A Learning Journey Into Communities
Daring to Live the Future Now
In this era of increasingly complex problems and shrinking resources, can we find meaningful and enduring solutions to the challenges we face today as individuals, communities and nations?
In Walk Out Walk On, authors Meg Wheatley and Deborah Frieze invite you on a learning journey to seven communities around the world to meet people who have walked out of limiting beliefs and assumptions and walked on to create healthy and resilient communities. These Walk Outs who Walk On use their ingenuity and caring to figure out how to work with what they have to create what they need. Are you a walk out?
biommicry
Forging a Post-COVID Economy with Nature as Our Guide – Part I (2020)
As the world considers how to build stronger and more just societies, can our economic model work more like nature, regenerating the systems that power its growth? In this article, Deborah Frieze and Sallie Calhoun extend a conversation they began at The Performance Theatre in 2019 in a panel discussion that also featured HSBC’s António Simões. Read article
TRANSFORMING PHILANTHROPY
Foundations Have the Power to Reshape Philanthropy (2020)
This opinion piece by Deborah Frieze and Tyler Nickerson (Chronicle of Philanthropy – February, 2020) describes how foundations can use their investments as well as their grants to advance their social and environmental missions. (Chronicle of Philanthropy, 2020)
Community
Why I Want Community Organizers to Tell Me Where to Invest
For those of us who wish to transform our economic system from one that extracts values from communities of color to one that operates in solidarity, it’s not good enough to redirect the flow of capital. We also have to redirect the flow of power. (Next City, 2018)
Emergence
Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale
Despite current ads and slogans, the world doesn’t change one person at a time. It changes as networks of relationships form among people who discover they share a common cause and vision of what’s possible. (A Berkana Publication, 2007)
Hero to Host
From Hero to Host: A Story of Citizenship in Columbus, Ohio
Something extraordinary is happening in Columbus, Ohio. Leaders in some of America’s largest institutions are giving up take-charge, heroic leadership and choosing instead to act as “hosts,” calling together people from all parts of the community to solve intractable problems. (A Berkana Publication, 2011)
Scaling
From Scaling Up to Scaling Across
Every entrepreneur wants to know how to turn small changes into large ones—fast. The problem is, scaling up only works in highly controlled environments where people do what they’re told. In today’s unpredictable and interconnected world, large-scale change happens through scaling across, where small local solutions travel and adapt freely through networks of relationships. (Medium, 2016)