Tag Archives: Philanthropy

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Final Evaluations

In what ways have nutritional

and health

and financial

and well-being values increased

over time’s past,

whether a quarter,

or a year,

or a decade,

or a lifetime,

or a millennium,

and in what ways have toxic dissonant disvalues

and decaying trends ebbed and flowed?

Where exactly?

For whom and for not whom?

 

How, when, and where have we reduced and increased

both short-term and long-term economic

ecological risk?

Why do you think so,

or not?

Do you use as evidence your own lungs

and heart,

eyes and ears and feelings?

And perhaps those of your family and friends,

your local community?

How about your country of origin?

What about as a humane race

to rejoin Earth’s Climax Global Tribe?

 

How is the larger DNA-regenerative fueled

branch of Earth’s Tree of Life coming along

right now as compared to

when trees were the most intelligent life-formed

diametric hierarchy?

 

And then there is the trunk and root system

of our entire polycultured and permaculturing

RNA-regenesis clan,

fractalling and crystalling and octaving,

folding and unfolding functions,

radically revolving and stealthily evolving.

 

Who is vulnerable enough right now

to truthfully teach us what they need,

who they need us to be for them?

Who is brave enough to listen?

 

How are we doing with our shared translation project,

syncing Eastern economies of karmic gratitude,

coincidental transactions of mutually bowing equivalence,

with Western stumbling incarnation

of more actively graceful ecologic?

Some might even say…athletic

Herculean powerful birthing pains,

inviting yin’s silent synergetic wisdom

to complement our yangish

left-brained deductive

languaged

metric

rhythmed

heart-beat

blood-flow ways

of reaching right’s proportionally loving order;

intuited

decoding and recoding DNA/RNA

functions and binomial frequencies of octave-tiered

information systems.

 

How is our New Millennium mission

to love all others

all species,

all space and time incarnations

and coincidental potentialities

as interdependent with ourselves,

to bring synergetic revolutions to this

nagging competition between

economic transactions and

permacultural relationships for growing eco-logical values?

 

Have we developed our prototype

for incubating cooperative deep and wide ecological proposals,

binomially designed to coincidently sync

with global information networks,

evolving cordless stringed formation,

we are what we absorb,

we are not what we dissonate?

 

How are we doing with combining our nutrient-value starved voices,

with chronically cash-starved voices,

performing our permaculture opera

for philanthropists and investors and policy makers,

butchers and weapons bakers and candlestick shakers,

kings and queens and fools,

knights and damsels distressed about each other,

each inviting mentors,

while shunning alien teachers,

optimizing ecological balance

by minimizing long-term life-investment risk?

 

Invest cooperatively in eco-confluent coincidence,

to divest of competitive ego-cognitive dissonance.

 

Open system radiant energy confidently absorbs

what gravity decomposes,

waiting for diastatic light regeneration.

Deduce from past natural systemic orthopraxis

what we induct from future’s optimizing intent.

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Cooperative Philanthropy

The day our United Way

slurps some Reality Stew

we will change this name

to The Competition Way;

competing for community support with the same constituency

we are teaching to compete with each other

for both community support and service.

Our United Way systemically grows

a Divided Fail.

 

The day our Philanthropic Foundation

absorbs some permaculturing compost,

we will learn to ask whose foundation is this really?

Are we a Foundation of inclusive cooperation?

A Foundation with Golden Rule

applied to all species living now

and in our global future,

incarnated by our Elder species

for this regenerative purpose?

 

Are we a Philanthropic Foundation

created by people

who deeply cared about sustaining life’s integrity

for seven generations?

Are we more a Foundation of confusing competition

for scarce resources,

or a Foundation for regenerating abundant contentment,

goodness,

beauty,

wisdom,

optimized economic policies for cooperative

ecological systems of health and well-being;

for minimizing suffering and exploitive competition,

economic commodification of Earth’s natural elements and systems,

a Commons that includes the lives of human

racing to win before losing our dreams

of teleological faith?

 

Could we become a Foundation for optimizing public policies

for mutually cooperative mentoring

of vocational choice,

of permaculturally,

organically,

integrally,

multisystemically functional, maybe even deeply creative, families

and thereby communities?

 

We stand within this permacultural Foundation

for cooperative mutual-investment guilds,

and networks,

and Climax Communities

for growing global consciousness of eco-identity,

Earth Care as Self and Other Care,

designing our ReGenesis Foundation,

with both interior and exterior landscape applications,

both YinTime and YangSpace information eco-metrics,

mutually mentoring Earth’s polyculturally cooperative eco-logic.

