The Program
Jul. 4th, 2020 11:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
myleskI do have a program in mind.
Before Marlo Reynolds was the Chief of Staff at Environment Canada and Climate Change, he worked for 8 years at Alberta's Pembina Institute. As a fellow environmentalist, our paths crossed regularly, but one such crossing was in 2004 when I received a scholarship to York University's Sustainable Enterprise Academy Business Leader Seminar where he was one of the speakers.
My co-hort was mostly sustainability directors from major corporations across the spectrum of industries, and Marlo presented to us a taxonomy of environmental organizations categorizes by strategic approaches. I don't remember all of the marine animals that his schema adopted, but protest groups were symbolized by sharks, community groups by dolphins, and collaborative groups, possibly, by killer whales.
I am thinking about Marlo this morning because he introduced environmentalist mindset to the co-hort of corporate employees with a short guided meditation.
"Close your eyes," he said, "and imagine the thing about society that most bugs you." Once we each had the single most irritating thing about public life firmly he mind, Marlo invited us to imagine an organization dedicated to solving that problem: How would it work? What solutions would it propose? How would it solicit support? "If you can imagine such an organization, then you know what it means to be an ENGO."
What is the biggest social issue that you want to help solve? is the focalizing question of the community organizer. For more than 20 years, my answer to that question was “environmental sustainability”, but this isn’t precisely true in July 2020. I think that today, the biggest social issue that I want to work on is social cohesion.
- Media Literacy
- Integrated Meme Design
Before Marlo Reynolds was the Chief of Staff at Environment Canada and Climate Change, he worked for 8 years at Alberta's Pembina Institute. As a fellow environmentalist, our paths crossed regularly, but one such crossing was in 2004 when I received a scholarship to York University's Sustainable Enterprise Academy Business Leader Seminar where he was one of the speakers.
My co-hort was mostly sustainability directors from major corporations across the spectrum of industries, and Marlo presented to us a taxonomy of environmental organizations categorizes by strategic approaches. I don't remember all of the marine animals that his schema adopted, but protest groups were symbolized by sharks, community groups by dolphins, and collaborative groups, possibly, by killer whales.
I am thinking about Marlo this morning because he introduced environmentalist mindset to the co-hort of corporate employees with a short guided meditation.
"Close your eyes," he said, "and imagine the thing about society that most bugs you." Once we each had the single most irritating thing about public life firmly he mind, Marlo invited us to imagine an organization dedicated to solving that problem: How would it work? What solutions would it propose? How would it solicit support? "If you can imagine such an organization, then you know what it means to be an ENGO."
What is the biggest social issue that you want to help solve? is the focalizing question of the community organizer. For more than 20 years, my answer to that question was “environmental sustainability”, but this isn’t precisely true in July 2020. I think that today, the biggest social issue that I want to work on is social cohesion.
For the purposes of this informal discussion paper, I propose the definition of social cohesion as the tendency for a human community in a given territory to be in unity while working towards a goal or to satisfy the emotional needs of its members.
Further, this program proposes a qualitative spectrum with idealized social cohesion at one end and pure affective polarization at the other. The program’s strategic goal is to shift society’s current position on this spectrum towards the social cohesion end. It will advance this position through particular programs.
What are these “programs”?
- MemePoppers- Media Literacy
- Integrated Meme Design
