhonda Magee, because it helps people tolerate the discomfort that comes with deeper discussions about race. And it can help cultivate a sense of...

Discovering Peace in Challenging Times and Learning to Meditate

Gil Fronsdal is the founding teacher of the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City California. He has offered a Dharma talk on the topic of how appropriate is it to even consider being peaceful during these times of COVID-19, and how ...

The Coronation – an essay by Charles Eisenstein

Covid-19 is like a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold of normality. To interrupt a habit is to make it visible; it is to turn it from a compulsion to a choice. When the crisis subsides, we might have occasion to ask whether...

Great works of art recreated in toilet paper and other household items (and members)

The Getty Museum issued a challenge on their social media feeds to “recreate a work of art with objects (and people) in your home.” The resulting submissions reveal the ingenuity of art lovers stuck at home. View the Tweet...

Quarantine Relationship Advice

For hundreds of thousands of years, even the most devoted couples have been uttering some version of that basic romantic principle: ‘I married you for better or for worse, but not for lunch.’ This article by John Tierney and Roy F. Baum...

COVID-19 Projections for Hospital Resources by State

Referenced in a White House press briefing as the “Chris Murray Model,” The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) ‘s COVID-19 project demand for hospital services and deaths per day in each state. Check...

Tips for a Virtual Seder

“How is this night different from all other nights? ” This question, that is part of the Passover ritual dinner, will have a very different answer this year given that we are all living in the shadow of a pandemic. Instead of gathering ...

Families First Service Resource Toolkit

The U.S. House of Representatives’ Families First Coronavirus Constituent Service Resource Toolkit  was published to help you understand all the benefits that are available to you and your community through the Federal...

Apple Announces COVID-19 Screening Tool

Today (March 27, 2020) Apple announced had released a new COVID-19 screen tool that it had developed with the White House Coronavirus Task Force , The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and FEMA. The app and website also of...

My Corona by Chris Mann

We hope this video brings some laughter to your day....

Steve Martin offers “Banjo Balm”

Some comforting music for these difficult times…...

Services and Partnerships With NewStories

Like all of us, NewStories is reimagining how to offer our services in these very new times. Our core competencies include: Substantial experience working in post-disaster contexts Knowing how to help communities and organizations develo...

How long COVID-19 remains infectious on various surfaces

A study published on March 17, 2020 in the New England Journal of Medicine reveals how long the virus that causes COVID-19 remains detectable on various surfaces and as an aerosol. Scientists discovered the virus is detectable for : up t...

A Lent for the Record Books

As many of us are in quarantine as a result of illness, exposure, “Shelter in Place” orders, or simply as a means of self protection, few of us actually know the origin of the word. Quarantine “means about 40, in French, and its Latin or...

How to Survive a Plague by Andrew Sullivan

Having been deeply affected by the AIDS epidemic, Andrew Sullivan offers his perspective on how we’ll be changed, individually and collectively, by the Coronavirus Pandemic. Will this pandemic “merely accelerate some of the worst cultura...

Songs of Comfort

Music is something that actually looks into the inside, that that knows no boundaries, and if we can actually express what is in our insides and show that, then this is the beginning of a deeper understanding of one another. … We’re coll...

Genomic epidemiology of novel coronavirus (hCoV-19)

Nextstrain is an open-source project to harness the scientific and public health potential of pathogen genome data. They are incorporating nCoV genomes as soon as they are shared and providing analyses and situation reports. Their...

A Listening Care Package for Uncertain Times

A collection of podcasts and poetry for however you’re processing or experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic....

Home School & Play Resources for Care Givers

Stuck at home with your child and not sure what to do with them? Here is a list of great learn and play resources for different ages. Activities for younger kids #playpandemic resource guide complete with meditations for parents Activiti...

Looking for the latest numbers of confirmed cases of COVID-19?

If you are wondering about the latest numbers, Johns Hopkins University is compiling data from  WHO, CDC, ECDC, NHC and DXY and local media reports to track confirmed Coronavirus cases around the world. Check it out here.  ...

