Whichever way you look at them, it is not easy recovering from a disaster. People get affected in different ways – physically, emotionally and financially. At 4:35 last week (September 4) we were woken by the magnitude 7.1 Canterbury earthquake striking around Christchurch the South Island of New Zealand. Luckily, for a range of reasons [...]
I just came across this slide show through a post on the Aid on the edge of chaos blog. Its interesting to see how Sharon Vanderkaay from Farrow Partnership develops the presentation to bring together considerations of complexity and living systems for organizational leaders. View more presentations from Farrow Partnership Architects. The presentation highlights 11 [...]
Asset based community development (ABCD) is an approach to community-based development, based on the principles of appreciating and mobilising individual and community talents, skills and assets – rather than focusing on problems and needs. It emphasises community-driven development rather than development driven by external agencies. The Community Capitals Framework supports asset based development by showing [...]
A few weeks ago Naomi Klein provided us with a very close-up yet systems-like view of looking at this disaster in her Guardian column – Gulf oil spill: A hole in the world. In this article she takes us into local meetings, and looks at wider policy initiatives. As she says, “the most positive possible [...]
Tagged environment, managing change, systems thinkingThis portal site has been updated on an ongoing basis over the past few months. This newsletter provides a brief introduction to new resources that have been added. In the reading section links are provided to three useful literature reviews, covering partnerships, leadership and participation respectively. The Learning for Sustainability site - http://learningforsustainability.net – brings together [...]
Tagged leadership, participation, partnershipsIn recent weeks it seems that attention is being given to the idea that while we have a certain level of understanding of the physical, chemical and biological processes around climate change, in order to change what’s happening, we need to look at the social systems which are contributing. A few days ago Nature’s Climate [...]
Tagged managing change, social scienceThe BBC has recently launched a website – ‘Bloom’ – an interactive site for those who want to tackle climate change but are not sure how to go about it. In addition to providing news and blog commentary, the site handpicks individual actions for the viewer, and allows comparisons between these and other actions by [...]
Tagged climate changeEcoTrust’s web magazine People and Place has an interesting article by Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz in which they propose Six Habits of Highly Resilient Organizations: 1. Resilient organizations actively attend to their environments. 2. Resilient organizations prepare themselves and their employees for disruptions. 3. Resilient organizations build in flexibility. 4. Resilient organizations strengthen and extend [...]
The Learning for Sustainability (LfS) web portal brings together resources that help address the social and capacity building aspects of managing collective interests. The site highlights the wide range of social skills and processes that are needed to support constructive collaboration, and indicates how these skills and processes can be interwoven to achieve more integrated and effective [...]
The UN University (UNU) “World 2.0” blog has been awarded the prize for the best designed site by the world’s largest Internet blog competition. The website was launched in July 2008, and features articles written by the UNU academic faculty, as well as other contributors, and brief video stories from around the world, exploring the [...]