systems change
Communications & Systems Change
This piece was originally published at The Outside in May 2019. After working with Tuesday Ryan-Hart and Tim Merry and the team at The Outside on a few change projects this year, I joined Tuesday and Tim to co-write this piece on why a systems change approach to communications matters. Communications work is a vital piece of […]
Lessons from Alison Hawthorne Deming and Sarah Schulman on hope and organizing during a “disturbance regime”
These are just two threads of learning that I took away from Social Justice Week at Fine Arts Work Center in July 2018 among many, many, many. If you were there as well and have reflections, please add your learning and thoughts in the comments. During Social Justice Week at Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts […]
Three Ideas to Help us Build the Feminist Businesses of the Future
On April 28th, CV and I were delighted to partner with Petra Kassun-Mutch, creator of Liisbeth, a consistently excellent magazine for feminists in business, and Dr. Barbara Orser, Professor of Management in the Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa and co-author of Feminine Capital, on a workshop dedicated to feminist business practice at the Centre for Social Innovation in downtown Toronto. View photos from the event here.
Petra gathered all of us together, welcoming entrepreneurs, academics, and other changemakers to CSI for a day of learning. Barbara opened the day with a keynote looking at the hard truth about the state of women’s entrepreneurship (and funding/capital) in Canada, summarizing key findings from her book, and making a case for “entrepreneurial feminism”. And then CV debuted her Feminist Business Model Canvas (FBMC), a Feminists at Work tool, which among other things, helps entrepreneurs build the businesses of the future by working with feminist values and generative design principles.
There’s a Conversation Brewing About Power that Needs #MoreVoices
How do we practice new power behaviors at work (in our for-profit and nonprofit organizations and in the way we interact with each other)? What can women and other marginalized groups bring to this conversation that help move this conversation along so it has its greatest impact? How do we make visible work that historically has been made invisible or devalued?
Lean Startup Conference Organizers Solve Gender Balance Problem
While so many organizations and business conferences struggle to achieve or are unwilling to look at gender balance and/or racial diversity, some folks are keeping it simple and getting it right. In San Francisco today, hundreds of folks will gather for day 2 of the wildly popular Lean Startup conference, based on the 2011 book by the same […]
The New Women’s Movement is Going to Take All of Us
I want to see a women’s leadership panel that includes both Sheryl Sandberg and bell hooks, working and thinking together because I know they each hold a piece of the puzzle when it comes to taking our collective work to the next level.
Women’s Leadership: Moral Obligation or Good Business Decision?
Marino cited a Japanese business principle “kaizen”—which directly translates as “improvement,”—saying that kaizen is actually quite a bit more than just improving a work process. It also means agitating one’s company in ways that it needs to be agitated. This includes agitating the organization around issues of gender bias. What kaizen is really about, he says, is “waking up every day trying to make things better.”
Dreaming 5 Ways the World Could Change for Women…
Sometimes this question of when the world going to change for women feels so complex and daunting, all I have energy left to do is dream! And it’s a bit of a paradox because dreaming ultimately is what gives me energy to get back to activism. So here are a few ways I dream the world could, just might, if we can help it, change for women.
What Makes a Movement?
Movements don’t happen as a result of one individual or organization, but rather from the cumulative, coordinated, and uncoordinated efforts of many individuals and groups. If movement building feels chaotic, that’s because it is. And, as a mentor of mine reminded me recently, in other ways movements are very much controlled and rightly so.
Authentic Leadership, Yes, But for What Purpose?
What does it mean to be real with ourselves and others in our everyday lives and at work? What does it mean to lead from an authentic place and why is even important?