Free Zoom Accounts for Schools

If your school is closed and you’re wondering how to keep kids connected, zoom is now offering free accounts for schools. Teachers could teach in a virtual classroom, and kids without computer or internet can call in from a phone to a lo...

Corona Wiki

A global case tracker index with visualizations https://coronawiki.org/index...

A Collaborative Guide to Covid-19 at Home Care

https://covid-at-home.info/ This guide contains general advice that should be applicable in many places. We may add information that is specific to certain countries or regions, but you should keep your eyes open for more specific...

Illustrated Guide For Families

This is an awesome guide from MANUELA MOLINA – @MINDHEART.KIDS WWW.MINDHEART.CO Checkout this guide and workbook for families. It can help your kids (and you) understand what’s happening! You’ve probably already figured it out: our kids ...

Coronavirus, synchronous failure and the global phase-shift

Across the corners of the internet, you may find speculation about how the coronavirus will lead to an apocalyptic breakdown of civilization. On the opposite end, you will hear assurances that everything’s pretty much going to be fine...

Making Community in New Ways

From the Independent, March 13th, Kate Ng As life in Italy grinds to a halt amid a nationwide lockdown to control the spread of the coronavirus outbreak, one street was filled with song as the community banded their voices together i...

Sabbath

By Lynn Unger What if you thought of itas the Jews consider the Sabbath — the most sacred of times?Cease from travel.Cease from buying and selling.Give up, just for now,on trying to make the worlddifferent than it is.Sing. Pray. Touch o...

An Imagined Letter from Covid-19 to Humans

This is an amazing letter. Kristin Flyntz was posted on Facebook on March 12th. She speaks of the letter as “imagined.” I know it was channeled. How many of us have heard these voices? When we pause and become still, we can listen to the...

Tips for Hosting Online Conversation

Looking for an alternative to face-to-face events in the time of Coronavirus? People have been experimenting with synchronous online convening for years and the tools continue to improve. Here are some suggestions from Peggy Holman...

You Can Hear the Birds Again

Brother Richard is a priest-friar of the Irish branch of the Capuchin Franciscan Order. For over twenty years he has worked to bring the insights of the Christian contemplative tradition to greater public awareness, particularly with ref...

Honest Government Ad | Coronavirus: Flatten The Curve

The Juice Media has created this very amusing video that contains both laughs and real information …...

McKinsey March 16th Report on COVID-19

Check out this informative report from McKinsey. It is written from a business perspective and does an excellent job of laying out one set of scenarios for the coming days, weeks and months. Makes transparent part of the bigger picture...

Collapse and Regeneration

Walking the Line Between Denial and Despair A couple of months ago, I received an email from Jenn Meilleur, our soon to be new Executive Director at NewStories. She was curious about an article she had received on Deep Adaptation or “A...

One Story: A Report of The First Peoples’ Convening on Climate-Forced Displacement

One Story That was what we heard and saw as each of 28 different communities, spread from the Alaska to the South Pacific, from Bangladesh to Louisiana and around to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington share their story of the immediacy ...

Pedagogy of Bioregional Regeneration

This remarkable conceptual framework comes to us from Joe Brewer. Much of our work at NewStories is around how to step beyond the extraordinary pressure after major disasters to get back to the old normal as quickly as possible.  We bel...

Sociological vs Psychological Storytelling

This Scientific American article by Zeynep Tufekci is more than an essay about one TV show with dragons. He uses fan reactions to the final season of Game of Thrones, to explore the difference between sociological and psychological story...

Project30

When disaster strikes, communities come together. Government, businesses, nonprofits, community groups and citizens set aside suspicions and grievances and just do what needs to be done. The overwhelming purpose of saving lives, caring f...

Borrow The Sugar

What does it take to come back into relationship with each other and our beautiful planet?  Why is it important? What shifts when we do? Daniel Aldrich in Building Resilience: Social Capital in Post-Disaster Recovery suggests that it is...

Nature, Culture, and the Sacred: A Woman Listens For Leadership

Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons offers inspiration for anyone who aspires to grow into their own unique form of leadership with resilience and joy. Informed by her extensive experience with multicultural women’s leadership development,...

