The Color of Love
Street art is evocative, fanciful, full of stories, sometimes angry, often joyful and, as Osterheldt suggests, it holds the color of love. More than the multiple hues painted on its make-do palates, street art is colored by a fierce and expressive honesty. That’s why it’s such an important lens for the work of collective change.
Why I Joined Forces with CCL
I would like to believe that my work has positively impacted the delivery of (some) social service programs, yet throughout these 20+ years I have felt a certain discomfort and disconnection with the work. Professionally, I often question the legitimacy of these improvements and the sustainability of these efforts. Personally, I often said to my husband, “my heart is not in this.”
The Power of Proximity
Proximate leaders should be leading, not following, the field’s cadre of academic, nonprofit, governmental, and business experts in creating solutions to their community’s challenges.
Empathy, Integration, Letting Go & Surprise
To get radically different outcomes, we need to use radically different containers to hold the work. The good news is that we don’t need to invent something new out of whole cloth. We have a number of approaches that have been around for decades, in some cases millennia, that mainstream society is not taking advantage of…
Black Lives Matter
I don’t need to tell this to black folks because they know it. But for us white folks, it’s amazing how so many aspects of our culture – what we often take as “our culture” – came from Black America. There’s a certain lack of consciousness that we white people have about this. More than that, there’s often a lack of understanding about the context and meaning in the cultural symbols Black America has created.
Empathy and Transformation
Supporting a collective set of players in finding empathy for each other even if they don’t all agree with one another is essential work to moving from incremental to transformational outcomes.