Effective change
“Act locally, connect regionally, learn globally” The Berkana Institute
People acting together locally can join up and provide solutions to many of the world’s most difficult problems. Using Emergence to Take Social Innovations to Scale.
How?
- Self-organising networks – individuals and groups realise everyone depends on each other. They organise to support the diversity and viability of everyone. This is how nature creates rainforests, ecosystems and the whole planet
- Emergence – local actions spring up in many different places at the same time. When connected together these local actions emerge as a powerful, larger system. This can happen very quickly
- A new system appears – it is greater than the sum of its parts, has new abilities beyond those of the local actions it sprang from, its arrival is always a surprise
MADGE is supporting this by:
- discovering all the wonderful projects going on locally and globally
- encouraging people to get active, network and join in
- sharing the results – send us your stories
- celebrating - food connects us to each other and the wider world
Read the “Cool Food section” Join up to the MADGE newsletter and be part of it all.
Can this really work?
It depends on your point of view. Frances Moore Lappe in her book “Getting a Grip” shows how your assumptions about life shape your actions. She explains two spirals – one of powerlessness the other of empowerment. Choose one:
Spiral of Empowerment | Spiral of Powerlessness |
Plenty of goods and goodness | Lack of goods and goodness |
Within human nature are deep needs for fairness, co-operation effectiveness and meaning so... | Human nature is selfish, competitive and materialistic so... |
We’re capable of learning the skills of deliberative problem solving, and .... | We’re incapable of deliberating to achieve common good, and |
Democracy becomes no longer a fixed structure but an evolving, values-driven culture we create. | We must distrust government and trust an impersonal fixed law - the Market – to decide social outcomes |
Rules, set democratically, keep wealth widely dispersed... | But markets only work if driven by highest return to existing wealth, so... |
So markets remain open, competitive, and life-serving as guided by democratic politics. | Wealth inexorably concentrates. |
Political decision-making is freed from the influence of wealth... | Concentrated wealth then infects and warps political decision-making, so... |
So more and more people have a voice in problem solving. | Power inequities worsen, generating scarcity from abundance and with it needless suffering and destruction of the natural world |
Problem-solving, power, connection and hope grow... | Fear, depression and violence spread |
Enabling progress toward resolving local-to-global crises – and reinforcing the the idea that ... | competition and consumerism intensify and our ecology collapses reinforcing the idea that |
There are plenty of goods and goodness | There is a lack of goods and goodness |
Taken from Getting A Grip: Clarity, Creativity and Courage in a World Gone Mad
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