Preparing for the Possible PDF

In the past many of us thought of community building — creating the lives and communities we know are possible — was different that work for disaster preparedness and recovery.  It’s time to step beyond that distinction.  When we...

Deep Adaptation

Can we look our current situation squarely in the eye? How do we live with the possibility that collapse is imminent, catastrophe likely and extinction possible? How do we find a way forward, accompanied by these hard truths?...

Sustaining Change in a Market Economy

Hanimin Liu offers the inescapable conclusion is that change is gradual and generation and requires persistence in patience. How do we take this truth on in our impatient world?...

Developmental Evaluation Primer

Developmental Evaluation is the one of the most developed "complexity-aware" evaluation approaches. This PDF, developed by Canada's McConnell Foundation provides an excellent overview....

The NewStories Regenerating Communities Spiral

NewStories Introduces a framework -- the Spiral of Co-Creating -- as a new way to look at how we can create collective impact....

Cynefin Framework from AfterNow

This chapter excerpt from AfterNow: When We Cannot See the Future, Where Do We Begin? gives a solid and colorful introduction to how we must work differently in situations that are obvious, complicated, complex and chaotic. Download PDF...

Methods for Dialogue and Conversation

How do we design and host conversations that matter?  This PDF shares the approaches Bob Stilger used in Japan for five years after the the Triple Disasters of March 11, 2011.  ...

FutureSessions

At NewStories we have decades of experience in helping communities and organizations and businesses have conversations that matter -- conversations which explore possibilities, strategize new action, deepen learning and ......

Aquaponics in Cherokee Nation

Vian, OK – It all started with an innate passion for helping others, and Oklahoma resident Richard Tyler has it.  Tyler’s passion and hard work has led to a 10,000sf aquaponic facility he constructed in 2015 to address the need for...

Play At The Core

Play At The Core is a Youth Development Consulting Group that serves children facing adversity and their communities by supporting program quality improvement in organizations that directly engage youth. PATC uses a play-based, experient...

AfterNow: Introduction

In the summer of 2017 NewStories will publish Bob Stilger's Book AfterNow: When We Cannot See the Future, Where Do We Begin. The book is his story of how he entered in to the intense field of collapse. It is the stories of how...

Communities Report on Culture of Health

What does it take to create a Culture of Health in the United States? In 2016 NewStories embarked on a Listening Tour in West Virginia, Cherokee Nation, New Mexico and Northern California to find new questions and new insights....

Thomas Berry: The New Story

This powerful essay from 1978 by Thomas Berry was part of the inspiration for founding NewStories in 2000.  It begins with these words: It’s all a question of story.  We are in trouble now because we do not have a good story.  We ar...

TEDxTokyo, 2010 Bob and Annie

Bob Stilger and his daughter Annie Stilger Virnig were asked to do the first ever father-daughter presentation at the second TEDxTokyo in 2010.  They talked about what they each had learned through their work with communities in the glo...

Limits to Complexity: Are Bureaucrasies Becoming Unmanageable?

This lovely analysis was made by Duane Elgin and Robert Bushnell almost 40 years ago and points with stunning accuracy to our world today. Limits to Large Complex Systems...

Disaster as A Springboard

  Bob Stilger describes his learning and experience from the first three years of work after the triple disasters in Japan on March 11, 2011.  Beyond the tragedy of disaster, there is a huge opening in which the new can be given...

Learning Resilience

Bob Stilger had a chance to talk about learning resilience at the 2014 TEDxTokyo Teachers event.  It was a delightful evening when he had a chance to practice some of what he described!...

Revolutionary Change Theories: Punctuated Equilibrium Paradigm

How do individuals. groups, organizations and industries evolve over time? How do they adapt or fail to adapt to changing environments?  How can change be planned and managed?...

TRANSIT: Transformative Social Innovation Theory

How does social innovation interact with other forms of (transformative) change, and how are actors (dis)empowered therein? TRANSIT (TRANsformative Social Innovation Theory) is an ambitious research project that will develop a theory of ...

