FIRST IN YOUR HOME, THEN IN YOUR COMMUNITY… THE RIPPLE EFFECT BUILDS A SUSTAINABLE SOCIETY.
My work and calling is social innovation. Someone once called me a “strategic meddler” – I observe how human systems function, imagine how what small intervention could do a world of good and start to experiment on a small scale until it’s ready to spread. Financial independence allows me to practice this art and trade with love, immediacy and accuracy – even if no one else understands what I am doing until the idea has taken off.
A social innovation is like a catalyst – introduced into an environment it will initiate a cascade of chain reactions. You can imagine it like a boulder which, when dropped in a river, redirects the flow for everything downstream. Or call it a “life-hack” for a society or like a little piece of code put in some unconscious life process that improves results or wakes people up enough to see new possibilities. It’s deceptively simply yet can have a significant effect. Social Innovations work with culture and systems, not politics, but they can make waves and change that politically seems impossible.
The social innovations I’ve worked on are designed to transform those ordinary daily life processes – like shopping, cooking, spending and saving money, talking to one another – from habits and beliefs, programed by the dominant story tellers (advertising/media) and run mostly unconsciously, into sense that life is about learning, self-discovery and connection.
- The 9-step program in Your Money or Your Life
- Conversation Cafes
- the 10-Day Local Food Challenge
- the podcast What Could Possibly Go Right?
- the Coming of Aging blog.
In 2010 I undertook a 30-day, 10-mile diet to test the viability of my local food system. I’d seen the need for greater community self-reliance in the disruptive years ahead and knew that our island community was far too dependent on the mainland for… well, everything. As part of this I helped start Transition Whidbey (see video below) which spawned and supported new projects and institutions on Whidbey Island, from an Organic Farm School to a fruit tree gleaning project to my subsequent book, Blessing the Hands that Feed Us.