COMMON GROUND CONSULTING LLC

The SHIFT Movie

A Movie Being Made By A Movement

Hey Everyone, I love this project and it features several of my friends, including the amazing Lynne Twist (one of my mentors and a person I talk about in many of my workshops). Thanks to my buddy Jeff in Atlanta for reminding me to tell you all about it!

This movie is about a paradigm shift in how we live together in an ever-changing world. It is a way of believing and acting that honors our oneness.

Echoing Green Announces 2009 Fellows

I'm proud to have been a part of the selection process for this year's Echoing Green fellows. Check out their press release and the video below:

From Echoing Green: "This is our favorite day of the year -- the day we announce the newest class of Echoing Green Fellows. We simply can't wait to tell the world about the extraordinary work of these promising social entrepreneurs.

More than six months ago, we received almost 1,000 applications for the 2009 Echoing Green Fellowship. Five grueling stages later, with the assistance of more than 200 experts and supporters, we are ready to announce seventeen fellows who are launching fourteen social change organizations.  They will join Echoing Green's network of nearly 500 social entrepreneurs who are working to solve social, economic, and environmental problems throughout the world.

Meet Our Esteemed 2009 Echoing Green Fellows:

Our 2009 Echoing Green Fellows are ready to spark change around the world, in areas such as civil and human rights, education and youth leadership, health, and public service. See our complete list of 2009 Echoing Green Fellows to read more about these extraordinary changemakers!

We hope that after learning about the 2009 Echoing Green Fellows, you will help us in passing on the good word about their outstanding hopes and dreams."

[From Echoing Green Announces 2009 Fellows | Echoing Green]

A trip to Perry Point in June

I'm taking a trip to Perry Point, MD today.

While here, I'm conducting a new youth development workshop for Summer of Service Crew Leaders with the National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC).

Common Ground Joins the Society for International Development

Common Ground is a new member of the Society for International Development (SID), which is a global network of individuals and institutions concerned with development which is participative, pluralistic and sustainable. SID has over 3000 members in 80 countries and 45 local chapters. It works with more than 100 associations, networks and institutions involving academia, parliamentarians, students, political leaders and development experts, both at local and international level. This makes SID one of the few organizations that has a holistic, multidisciplinary and multisectorial approach to development and social change.

Giving USA: Charitable Giving Fell 2 Percent From 2007 to 2008

Individuals, foundations and corporations collectively gave more than $300 billion to charities last year — the second year in a row, and only the second time ever, that giving crossed the $300 billion mark.

In current dollars, 2008 giving fell just 2 percent, to $307.6 billion from $314.1 billion in 2007. When adjusted for inflation, giving fell by 5.7 percent.

That inflation-adjustment decline is the sharpest since the  survey was started in 1956.

The greatest decline in giving (12.7 percent, or 15.9 percent when adjusted for inflation) was to human services organizations — the food banks and health clinics and childcare groups and job training centers that have seen demand for services skyrocket even as they face severe budget cuts from the government. They received 9 percent of all philanthropy in 2008.

Religious groups once again received the largest share of philanthropic dollars: 35 percent. Giving to religious groups increased 5.5 percent (1.6 percent when adjusted for inflation) in 2008.

As in previous years, individuals gave the most, accounting for $229.28 billion or 75 percent of all giving in 2008, but their giving dropped by 2.7 percent (6.3 percent adjusted for inflation). Foundation giving was $41.21 billion, a 3 percent increase from 2007 (though up only 0.8 percent when adjusted for inflation) and 13 percent of total philanthropy. Corporate philanthropy totaled $14.5 billion, 5 percent of all charitable giving. That’s a decrease of 4.5 percent (8 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars) from 2007 giving levels.

Many charity experts believe that the worst is yet to come, since the economy didn’t begin to fall in earnest until the fourth quarter of 2008. Many foundations have lost more than 30 percent of their capital, and by and large those losses are only now being factored into the rolling averages that determine how much a foundation will give away.

Giving USA is a publication of Giving USA Foundation and is researched and written by the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University.