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn’t change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can’t ge...

未来が見えなくなったとき、僕たちは何を語ればいいのだろう

Bob Stilger spent four years working in Japan's triple disaster area and shares stories, insights and questions about how we create a future when the world we know falls apart....

Cynefin Framework

The ways in which we effectively find our way forward, responding to a particular problem or opportunity, need to be situational. Our work is in one of four domains: simple, complicated, complex, chaos or disorder...

What would Homo Systemicus do?

This is one key chapter of a longer manuscript by Barry Oshry which examines the critical nature of power and love in the organic systems in which we humans live, but which we frequently are unable to see....

While Waiting For Homo Systemicus

Many of the problems we human beings encounter might be remedied if we overcame our blindness to the systems in which we live and developed what Barry Oshry calls systems sight. This thoughtful manuscript points towards a different...

Power and Love

Barry Oshry has spent decades analyzing the ways in which power works (and doesn't work). This remarkable essay follows on a conversation Barry had with Adam Kahane before Adam wrote his book Power and Love. The essay offers critical...

The Soul of Place

Michael is an extraordinary artist with deep sensitivity to nature, leadership and community. This book is a wonderful exploration of the powers of place and how they can inform our lives....

Living Universe or Dead Universe

What does it mean to be part of a living universe? How is it different from a universe that is dead?...

Lush Cosmetics Presents: The Oasis Game

What happens when volunteers from Lush Cosmetics meet a community group to play the Oasis Game?...

Warriors Without Weapons 2011

GSA is a 32-day immersion, which is based on the daily life of 60 young people from all over the world, who learn and apply different social technologies together in order to realize collective dreams of 3 different communities....

Oasis Holland

Oasis Game Amsterdam...

A World of Solutions

A sequel to the film "What's Possible" for the United Nations Climate Summit....

Combining Competencies

The Story Of Turtle And Rabbit (The New Version)...

Weaving the Community Resilience and New Economy Movement Report

A portrait of a rich and vibrant movement, full of promise and hope for a better future....

Vikalp Sangam

This website hopes to feature alternatives in the full range of human endeavour as they take place in India, and through this to help build bridges amongst them, learn from each other, and together present a challenge to the mainstream...

Tao Te Ching – Chapter 15

Are you patient enough to let your mud settle, waiting until the water is clear?...

The Healing Century

Despite the widespread frustrations of our time, I believe we must live with hope. We are capable of making a profound positive shift in our thinking. The heart of this shift would be for us to conceptualize the 21st century as the...

エンスピリテッド・リーダーシップ：不確かな時代の道しるべ

世界のあちこちで、人々は新しい形でリーダーシップを取ろうとし始めている。その人たちは多くの場合、組織や地域社会で権力をもつ立場にいるわけではない。ただ、なされるべきことが見え、進んで声を上げ、そして実際に行動する人々なのだ。しばしば、前に進み始める時には心臓が恐ろしさでどきどきしているのだが、今こそ未来への新しい可能性をもたらすべき時だと彼らは信じているのだ。...

Beautiful Solutions

Resistance is essential, but it’s not enough. As we fight the injustice around us, we also have to imagine — and create — the world we want....

Disaster as a Springboard for Thriving Resilient Communities

This article chronicles the initial response to Japan's triple disasters of March 11, 2011. It looks at how people begin to create the new after everything falls apart....

The Six or Seven Axioms of Social Change

Explore Margaret Mead’s axiom: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”...

Journeying to a New World

Margaret Wheatley says she’s “still trying to come to terms with the experience of seeing, feeling, tasting and working earnestly from a new paradigm while living in the old one.”...

Spiritual Activism and Liberation Spirituality

Activists are being asked to examine our current historical moment with real intimacy, with fresh eyes, fire, and compassion....

The Great Turning

By what name will future generations know our time? Will they speak in anger and frustration of the time of the Great Unraveling,...

Emergence and Systems of Influence (Spanish)

Spanish version of article is written by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze about working with emergence. ...

