Massive Change project explores the legacy and potential, the promise and power of design in improving the welfare of humanity. It originated as collaboration between Bruce Mau Design and the Institute without Boundaries in which we researched the capacities and limitations of human efforts to change the world for the better. The Change Your World Tour will present 300 future-focused proactive global concert expo events that will change the way people live.

Ninth Floor Project was started by Martin Kace. He has been living in a wheelchair for 5 ½ years and has adapted pretty well except for hugs and kisses from his loved ones. Much of his life is back to normal except he finds he takes stem cell politics personally. He thinks about the young people who would most certainly walk again if science were allowed to move forward. Instead they are doomed to live in their chairs while 400,000 embryos are trashed and incinerated every year.

OLPC—one laptop per child—is a potent learning tool created especially for the world’s poorest children living in the world’s most remote environments. The computers won’t be for sale but will only be distributed to schools directly through large government initiatives.

Zerofootprint helps you reduce your footprint by providing information, products and services to the global network of consumers and businesses that wish to reduce their environmental impact. It includes green products, green events and green stories. Under the ideas section is the zerofootprint challenge. The question: Is it possible to prove that simple ideas can bring massive change?

Tags: change, world, laptop, green products, humanity

The current (from 9/23/2006) definition of change agent from Wikipedia says that a change agent is someone who engages either deliberately or whose behavior results in social, cultural or behavioral change. Wikipedia also lists management stages for change and employee steps to commitment.

Last week when I was researching to see earlier referrals to change agents, I came upon an article from 1999 by Seth Godin. Seth is one of my mentors although we’ve never met.

Fast Company’s prototype issue was November 1993 and one of the main articles was about Gunther Pauli. Pauli as reported in this article was the CEO of Ecover. His concept was using a new business model. His products for cleaning used only natural soaps and renewable raw materials. In the process, he built the world’s largest ecological factory.

One of the earlier referrals to change agent is in the April 1997 issue about Bob Knowling. Knowling helped to transform Ameritech from the old company concepts to new company concepts. As reported, he convinced 30,000 employees to become part of community service, shifted millions of dollars of Ameritech Foundation money into high-leverage community actives, helped to revitalize the Chicago YMCA, and shared his passion to HOPE, Chicago’s largest inner-city manufacturing training center.

In a training guide for change agents, Annie Layne used the basics used by the Peace Corps to show concepts that could be used for any business.

Become a change agent where you are by reducing your beliefs and motivations to a mission statement or a single sentence to give you focus for your planned change.

The following quote is reprinted from a website that I can no longer access. If anyone knows the author’s name or new website, please email me. I believe wholeheartedly in what he is saying.

“You see, I believe we can get past this thing called alcoholism and addiction. We can get past it by taking advantage of every opportunity for abstaining that we encounter. For most people that includes a period of time in a 12 Step Program. If it’s not AA right off the bat, almost ALL Treatment Centers refer clients to the 12 step programs anyway. So if you haven’t done it already, go ahead, bite the bullet and put a little time into AA.

One thing you’ll learn there is what Not to do if you really want to stop drinking. You will have many, many opportunities to study people as they stumble through the obstacles they place before themselves on the way to sober living. There are tricks to not falling prey to self-destruction while learning to not drink, and it’s less painful to learn those lessons second hand. I learned a lot of them there.

The bottom line for everyone is that if you really want to get sober, you will get sober. It doesn’t matter what your gig is, it could be the fishing cure, church, a hot new babe, 12 steps, or plain hard assed self-preservation. When the nickel drops and you know what you need to do to get the job done,,,, go ahead and do it. And do it like you never did anything before, because getting sober takes all the passion you’ll ever have. Staying sober, it gets a lot easier after the first 10 or 15 years.”

The link I have is http://biminibound.com/recovery/index.html

I love reading and writers who know how to use words to make me feel something. I don’t live in my head any longer. Nor do I allow my feeling to dictate the direction for my life. I was reading through my favorite blogs today and came upon this: Ragamuffin Ramblings: Seeing what God can do..
What really got my attention was part of one of his sentences:”the blasting cap that started the implosion of my old life, and the beginning of new life out of the rubble of the old.” I never tire of reading about new beginnings that lead people to change their lives in radical ways. William James reported over 100 years ago that college students are particularly prone to spiritual conversion. He recounts 2 types of conversion experiences. One is the sudden, immediate conversion which is what I experienced. The other is a slow growth into the spiritual direction of God leading a conversion experiences.