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CT-ReGenesis Network: Reconnecting People, Place, and Planet

TO:

  • Habitat for Humanity Bridgeport, Cromwell, Danbury, Hartford, New Haven, New London, Salisbury, Waterbury, Willimantic (HfH)
  • Connecticut Council for Interreligious Understanding (CCIU)
  • Connecticut Food System Alliance (CFSA)
  • Melville Charitable Trust (MCT)

 

FROM: CT-ReGenesis Cooperative Network Developers

 

6/25/2014

 

At the deepest level, there is no giver, no gift, and no recipient…only the universe rearranging itself.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

 

CT-ReGenesis Project’s proposed mission is to rearrange our State more nutritiously and equitably; one home, one neighborhood, one cooperative moment in time.

 

We believe Habitat for Humanity, the Food Alliance, Council for Interreligious Understanding, and the Melville Charitable Trust already participate in this mission, as do we all. Some more intentionally; some less so.

 

This communication will introduce each of us to the others, within a proposal to design a cooperative network together. This cooperative project might have the potential to significantly expand how we define optimally supportive housing and homes, nutrition, and healthy well-being.

 

A summary outline of our initial infrastructure might be pictured as a tree with two balancing main branches, each reseeding the soil of future generations:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Habitat-9 CT Chapters/6 ReStores                         Council for Interreligious Understanding

Restoring materials, homes, neighborhoods               Restoring people and communities

Formation of renewed places: hope                            Formation of young people: faith

 

 

 

Food System Alliance

Restoring well-being, nutrition, health

Formation of healthy CQI[1] systems, individual and corporate

Melville Charitable Trust

Restoring supportive homes/environments

CQI supportive habitat development for optimal sustainability of at-risk people

Root system leading to a support network of CT social investors/philanthropists/public-sector investments

 

 

Who is in this CT-ReGenesis Network?

 

We are an informal cluster of individuals, three of whom are currently working part-time to propose that the four organizations (counting HfH chapters as representative of one international organization) could form a Core Network Team:

 

Mary Millican is a parent, former special needs school administrator, former owner of vintage retail enterprises, estate staging and closure experienced, master gardener, avid recycler. She wants to help Habitat ReStores, and other non-profit materials recyclers discuss how they might optimize their individual effectiveness for clients while minimizing transportation and acquisition expenses through cooperative networking and resource sharing.

 

Janet Tanner is a real estate agent with ReMax, an international brokerage firm. Her eco-justice and social justice experience includes advocacy for affordable housing, Habitat volunteer, horrible gardener and cook, shops at thrift stores because it is the logical thing to do, parent of a fully employed ADHD young adult. She wants to help people who are selling their houses get rid of their unwanted resources as generously, efficiently, and cost-effectively as possible, recycling goods into a cooperative distribution network where each item will return highest and best use where it is most needed in the local community. Habitat ReStores would be ideal organizing anchors for local gathering and distribution networks.

 

Gerald Dillenbeck, M. Div., MPA in Community Development, Permaculture Designer with special interest in the economics of ecological and nutritional development for at-risk populations. Interreligious EcoMinistry Chaplain at the Sustainable Farm School. He is a Taoist Christian, more or less; Ph.D. candidate in Holistic Teleology, occasionally; dissertation research is relevant to the mission of the proposed CT-Restore Cooperative Network. He is a former Habitat Board member (New Haven, in the 90s), sometimes a not-so-great community gardener, and vegetarian cook, member of the Order of Universal Interfaith, former President of the CT Housing Coalition, former grants administrator for Covenant to Care for Children, which, among other things, distributes clothes, and sometimes nutrients, through a network of faith communities, to at-risk kids throughout Connecticut.

 

Jerry (seldom “Gerald”) would like to help form religious and secular youth leadership teams to discuss and grow toward CQI standards for optimal nutrition, home environments, and sustainable vocations in a globally “rearranging” self-awareness. This requires formational environments mindful of the diverse and mutual well-being of all individuals, and all species. His favorite story is Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who, “A person’s a person. No matter how small.”

 

 

Readers are encouraged to first look at the section pertaining to your own organization. If that makes sense, then reading the other sections should begin to articulate how the Core-4 could fuse high CQI eco-equity and nutritional outcomes throughout Connecticut.

 

 

CT-ReGenesis Network’s potential value for HfH and ReStores: Two Scenarios

 

First Scenario

 

Each Habitat ReStore is loaded with great resources including many that have filtered through various Youth Transition Teams, sometimes as community improvement volunteer projects that have led to establishing entrepreneurial cooperative enterprises, vocations, and guild associations. The Americorps/VISTA programmatic platform has been tailored to support challenged young adults move into sustainable Transition Team vocations.

