Learning Together. Building Community.

Twenty-five years ago, Priscilla Plummer was sitting with a group of women in a village in Mozambique. Knee-deep in the research for her master’s degree, she wanted to learn about the realities people were facing in Southern Africa. As she got to know the women in her village and listened to their stories, Priscilla realized their experience was very different from the picture painted by the big development organizations with their projects and programs and reports. It was cl

Grace Reed’s article on Solving Homelessness talks about how effective the village model is for getting people off the streets and back into stable lives. A village… It also takes a village to raise a child. I was sharing all this with a friend the other night and suddenly we both realized—it takes a village to do anything! We think we are independent. We think our success is our own. And so we look at those who struggle and say, “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” But we

Last night I witnessed the most amazing thing: a gathering of love so strong it sent chills up my spine. Some months ago, Glaucia Martin-Porath found a building for the Women’s Plaza. Her vision is to create a place where women can work right alongside their children and go see them any time of the day: read them a story, have lunch together, comfort them when they need it. A space where women can get support and advice from the women working next to them. It looked like she

Interview with Donna Maxey Donna Maxey is the founder of Race Talks, a conversation series that gives people a safe place to talk about racial issues and learn from each other. Her own experiences make her uniquely qualified to lead these discussions with compassion, understanding, and clear-sighted vision. From growing up in the thriving Black community of Albina, which was later displaced to make way for a freeway; to teaching children (and adults) of all ages, Donna has ex

Interview with Ona Porter Ona Porter believes in people: if you give them the right tools, they’ll thrive. She’s been an advocate and an educator in one form or another from Texas to the Caribbean and now in New Mexico. Her organization, Prosperity WORKS!, helps low-income families lift themselves out of poverty by saving to purchase an asset (a house, a college education, or a business).  What these people have achieved is just incredible. Here’s Ona to tell the story… Prosp

On April 24, a group of us got together to dive deeper into what it takes to build a vision for the prosperity of all humankind. This time we explored the whole concept of prosperity itself, using several different approaches. Stories of Prosperity First, we shared insights and stories about prosperity from our own experiences and traditions we admire: When I had means, all the bells and whistles, I was not motivated to be grateful for any of it until I lost it all. Losing mo

How do we create a unifying, global vision for the prosperity of all humankind? How do we create a vision of well-being for every man, woman and child on the planet? Clearly, our present strategy isn’t working—right now we are on autopilot. We  consume the earth’s resources to make massive quantities of cheap goods that don’t last. This may make a few people very rich, but it doesn’t create Prosperous Ecosystems or help us produce Delicious Food, Fair Food for everyone, or he

This is the second (and last) post following the November 22 Prosperity Discussion, where a few people got together to Start a Vision Discussion. We began with the quote below and focused on really listening to each other and letting go of our views once we’d expressed them, offering them to the group as a whole. Essentially, we were practicing the art of consultation. There were so many wonderful thoughts shared, they didn’t all fit in one post. The first set of insights was

On November 22, a few people got together to Start a Vision Discussion. We began with the quote below and focused on really listening to each other and letting go of our views once we’d expressed them, offering them to the group as a whole. Essentially, we were practicing the art of consultation. There were so many wonderful thoughts shared, they won’t all fit in one post. So I’m sharing the first set of insights here. Stay tuned for the next set. Feel free to add your though

One Sunday in November, a group of us got together to start discussing this idea of a global, unifying vision for the prosperity of humankind. I’ll be posting the insights from that discussion over the next weeks. Today I want to talk about how to begin. How do we start this conversation about vision? It’s one that we all have a stake in. And one we know in our hearts we desperately need—both the vision and the conversation. Here’s what I did. Maybe it will work for you too.

On August 24, I was a guest on Grace Eagle Reed’s radio show “Disability Awareness“. We talked about how the Prosperity Project got started, the people I’ve interviewed so far and a vision for the future. Here is the recording of that interview. #prosperity #story

Another theme that is emerging from the interviews on this blog is Justice. We are accustomed to thinking of justice in punitive terms—a person commits a crime and is punished. Or that justice is blind. What does that mean, anyway? But really, justice is so much more than this. Baha’u’llah describes justice as the “best beloved of all things” in the sight of God. The Prosperity of Humankind explains that as we become aware of the oneness of humanity, justice is the force that

There are several stories in this blog that touch on the theme of “Oneness of Humanity.” View the fully interactive concept map at Prosperity of Humanity Listening to the news, we seem to see conflict at every turn. And yet, if we look closer, we also see thousands and thousands, if not millions of ordinary people coming together to address the problems around us. Everywhere, people are expressing the desire for an end to conflict and movement toward peace. What we need is a

A friend asked me to share the story of the butterfly. I’ve read this story many times, in different versions. My first encounter with it was in Lynne Twist’s book, The Soul of Money. The Butterfly Scientists have been studying the butterfly and how it transforms from a lowly caterpillar to a winged beauty. This is what they’ve found… The caterpillar goes through most of its life in a mild-mannered way, crawling and munching. But at a certain point, it develops a voracious ap