This month, I was lucky enough to join Summit at Sea, the fourth event put on by the Summit Series team who bring together business visionaries, artists, social entrepreneurs, and environmentalists with the goal of fostering collaboration and innovation through the revelry they create at their exclusive gatherings. The event was unlike any other I [...]
I have purposely stayed out of the “TOMS Shoes = Bad Aid” campaign that has been going on for the past few weeks and haven’t tweeted about it. It was not because I am not strongly opposed to aid which is about “giving things away”, as I clearly have learned from experience that that is [...]
This week I offered a class with my friends Kit & Matt through the new group/learning platform SkillShare. It’s a phenomenal concept: anyone can be a teacher and offer up a skill they have and any of us can be student and pay for a class on topics as varied as Knitting for Beginners and [...]
I recently put up a post about a speech Ivan Illich gave to a group of young American volunteers about to head to Mexico to “help”. It’s one of those speeches that makes you re-question all of your good intentions and perhaps reflect on your past actions with a new light. And then it can [...]
Oh how I wish that I had heard Ivan Illich give this speech in 1968. I imagine myself as one of the students about to be sent off to Mexico to “volunteer”, eager to “help the poor people”, smiling proudly as I shine in my own self-worth. And then I imagine hearing him start out [...]
Layheng Ting is PEPY‘s new Director. Here is a piece she recently wrote for the PEPY newsletter which I thought I would re-post here. Thanks Layheng, and welcome to the team! —- Sustainability has been a buzz word in development work for a long time, but how to actually make a project sustainable still remains [...]
It seems that nearly every GAP year program, international school curriculum, and business incentivizing “volunteer leave” is now harping on the concept of “service learning”. They are no longer calling it “volunteering”, as the learning is being emphasized, but what I think we need is a further revolution of this concept. I no longer believe [...]