  • Full kitchen sets
  • Bath fixtures
  • Good reconditioned appliances [entrepreneurial venture of a Youth Transition Team]
  • Furnishings, including refinished/painted by a Transition Team(s)
  • Interior décor
  • Window treatments
  • Organic compost [entrepreneurial Transition Team]
  • Mulch [Transition Team entrepreneurial opportunity]
  • Gardening equipment
  • Seeds and plants, seasonal [Transition Team organized and produced]
  • Fencing
  • Bicycles [Transition Team refurbished], urban cargo-bikes

 

Most of the more established real estate agents in Connecticut are supporting the ReStore Cooperative Network’s expenses to pick up their property sellers’ unwanted items prior to closing, then distribute those goods where they will return the highest value. This follows the CQI value template for greatest effectiveness in response to trauma, potential pathology, lack of well-being, with least overall resource loss. Resource investments include living-wage time invested by cooperative worker-owners, and energy/nutrient depletion.

 

Also available at the ReStores, or other neighborhood/community center space, are Restoration Incubators for homeschool education, training, recreation, and vocational development space. These Centers are home to the HfH, Food, and Housing AmeriCorps/Vista youth leadership and internship programs, and may provide after-school Deep Learning activities available from the Sustainable Farm School, Gaia University, etc. AmeriCorps stipends are initially paid through a Melville Foundation grant, and eventually through ReStore sales and cooperative exchanges within the Network.

 

Additional classes, cooperative employment, activities that might emerge from these Incubators, depending on local interest and needs:

  • staging services for real estate sales,
  • solar and wind energy production,
  • Community Farm Association transactions, food banks,
  • designing organic, edible landscapes and gardens, and installation support services,
  • mural design teams,
  • cooperative stores and exchange centers for clothing, toys, books, tools, seeds, organic fertilizers, mulch,
  • child and elder care,
  • tax assistance,
  • classes in nonviolent communication, writing, entrepreneurial development, natural construction and crafts, permaculture design, interfaith dialogue, cooking, preserving, yoga, Tai Chi, meditation,
  • support for the formation of residential cooperatives, partnering indigenous tenants in multis with property owners looking for a buyer.

 

Second Scenario

 

Each Habitat homeowner receives a broader scope of services, as needed and welcomed.

  • Recycled, natural and low carbon-footprint building materials and  systems design;
  • Optimized functional, aesthetic, and ecological site planning and landscape design;
  • Access to cooperative-subsidized alternative energy [a potential Transition Team enterprise];
  • Green/natural/recycled/refinished/repurposed furnishings and interior design, new homes fully staged in consultation with homeowners [Transition Team enterprise];
  • Edible landscape design, including organic gardening, on site, or within a nearby community garden setting [Transition Team enterprise];
  • Full garden-to-table-to-compost nutritional loop support system—implementation and/or maintenance, as needed and wanted [Transition Team service];
  • Functional bicycles/tricycles, cargo pedal systems, possibly battery-fueled vehicles eventually [Transition Team services and/or entrepreneurial enterprise];
  • Access to organic CFA cooperative;
  • Access to treadmills, exercise bikes, aerobic equipment connected to electric meters [Transition Team enterprise];
  • Solar panels, wind/water turbine energy production system on site as feasible [Transition Team enterprise].

 

In addition to these two scenarios, HfH relationships with constituent faith communities may be enriched with enhanced youth ministry connectivity and a broader band of useful volunteer skill sets, more inclusive of all ages and genders.

 

 

CT-ReGenesis  significant values for the CT Council for Interreligious Understanding (CCIU)

 

This opportunity framework is somewhat the mutually symbiotic reverse of the Habitat possible futures scenarios.

 

Adolescence through young adulthood is the stage we are increasingly losing kids from intentional faith communities, and other formational systems, such as schools. Perhaps even more true in a globally interfacing culture, young adults are discovering their life journeys informed by the “Religious Commons,” what is held as sacred by all faith traditions, including those that have become secularized, like science, the arts, humanities.

 

Resilient, “deep learning” development systems help us understand ourselves and mature most effectively in an intentionally diverse environment, with others we may primordially see as not like me. Deviant frames of reference, appreciatively facilitated, become richly valued diversity for better understanding the range of assets, resources, and nutrients in Universe. Cultural strengths and challenges inform each other through the individual’s original lens of meaning and value. This seems to be true in all regenerative economies, whether they are pedagogical, spiritual, financial, communication, ecological, or possibly even genetic information systems.

 

CT-ReGenesis is informed by a combined economic, ecological, and social justice agenda long familiar to the religious sector. Faith community participation in this cooperative network may increase interreligious opportunities for dialogue, understanding, and cooperative neighborhood improvement projects. Those with skills and interests in alternative energy, new economics, eco-justice, international justice dialogue and discernment, gardening and agriculture, nutrition and food preparation, therapeutic and nutritional education, permaculture design, holistic therapies and medicines, planning and design, nonviolent communication and living, group facilitation, compassionate therapy, are a rich source for mentoring, team leaders, and skill-shares.

