Act: Inspiration

An Instruction Manual for Fixing the Food System

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For years people and organizations from Frances Moore Lappé to Slow Food have sought to repair and restore our broken food system, making noticeable but still negligible progress. Surely more people today are aware that there’s a problem, and admitting that is the first step, as they say.

Taking Practical Action Toward Resilience

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Dreaming, organizing, and awareness raising are all important parts of the work we do, but there is something to be said for bringing people together, getting your hands dirty, and creating something beautiful. As we heard in last month’s teleseminar with Rob Hopkins, practical projects are one of the most fun and effective ways to energize and strengthen your existing Transition groups and reach out to inspire and engage your community.

A Visit with the Bitcoin Foundation’s Top Scientist

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Gavin Andresen, the lead scientist for the Bitcoin Foundation (and one of its only two staff members) sat down with a few of us at the UMass Amherst Knowledge Commons meeting on Wednesday.  Having read so much hype and misinformation about Bitcoin over the past few months, I was excited to have a chance to talk to someone directly connected with this brilliant experiment in algorithmic institution-building.  Bitcoin is, of course, the digital currency that has been in the news a lot recently because of its surging value among traders – and its dramatic crash.

Learning to Look at the Sky Again

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“Because you gave names to everything you found, and came up with logos for bad ideas, and woke up early for conference calls, and changed your car every two years, and it was no progress at all/just a shadow festival/because of that you will have to learn to look at the sky again, you will have to learn to eat food that grows where you live again, you will have to learn to touch what you make.”

Six resilience “aha!” moments

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Usually when I go to events I tend to be the ‘resilience guy’, or one of a handful of people who work with and think about resilience who tend to gather at the back of other events and bemoan the fact that no-one has talked about resilience yet. So I was fascinated when I saw that the British Red Cross was hosting a one-day conference on resilience, the first that I’ve been aware of.

Learning From Knight’s Soul of the Community, Leaning Toward the Future of Placemaking

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The Knight Soul of the Community study investigated community attachment—a multidimensional construct that went beyond measuring just satisfaction to also look at community pride, community optimism, and other emotional feelings about place. Attachment is not the traditional idea of engagement that is usually studied in places, but a separate construct. Understanding residents’ emotional bonds to place represented by attachment took our examination beyond the outward behaviors of traditional engagement and gave new insights into the dynamics of how place affects people. That, alone, was a significant contribution to understanding place success that had basically gone unmeasured.