The sparksforchange blog has been created as a way to educate myself, and hopefully others, about the many ideas and people out there that are making a positive difference for social change. It aims to be a part of and contribute into the wider on-line community sharing information about things that empower individuals groups and communities to feel better about themselves and make the difference they want. Topics of particular interest to me include different ways that we can seed, grow and support networks, the use of social media, and innovative approaches to support social learning and collective action. More background information can be found in the about the Learning for Sustainability website page, and more about my own background can be found from my home page.
Please let me know if you have any sites you’d like to see added, thoughts you want to share, or stories you think need to be written – you can e-mail me at http://learningforsustainability.net/contact.php. The idea is that the site will be written in an interesting and engaging fashion …. but time will tell.
The sparksforchange blog aims to complement to the main Learning for Sustainability portal – http://learningforsustainability.net – a reference guide for researchers, government and agency staff, NGOs and other change agents working to support social learning and collective action around sustainability issues. A central section of this site links the reader to a range of guides, tools and checklists that can be used to address issues involved in multi-stakeholder participation and engagement. Practice areas covered include networking, dialogue, adaptive management, facilitation, evaluation and knowledge management. Other pages link to areas such as social marketing, narrative, action research, capacity building, integration, empowerment and the growing role of the Internet.
The lessons here come from a range of sectors including the HIV/AIDS sector, public health, environmental management, disaster management and protected natural areas. Collectively, these references highlight the fact that each sector is looking at similar human dimensions practice change lessons, and that the more we can learn across sectors the better.
The Learning for Sustainability site – http://learningforsustainability.net – also manages additional pages on finding volunteering and job opportunities in the sustainability sector. These are directly accessible from the main site indexing system. As with the rest of the site these sections bring links to lot of on-line resources together in one easy to access site, each link is annotated to provide a guide to its contents.