 

Faith community members may want to consider stronger nutritional and environmental standards for their own properties. For example, more edible plants and less grass, buying into an alternative energy cooperative, harvesting solar and/or wind power on-site, group purchases of local CFA contracts, investing in local cooperatives, organic farms, and intentional communities, responding to local needs for more affordable and sustainable habitats.

 

Faith communities may come to think of their HfH affiliate as the local religious sector’s incubator for housing, economic and nutritional and vocational development, and neighborhood improvement partnerships. Individuals may discover that their religious tradition is more dynamic and compelling within a more inclusive polyculture. If participation in this cooperative network transforms Habitat’s Restores into incubators, participation by CCIU may transform this platform for mutual understanding into more of a positive teleological laboratory. CT-ReGenesis network developers may want to consider the Interfaith Youth Core (www.ifyc.org) as a rich resource for linking youth ministry to interreligious understanding and housing/human/environmental service projects. There is also a federal initiative for interreligious cooperation and community service that may be useful for drawing higher profile momentum.

 

 

Regenerative Nutrients for the CT Food System Alliance

 

Food systems are nutrient systems. Food, power, medicine, health are words that have been closely associated with each other since early symbolic communication, and these are all about nutritional flow. The Permaculture Design principle of greatest effect with least effort is all about optimizing the improvement of quality, measured in nutrients, energy, vigor, thriving, rather than the lower qualitative standard of survival of the fittest. Regenerative evolution of nutritional flow aspires to abundance, resilience, healthy sustainability far into our future. The evolution of nutrient systems becomes revolutionary as our focus moves from survival toward global thriving.

 

Thich Nhat Hanh understands communication as a type of nutrition. What we sensorily absorb from our environment, whether through taste, sight, insight, or hearing, lies on a spectrum from abundantly nutritious to offensively toxic, even poisonous in sufficient amounts. Substances, sounds, views, fragrances, feelings, ideas, informationthat we are drawn to because they enrich our selves, and our Universe, are nutritious; those we avoid have proven to be toxic.

 

Both science and religions agree that our neural and nutritional systems evolved through natural systems experience, following natural principles of thermodynamic balance and development, regardless of the polynomial, polycultural, paradigmatic, or power/energy frame through which we have learned to comprehend Universe. Our most permanently-encultured (PermaCultured) frames, or narrative strings, extend back through our proto-history toward an even more Primal Root in the form of shared RNA Codex.  RNA-coded nutrient-fed-and-yielding development systems define the form and function of all living cells. In a sense, natural sciences recognize RNA as our universal progenitor of life, and each neural/nutrient system is an articulation of that global, natural, and primal plasmatic river. Our neural systems thrive with natural nutrition abundance, and avoid dissonant, toxic, anomalous, and entropic dissonance patterns (negative deviance, in Group, BioEvolutionary, and Cognitive Dissonance Theories).

 

Forming a newly-activated intentionally designed polyculture with affordable housing developers, neighborhood organizations, interreligious intentional communities, and post-millennial young leaders, heads of young families, populations at-risk of homelessness and poor nutrition, promises greatest inclusive effectiveness, with least redundancy of organizational and program-delivery expense. Strategies that are more academic and school-based tend to be less effective and well-sustained at the family level because these are not responsive to the specific situations of each household.  Program delivery limited to school-based participation seldom engage at-risk parents in the sustained and holistic way that would be most helpful for family well-being and health, including mental and economic health.

 

Organic carrots, even habitually devoured, will only go so far in meeting the full nutritional needs of a family living in a chronically stressed environment.  On the other hand, a family suffering from PTSD eating organic carrots will probably do better than the neighbor devouring the equivalent weight of quick-fix toxins and sugars.

 

Youth EcoMinistry settings are also ideal opportunities for all of us to teach each other about our growing awareness that nutrition v. toxin is a range of resource variables that crosses all sensory receptors, from touch through sight. Both positive and negative deviance information travels across all natural systems and paradigms, sometimes enriching, sometimes decaying, adding further dissonance, sometimes adding great beauty and grace and feeling to a growing global comprehension of our nutritional vocation to be sure every individual’s health and energy developmental needs are met. Nutrition optimization is healthy self-care (greatest effect) and dissonance prevention (least resistance).

 

 

Regenerating CT’s Optimally Supportive Habitat with the Melville Charitable Trust

 

What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?

Henry David Thoreau

 

Community and Economic Developers, and Permaculture Designers, come to the topic of nutrition from an unusual position, especially if they have watched and listened to the nutritional flow of our global wealth evaporate.  While research funders are finding significant productive value in cooperative-learning structures, philanthropists are finding the competitive grants economy unsuitable for encouraging cooperation and networking. This dissonance becomes more urgent as social investors of good will are confronted by the viral growth of the non-profit sector, each becoming increasingly skilled as a special interest lobby for its exclusive domain, territory, and mission.