[From Charitable giving is down, but it still tops $300B - Washington Business Journal: ]

Kiva to Make Microloans Inside the U.S.

The San Francisco non-profit has arranged microloans for borrowers in Africa and other parts of the developing world since 2005. Now it will also serve borrowers in the U.S.

Kiva's lenders loan small amounts of money -- the average loan size is $416.09 -- to entrepreneurs who post their profiles on Kiva's Web site.

Here are a few: a woman in Tajikistan who started a sewing business with her sisters after their husbands left to find work in Russia and she needed to support her children and her aunt; a man in Sierra Leone who got a loan to sell goods on the street and then open a small shop after a rebel army cut off his hand.

More than 70 percent of Kiva's lenders are in the U.S., though, the company said today, and poverty is everywhere.

So Kiva is trying to connect lenders and borrowers no matter where they are: "a Guatemalan woman making a loan to an entrepreneur in Detroit, a man in Uganda making a loan to an entrepreneur in Rwanda, and an Italian lending to a Filipino farmer. We are excited about these possibilities and look forward to seeing them become a reality."

U.S. entrepreneurs who want to borrow money through Kiva should check with OpportunityFund.org or Accion USA, Kiva's partners. There is more information on Kiva's home page.

The company told the Chronicle in February that it expects to enable $60 million in loans in 2009 throughout the world.

[From The Technology Chronicles : Kiva to make microloans inside the U.S.]

Shoppers, Unite! Carrotmobs Are Cooler than Boycotts

From Time Magazine

Shoppers, Unite! Carrotmobs Are Cooler than Boycotts
By Jeremy Caplan

Forget sticks, and stick with carrots instead. So says Brent Schulkin, founder of a fledgling movement of activist consumers employing a kind of reverse boycott that he calls a Carrotmob. The concept is simple: instead of steering clear of environmentally backward stores, why not reward businesses with mass purchases if they promise to use some of the money to get greener?

"Traditional activism revolves around conflict," says Schulkin, 28, a San Francisco–based activist turned entrepreneur. "Boycotting, protesting, lawsuits — it's about going into attack mode," says the former Googler and onetime game developer. "What's unique about a Carrotmob is that there are no enemies." The focus is on positive cooperation, using the power of the casual consumer to help save the planet. (See pictures of a grocery-store auction.)

The movement was born on March 29, 2008, when hundreds of green-minded patrons poured into a San Francisco convenience store after Schulkin solicited bids from 23 stores in the area to find the business that would promise to spend the highest percentage of Carrotmob profits on more energy-efficient lighting. The crowd spent more than $9,200 at the K&D Market, which then fulfilled its pledge to plow 22% of the day's revenue into greener lighting — with the haul from the Carrotmob providing enough cash to make all the improvements recommended by an energy auditor (and Carrotmob supporter).

[From Shoppers, Unite! Carrotmobs Are Cooler than Boycotts -- Printout -- TIME]

How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live

This is a great article for understanding Twitter. This topic has come up in almost all of our recent consulting engagement. Check it out. Craig

From Time Magazine

By Steven Johnson

The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal."

I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter's co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom '90s when he was launching Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams was launching a communications platform that limited you to a couple of sentences at most. What was next? Software that let you send a single punctuation mark to describe your mood? (See the top 10 ways Twitter will change American business.)

And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.

The social warmth of all those stray details shouldn't be taken lightly. But I think there is something even more profound in what has happened to Twitter over the past two years, something that says more about the culture that has embraced and expanded Twitter at such extraordinary speed. Yes, the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought. But the key development with Twitter is how we've jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of.

In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it.

[From How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live -- Printout -- TIME]

A trip to Dickinson, ND

I'm taking a trip to Dickinson between June 7th and June 10th.
I've arrived here on the third leg of this series of trips and I'll be working for the next couple of days with the Western Wellness Foundation.

A trip to Chicago

I'm taking a trip to Chicago this weekend. I'm meeting friends from DC and Chicago to attend the World Cup 2010 Qualifying Match: U.S. vs. Honduras Futbol!
Click here to read about the match.