Last night, ten faces peered back at me from the glow of my computer screen—including my own. This was my first Google+ Hangout experience, and now nine strangers were gazing into my living room (and I into theirs) as we began a dialogue about educators experimenting with walking out and walking on. And who knows […]
Just after midnight last night, I found myself in Boston’s financial district, following in the footsteps of a New Orleans-style brass band that marched along Atlantic Avenue. More than a thousand Occupiers and supporters were dancing in the streets as the city prepared to evict the Dewey Square encampment. The Mayor’s midnight deadline had passed, […]
Last night, I attended a forum at MIT to reflect on the significance of the Occupy movement. Pete, one of the Boston Occupiers who coordinates the medical team, was sharing stories about the challenges of daily life in Dewey Square, which alongside activists and protesters, has attracted drug dealers, sex workers and the homeless. According […]
Last week, Meg Wheatley and I hosted a conversation in Washington, DC, about the relationship between Walk Out Walk On and the Occupy movement. The event took place at Busboys and Poets, a restaurant, bookstore and community gathering place named for American poet Langston Hughes. It is also a place where activists, artists and dreamers […]
Recently, my friend Manish Jain asked me to write some reflections about the relationship between resilience and jugaad, a Hindi term for ingenuity, an invitation to the imagination to play and invent new solutions using whatever is right in front of you. It brought to mind for me a scene in the movie Apollo 13, […]
This morning I woke up to this email from Sarah Whiteley, one of the stewards of Axladtisa-Avatakia, the learning community in Greece that I wrote about in Walk Out Walk On. You might have heard… but two nights ago, Syntagma Square was stormed by the riot police—and now the tent village is not there. People were […]
“Something is wrong with the global financial system. International financial crises or near-crises have become regular events… The question is not whether there will be another crisis, but where it will be.” —Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz, 2003 It couldn’t be better timing. I’m reading New Money for a New World, a forthcoming book by economist […]
In my May 21st blog, I bemoaned the decision to shut down more than a dozen schools in the Boston public school system—most of which serve low-income neighborhoods. I wondered what “walking out” of this system might look like, and went as far as suggesting “…that might mean pulling our children out of the school […]