 

Adding considerable climatic cacophony to the evaporative trend of philanthropic dollars: When investment markets do poorly, the suffering of competing worthy missions raises to a higher pitch. Generous social investors’ wealth deposits shrink, and calcify, deplete, and become of incrementally less functional value in the face of further climatic change. The nutritional power of the grants and research economy wanes as need becomes more acute, critical, dissonant, chaotic, moving toward despair. The nutritional wealth of our communities ebbs as our communication resonantly echoes and flows with the discord of not enough, and exclusion, and not in my backyard.

 

Diverse theories and practices of systemic change frequently note that enduring transformation is more likely in the presence of both (a) a compassionate sense of urgency, and (b) an inclusively mindful intention to develop resilient cooperative relationships. The greatest compassionate effect, in the face of increasingly critical global suffering, is to be and do the opposite of what is least mindful, most exclusionary and competitive—creating a vacuum of subcultural, exclusionary, chauvinism. Housing is the Answer! when our questions are provincial, rather than mindful of whole household-systems analysis.

 

Solving the problem of homelessness, especially through diverse forms of Supportive Housing was a strategic choice at a time when the philanthropic sector was investing in food and nutrition, but not so much in shelter. The scandal of people without shelter in the midst of affluence appalled the Trust’s Founders. This combination of urgent compassion and holistically mindful strategy has superlatively served the MCT in achieving remarkable socioeconomic influence for a more inclusively equitable society.

 

This cooperatively intended proposal celebrates a watershed moment in the possibilities for achieving realistic CQI outcomes for eco-justice and for humanity, for inclusively restoring people in a place of increasing climatic vulnerability.

 

Until recently, social investors have been offered opportunities to invest in prevention of loss strategies or more urgent intervention to remediate critical losses already incurred. Supportive Housing has usually been an intervention tool, while affordable housing projects, more broadly argue that local access to affordability helps prevent homelessness, as well as having other well-being benefits.

 

Based on the symbiotic principles of Permaculture Design and Buckminster Fuller’s Theory of Regenerativity, the CT-ReGenesis Cooperative Network seeks a more inclusive regeneration strategy. Restoring value in people, places, materials, thoughts, actions, words intends to prevent decay of our commonly held values (air, water, soil, nutrients, communication, information, beauty, gratitude, love, mindfulness, equity, integrity), one moment at a time heuristically assumed as an eternal positive teleological place. Somewhere within our network of diverse repurposing, we can help each other find our most mutually confluent home and purpose, if we choose cooperative rather than the more competitive side-by-sideness of walled missions designed to support institutional survival more than shared vocational purpose.

 

Restoration intervenes at the first identified risk of loss and disvalue, minimizes loss by identifying highest potential purpose through existing relationships, reorientation, reuse with least economic and ecological cost to our present and future. This seems like an appropriate metric for Continuous Quality Improvement within any system, set, or universe.

 

Cooperative polycultures are more productive of positive resources, nutrients, information, more resilient, easily and inexpensively maintained, resistant to dissonance and disease, mutually enriching, mutually grateful for nutritious diversity, than the competitive economies of scarcity in monocultural self-preoccupied identities.

 

A pre-development grant to mutually design the CT-Restore Network from three individuals to four, and more, cooperative, mutually-investing, organizations would be helpful. More significant in the larger picture, perhaps the MCT could invite other New England/New York social investors to discuss and discern the possibilities for supporting cooperative enterprises informed by regenerative values, intent, and practice. Our path is recycling; our goal is profoundly deep socio-ecological regeneration.

 

It would be extremely helpful if the MCT Executive Director and/or Trustees could collaborate on a media plan for this project and the ecology of cooperative economics, social investment, and philanthropy that forms this cooperative project’s theoretical infrastructure. This might conceivably be of interest not only to the CT Council for Philanthropy, but also communication outlets beyond Connecticut.

 

Our philanthropic foundational question becomes “If we are not 100% invested in cooperative and community-based regenerative initiatives, then on what basis would we expect highest CQI sustainable return on our investments? Is it ethical, is it morally appropriate to the needs and expectations of future generations and species, to settle for anything less than our 100% commitment to a regeneratively equitable and inclusive economy and ecology; bringing us the biggest bang for least bucks?

 

At the end of the day, each era, each project, we are each and all recycled nature, restoring our pilgrimage home, where past greets future, with gratitude for what we have started, and what may further evolve from our own endings.

 

[1] The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in response to ongoing social investment optimization objectives, to achieve both sustainable positive outcomes AND cost effectiveness, has led an initiative for program design and reporting metrics that meet Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) standards. The long-term comparative trend analysis by the Tellus Institute (www.tellus.org) defines a constellation of global economic, political, and ecological values that project optimized long-term viability outcomes through the year 2100. They call their highest performing algorithm the “Great Transition.” This CT-ReGenesis proposal heuristically assumes that Tellus Institute trend analysis is appropriately responsive to social investor’s urgent search for CQI program design and reporting standards.