Reflections on Now Activism

An introduction to a booklet produced by Shikshantar: The People’s Institute for Rethinking Education and Development on the theme of the Now Activism....

Slouching Towards Flatland

n 2000, the United Nations articulated eight development goals that all member countries agreed to try to meet by 2015, known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)....

The Roots of Aliveness

It has often been said that our span of awareness is a mile wide and an inch deep. The quality of our inner life is frequently overlooked in our efforts to cope with the daily demands and expectations of our outer life....

Enspirited Leadership In Japan

This chapter from Leading with Spirit, Presence and Authenticity describes leadership emerging at the community level in Japan as people work together to create a new future after the triple disasters of 2011...

PLANETARY

PLANETARY is a feature length documentary that expands on the mind-blowing perspective shared by astronauts and indigenous elders alike...

The Place Beyond Hope and Fear

In difficult times it takes effort to stay grounded in the present, but it is only there, says Margaret Wheatley, that we will find a place unclouded by hope and fear....

Collaboration

The Courage to Step into a Meaningful Mess
We have all experienced the messiness of collaboration. What makes collaboration worth it?

The Leaders We Need Are Already Here

This beautiful booklet tells the story of the Berkana Fellows program in India - young men and women learned to step forward....

Emergence and Systems of Influence

Despite current ads and slogans, the world doesn’t change one person at a time....

Enspirited Leadership

This article from the Berkana Institute summarizes Bob Stilger's findings about Landmarks for Leaders and Enspirited Leadership....

The Economics of Happiness

The Economics of Happiness is a project by The International Society for Ecology and Culture (ISEC)...

Channeling Change

Making Collective Impact Work...

Collective 
Impact

Large-scale social change requires broad cross-sector coordination,...

Organizations as living systems

Phil Cass talking through his perspective on organizations as living systems...

The Institute for Strategic Clarity

non-profit research and education organization, encourages and supports research into the emerging field of Ecosynomics and ... abundance-based agreements....

The Networking of Knowledge and Storytelling

“Western culture’s traditional system of knowledge is a stunning achievement,” says author and Harvard Internet scholar David Weinberger at the outset of this thought-provoking video. “It made us the dominant species on the planet.”...

Supporting Pioneering Leaders as Communities of Practice

If we stepped away from our assumptions of what a talented leader looks like, what would we see?...

hear & now

Bob Stilger wrote this article for Ascent Magazine about how we need to cultivate a better listening…...

Empathy, Neurochemistry, and the Dramatic Arc

The emotionally charged story recounted at the beginning Dr. Paul Zak’s film—of a terminally ill two-year-old named Ben and his father—offers a simple yet remarkable case study in how the human brain responds to effective storytell...

Warriors Without Weapons: How Learning Moves Trans-locally

Sixty youth from sixteen countries stand in a river in Southeast Brazil slapping their hands on the water, chanting, “HE-áh-na-na-na, HEáh-na-na-na, HE-áh-nah-nah- HE!”...

IF TOMORROW STARTS WITHOUT ME…

A narrative poem weaves through the stunning background to create a piece of art....

From Hero to Host

This is a story of how small, local efforts move laterally through a network of relationships to emerge as large-scale change....

What is Our Role in Creating Change?

Margaret Wheatley discusses how the world changes and why we need to step forward for what we care about....

Perseverance: Lost in the Gulf of Mexico

Written in the middle of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, this piece invites us to think about what these kinds of disasters mean for us as human beings in these times....

Leadership in the Age of Complexity

For too long, too many of us have been entranced by heroes. Perhaps it’s our desire to be saved, to not have to do the hard work, to rely on someone else to figure things out....

Discovering New Stories

This is a downloadable version of Bob Stilger's doctoral dissertation on Enspirited Leadership....

Alive In Community

This article, co-authored with Aerin Dunford, describes how Berkana has designed and hosted large, multicultural gatherings in different parts of the world for people who are building healthy and resilient communities....

Can I Be Fearless?

Margaret Wheatley asks a difficult question of us in this energizing article. She takes her readers along a path lined with different answers and solutions to dealing with our fears....