Lewis Rambo has attributed seven characteristics to conversion experiences. “Conversions 1) take place within a given personal and social context, including the symbolic; 2) are catalyzed by a crisis, which can assume many guises; 3) involve an active search or quest for an answer, provided the potential convert is intellectually, emotionally and religiously ready; and 4) are mediated by an encounter with an advocate for a particular resolution, whose strategy and methods must match the needs of the potential convert. Conversions also require 5) interaction with the community of faith and result in both 6) a commitment to the new faith in the form of experienced surrender to it and 7) significant personal consequences through the exercise of it.”

http://betterme.org/cleansweep.html

The Clean Sweep Program is a checklist of 100 items which, when completed, give one complete personal freedom. These 100 items are grouped in 4 areas of life with 25 in each group: Physical Environment, Well-being, Money and Relationships. These 4 areas are the cornerstone for a strong and healthy life and the program helps a person to clean up, restore and polish virtually every aspect of his/her life. The program takes between 6 – 24 months to complete.

Objective
The participant’s goal is to get a score of 100 out of 100. The objective of the program is for the participant to get complete about 100 possible incompletions in their life. Incompletions are those physical, emotional or mental items, which are in some way not resolved in the current moment. Incompletions of any kind drain energy. That is, they require energy to live with, given it takes work to keep us whole when there is something in the space. To have full integrity (like a complete circle) is normal; the program gives one a way to get there in a natural way.

http://www.43things.com//

Write down your goals

People have known for years that making a list of goals is the best way to achieve them. Why is that? First, getting your goals in writing can help you clarify what you really want to do. You might find you have some important and some frivolous goals. That is OK. You’ve got space for 43 Things on your list. Not every one of them has to change the world (but save room for the ones that might).

Get Inspired

What do you want to do with your life? It is not an easy question to answer – and you shouldn’t have to answer alone. Browse 43 Things to find out what others want to do. You might find some goals you share. Click the “I want to do this” button to add a goal to your list. Got an idea for a new goal? Just type it in the text box on the homepage or at the bottom of any page on the site. Bam. Now, it’s your thing.

Share your progress

We all have stories about what we care about. Writing down your progress on a goal can help someone else learn about something you both want to do. When you see a goal you’ve achieved, click on the “I’ve done this” button and share a story about how you did it.

http://pioneersofchange.net/

Pioneers of Change fosters understanding, capacities and relationships needed by younger practitioners committed to stepping forward and creating the change they want to see in the world.Pioneers of Change is a global learning network supporting practitioners in their mid-20s to mid-30.  Founded in 1999, by a group of people from 16 countries and now includes participants from around the world. When you join Pioneers of Change you explicitly commit to the following principles: Be yourself, Do what Matters, Start now, Engage with others, Never stop asking questions.

http://www.worldchanging.com/aboutus/

WorldChanging.com works from a simple premise: that the tools, models and ideas for building a better future lie all around us. That plenty of people are working on tools for change, but the fields in which they work remain unconnected. That the motive, means and opportunity for profound positive change are already present. That another world is not just possible, it’s here. We only need to put the pieces together.

Tags: change, progress, tools, future, goal, organize, progress

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I will be running a post from time to time with the beliefs behind the blog/site.

1) Agile Advice: Thoughts and experiences for practitioners following the Middle Way to Excellence. The axioms for this site are: we are creators, reality is perceived, and change is natural. They have workshops available in Canada to learn agile thinking. Also several whitepapers are available at this site.

2) Tech-recipes.com This site was started as a computer cookbook in October 2003. It contained 1000 step-by-step tutorials as well as excellent forums. I wish I had kept track of all the angels like this site that have lifted me from ignorance to learning. I am self-taught with no formal training so it has been a wild learning curve.

3) Global Kids’ mission statement is to prepare urban youth to become global citizens and community leaders. Global Kids, Inc. works to ensure that young people of diverse backgrounds have the knowledge, skills, and experiences they need to succeed in the workplace and participate in the shaping of public policy and international relations.

4) 2Nonprofits: Bringing effective change agents to the social sector is a blog project of the Wilson Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Pace University. Its mission is to help experienced business people make the transition to work in the nonprofit social sector. With the greatest number of people (baby boomers) due to hit retirement soon more and more people are “retiring” to service jobs in nonprofits. These workers are being labeled “social entrepreneurs.”

Steve Jobs in the commencement address he gave last year to Stanford University told three stories in what he called connecting the dots. The name of the address was: “You’ve got to find what you love.” The dots included the choices he made that later led to some of his amazing career development.

The choices were:

(1) He dropped out of college formally but stayed at the school for another 1 ½ years to take the courses he liked. One of those courses was calligraphy which later became the fonts for our personal computers.

(2) He was fired from Apple but started Pixar and NeXT during his readjustment period. Pixar created the first computer animated feature film, Toy Story. Apple bought Pixar and rehired Jobs.

(3) In 1994, he was diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas. His type of cancer was curable with surgery. But the lesson he learned from this experience is that death is life’s main change agent.

Our time here is limited so his message is to enjoy it and find what we love to do in life.