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The Wealth Economy: Turning from Competition to Cooperation

Toward a PermaCultured Cooperative Financial Exchange Ecoministry

Just because someone is religious doesn’t necessarily mean that that person, or corporate person, doesn’t have an embarrassment of riches.

I look back over my 30 years in community building, 20 years as a grants and contracts researcher, writer, and manager, and have a profound discomfort with our philanthropic economy, with how it works as an economic system.  It is highly inefficient.  It has learned nothing about cooperative systems development theory; and seems to show no systemic value for the cost-effective benefits of returning to the community the wealth from which the wealth originated, as effectively as possible.

 I could probably write a book about cooperative economic theory; which no one would read.  So, let me give a specific example of an alternative model that has merit for consideration.

Today, if you are graduating from high school in the U.S., you can fill out one master application form and submit it to a central network for consideration.  I believe every college and university in the U.S. can acquire access to that information (not sure about information confidentiality boundaries, but let’s assume that this now becomes public information).  If a higher ed institution is seriously interested in having you join their student body, then they may ask you for a little supplemental info.

If a networked application system can work for individuals seeking a social investment in their personal contributions to society, then why on earth do we need 10 to 20 separate on-line sites for cooperative neighborhood and community, and regional groups to post who they are, what they have done to assess their shared values for the future, what they want to do, and what outcomes they expect, and how much money they need to do that?  Maybe diversity is a good thing in that regard.  Assuming that it is, why wouldn’t we want the stewards of our wealth to proactively harvest this information, organized so they could search for their specific social investment priorities and service territories, and consider these postings as applications for funding worthy of being treated like any customized application sent specifically to their overworked, tired, exhausted, frustrated grant officers who have a stack of applications sitting on their desks, most of which have only moderate synergy with what their Board of Directors wants to fund right now? I wonder how many grant officers have told me they feel like screening editors in a Publishing House, wading through stacks of material that they have to read just because somebody sent it specifically to them; not because it necessarily has anything to do with what they are hoping to support.

Perhaps the wealth deposit stewards could form a Cooperative Philanthropic Network that would help them figure out who gets to invest  how much in our intentional community vocations? The Ashoka Foundation comes to mind as one that has tried to blend their grants with a social investment format, but it is cumbersome primarily in its isolation from a broader network of opportunity.  And, the underlying economic assumption continues to be a competition between value outcomes that would work more optimally, and sustainably, within a cooperative economy.

The main beneficiaries of the current philanthropic system are grant writers and managers, foundation grant officers and senior executives, and the financial institutions that are managing the wealth deposits without (as a general rule) any consideration of value other than the accumulation of more capital, so the foundations can invest the interest only back into the community. But God only knows what permacultural crisis their stock portfolio is supporting in communities across our overheated planet.

Meanwhile fossil-fuel based wealth deposit growth is starting to slow down and our kids are increasingly recognizing that their adult reality will be lived out in a major realignment of social and economic systems, trending toward becoming information and communication-based. They will either re-learn how to live in a cooperatively balanced ecology and economy, or their kids will face some serious survival yuck.

If we have a shared vocation as a species to fix this, it seems like the prophetic voices are those who are participating in these stewarded public conversations.  Is it appropriate for the D&D practitioner community to profile our wealth management system as a shared social investment values problem? Do communication facilitators inappropriately step out of their role if they speak collectively as a community that has been listening to regular people talk about what they want and don’t want for their futures and their childrens’ futures, and what that implies about a better, more efficient and effective, system for social investment than what we do now?

I’m not trying to bite the hand that has fed me so effectively during my career, but I do wonder if our wealth investment system is cancerously leaking our own life blood.  And, it seems like it would be fairly easy to fix, if we wanted to.

One week later:

I am currently trying out a prototype survey to use with individuals, families, and project teams.  I need to be a bit more sure that this will be viable as a format to begin what the Mondragon educators refer to as personal development.
 I am waiting for a book I just learned about that is something about spiral and integral learning and communication development process.  It sounds like there might be considerable confluence with sociocracy.
I had a highly resonant reaction to the Mundukide Foundation’s mission statement and what it sounds like they are trying to do.  I am wondering if it would be possible to gather religious sector philanthropists into a collaboration with cooperative and permaculture/ecological network agencies at  national and international levels to rethink our philanthropic economy as one that could be based on direct meme-value, rather than capital value. It seems like we might need an incarnation of this collaboration at a regional level to draw on as a resource for a more global aspiration. In other words, if a permaculture cooperative network were learning how to invest in shared social value enterprises and vocations in the CT River Valley (its only obvious advantage being that is where I happen to live right now–not that there is any infrastructure in place that looks particularly promising) and beginning to sync and develop more cooperative efficiency and economic inclusiveness for marginalized populations, then we could tell that story as a way of helping each other think about what that might look like globally.
Both the research and philanthropic grant sectors are increasingly drawn toward cooperative enterprises for learning, and for providing services. However, both grant sectors still use competitive processes to attract and process proposals.  Even as enlightened an entity as the Buckminster Fuller Institute’s Fellowship program uses this model (and if institutional culture should understand the efficiencies of synergetics I would think it would be the BFI).  I was reading through a list of their 10 finalists in 2013, of which they were probably only going to actively work with one.  That is their structure.  But, there were 3 of those 10 that were basically the same idea (something to do with a new design to bring potable water to villages with dysfunctional wells, if I remember correctly), but the focus was on three different areas of the planet, and their design concepts were probably not entirely redundant.  Even so, if I could take a cursory glance at their list of finalists and see how much more bang for their buck we could all potentially get by helping those 3 finalists work together, well, you can finish that sentence for yourself.
Imagine what might happen if we had 10 seasoned grant writers actively scanning the 10 most active social investment websites for cooperative potential between proposed projects with similar missions and compatible outcomes.  These grant “brokers” are acting as a collaborative team, sharing information about emergent trends and shaping potential multiple partners into effective cooperative partners with a shared revenue resource. If this Cooperative Research and Philanthropy Team was connected to a network of philanthropists, they could act as a communication hub between the wealth deposits and a portfolio of synchronized cooperative ventures needing grants and, possibly, loans.
There are a couple of advocacy dimensions to this cooperative economic development proposal.  One is that religious and other “we are all in this together” oriented wealth deposit managers really need to talk to their grantor and social investor colleagues about their investment portfolios; encouraging more and more of them to invest larger and larger portions of their portfolios in community-value-driven vocations/enterprises, rather than financial bottom-line corporations that may be using our capital wealth for purposes that are not sustainable, potentially doing far more harm with the philanthropist’s money than the interest that they spend on grants does good.  Most religious sector philanthropists have divested of investments that are ecologically counter-productive. If this trend became normative for wealthy foundations and individuals all across the planet, then a capital-accumulation valued economy might begin turning around toward a cooperative development valued economy and ecology.
The second area of potential advocacy has to do with tax structure. If wealth deposit managers took the lead in talking to government officials and other people in the top 1% globally about the havoc their accumulation is causing to the entire ecosystem, perhaps we could arrive at some consensus that the top 1% of earners each year (after taxes) could afford to either invest maybe 80% of that after-tax net income in cooperative/environmentally sustainable enterprises/vocations/habitations or pay that amount in taxes.  In this way, the top 1% (subtracting last year’s income from last year’s taxes/social investments) would cycle each year.  It would be only the most cancerously growing, self-isolating, wealth deposits that would pay the ultra-high pay-back tax, or social investment, rate in consecutive years.
Then maybe we could think about doing something similar, but at a lower rate, for the top 2 to 5%, then the top 6 to 10%.  Reverse-trending wealth deposits toward a cooperative and inclusive economy might mean that the meme, or Information, value of currency would self-balance, if done globally and incrementally.  Maybe we wouldn’t need Community Currency barter-exchange transfer records if we re-oriented our wealth deposits to actually serve our sustainable socioeconomic and cultural values.
But, this all needs to be talked about, especially by people who are already invested in permacultured systems-analysis and design, cooperative workers and residers, New Economy and Natural Resource and Whole Systems thinkers, and the religious/spiritual sector.
My personal paradigm is what is emerging under the label “EcoMinistry.” The difference between human service and ministry is that service is something a provider brings to a client while ministry is something that two or more people do together, from a position of solidarity. Eco is short for ecology, but it also works for economy; as an ecologically informed economy.  So, in my sometimes not-so-humble perspective, we are an emerging species of ecoministers. This is about how we live sustainably together under the assumption that the Golden Rule always and inclusively applies to all species and all systems and all paradigms and all traditions and all memes, and all communication. It is a philosophy of mutually-assured nonviolence and affinitive hope.
 I believe I know of a handful of foundation people regionally and nationally who would like to have this agenda spelled out theoretically and then described in terms of project activities, development trajectory, and budgeting. That is the direction I am taking and I am actively looking for a core design and consulting team toward that end.
None of this is intended to distract from the primacy of working directly with small groups of marginalized kids and young adults, more or less following the Mondragon pedagogical model of personal development, leading to social development, leading to shared vocational teamwork and intentional community-building.  I find myself drawn to “deep listening” and “deep learning” models that are confluent with nonviolent communication and lifestyle paradigms. My 17 year old son and I are taking a University of Stanford MOOG starting on January 20th on the Deep Learning pedagogical model. We are also both taking a Permaculture Design Certification class. We are planning to apply what we learn with kids and young adults failing to thrive in the transition from poor learning environments into employment.  Our emphasis will be on developing core healthy relationships to build shared, sustainable, vocations. (which I will choose to think of as ecoministry, but I won’t scare everyone with that concept, I think; at least not the first day). Our local headquarters is called the Auerfarm 4H Education Center, an independent non-profit, but part of the Cooperative Extension Service here in Connecticut.  It is also a cooperative farm and includes some ingredients of an intentional residential community, with potential for more of the same.
I am learning to trust the process and let a big vision unfold in its own time.  If it is not built together, then it is not worth building.  The valuable feedback I am getting (and not always accepted with grace) is that I get too far ahead of myself, too impatient with development process, and too unrealistic about deadlines for implementing good public discernment and engagement design.  To be less driven by grantor’s deadlines, and more in control of what has internal design integrity.  If the design and theory and inclusive process are meant to be permanently sustainable, and revolutionary, then I must trust that money and other needed resources (nutrients) will be there when we need them. Whether it grows legs or not will ultimately not be about cash flow; it will be about good inclusive sustainable, permacultured design.
This feels like a highly promising opportunity to globally improve the effectiveness for health and well-being by working with philanthropic leaders to develop a cooperative grant information exchange network.  This, rather than continuing to ask for cooperative proposals while setting up competitive application processes that are highly inefficient at a global scale, if our species’ goal is to optimize sustainable well-being by increasing the effective flow of our rather too calcified wealth deposits.  No biological system can optimize nutrient flow and health when fuel-resources are hoarded for self-selecting subsystem nutrition, leaving the remainder of the planet to scramble for the crumbs.

We, the big WE, might benefit from inventing a variation on the stock exchange brokerage model that would be rooted in well-being value, rather than capital value; the exchange would be in the form of grants and low-interest loans rather than stocks, and a broker would be someone who works within a cooperative social investment ecoministry team, scanning on-line, internationally for cooperative investment opportunities that show high synergetic value (using something like Hubbard’s Whole Systems analysis, Spiral Development Theory, etc.), looking for resources to achieve significant permacultural optimization outcomes all over the planet, packaging these independent projects, adding a budget using cooperative synergy assumptions, and sending out the umbrella grant/loan package to appropriate philanthropists, within a religious, cooperative, ecological, peace, and public discourse investor network. A network of ecoministry (I think ministry can work in the British secular humanist way here) philanthropists to consider the umbrella investment portfolio collaboratively, each taking the piece most appropriate to their individual priorities, usually geographic.

There is something in here not only about shifting from competitive capital values to cooperative well-being values, but also to re-framing religious/spiritual ecology into its permanently encultured, proto-religious economic system roots; a regeneration of planetary information-transfer development systems. Not a species capacity before  the current evolution-potential of the WWW.

From one guy trying to learn his ecoministry vocation, hopefully to another.
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Notes from, and to, a Grant Writer

Philanthropy is a peculiar form of social investment.  Those of us who have spent many years in this form of human industry often wonder if there is not some better, more humane, more efficient, more hopeful, even more peaceful way to do it.  The following correlated notes to philanthropists, non-profit leaders, researchers, and myself come from what I have learned so far:

To Philanthropists, cc Non-Profit Leaders:

If you are reading a grant proposal written in a grant writer’s office, using language chosen solely by that writer, then stop reading it.

If you are having a proposal review meeting with only paid non-profit staff in the room, walk out.

If you are reading a grant report written by a grant manager, paid by the grantee, using language and metrics chosen solely by that manager, throw it away and make no further investments in that direction.

To Grant Prospect Researchers, cc Non-Profit Leaders:

When you are researching grant prospects, give the highest priority to a direct match in terms of community of intent; the same territory and the same priority for change or maintenance. Avoid those prospects that are not clear about this.  They are, at best, your second-tier prospects because people who really enjoy investing in people give to specific people for specific priorities.

Give third priority to prospects that would be willing to read a proposal, attend a follow-up meeting, and accept a report written solely by and with you and your paid staff, using only internally chosen language and metrics.  People who enjoy investing in people are more likely to give effectively and with great resilience over the long-term.  It is unlikely that investors and investments will build mutually enriching relationships without inclusive communication.

To Myself, cc Non-Profit Human Resource Leaders:

Never write a grant proposal for those who would presumably benefit from a grant; always write proposals with prospective beneficiaries.

Never write a proposal or report that is not part of an intentional and inclusively evolving system: primary constituency, non-profit administration, and the reader(s).

Never work for anybody; always work with prospective beneficiaries, project/program executives, and those who are responsible for wealth investments.  You are the translator across paradigms; not the fundraiser.

Never forget we are all in this together, however difficult it is to remember that some days.

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