Category Archives: Transforming

Projects that are making a difference, improving lives, and building communities.

Around the world, Authors A-H, Social Issues

Diversity, Dialogue, and Mindsight – by Greg Nees

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Have you ever entered a conversation with the best of intentions, only to end up in an argument? I suspect we have all had this experience and I’d like to suggest that one reason this happens so often is because of mind distance. When we try to communicate with people whose experiences and world views are very different from our own, we often run into invisible walls. It’s like trying to describe colors to a friend who has been blind from birth. No matter how much we try to explain what the world looks, sounds, and feels like to us, if the other person’s experiences have been significantly different, they will have trouble listening and understanding. In my work as an interculturalist, I encounter such mind distance on a regular basis.

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Authors I-Q, Go Green

TRANSPARENCY in The PARIS CLIMATE AGREEMENT – by Olumide Idowu

The Paris Climate Agreement sets crucial goals: to limit global temperature increase, and specific goals in three areas – mitigation, adaptation and finance. The long-term goal for mitigation is 2 °C strengthening to 1.5 °C which guides the Agreement. There is a global goal adaptation which includes increasing adaptive capacity and resilience; and a finance goal to increase post 2020 from $100 billion per year. Finance flows will have to balance adaptation and mitigation.

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Around the world, Authors R-Z, Social Issues

French Introspection & Action: Aftermath Of The Paris Attacks – by Andrew Scharf

All of a sudden, the French find themselves front and center on the world stage: continued slow economic growth, the surge of refugees across Europe and now, dealing with the aftermath of November 13. Since the carnage that hit Paris, President Hollande has been on hyper-drive: air strikes in Syria, intensified security, and persistent lobbying among key world leaders for a coordinated war against ISIS.

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Authors A-H, Religious Diversity, Social Issues

Creating Cultural Tolerance, One Meal at a Time – by Elisabeth Falcone

My daughter came home from Middle School where they were studying the Holocaust and asked me “Mommy, was grandpa a Nazi?” How do you answer such a question? Easy! I said “No”, because all of my life I had heard my parents rail against the Hitler regime. They sent my father to the Russian front and my mother to the basement for shelter from the Allied bombers attacking Berlin. But thirty years later, a fifth-grader in my French class, who was also learning about the Holocaust, asked me, “Why are the German people so awful?” Now the answer was not so easy, because the student unwittingly used a stereotype painting all present-day German people as Nazi criminals. Without going into the history of WWII, I briefly explained that not all Germans are awful, just like not all Americans are awful. Still, seeing an opportunity for a lesson, I taught the French words for “war and peace” (la guerre et la paix) and went on with class.

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Authors A-H, Social Issues

Don’t get mad, get home safely – by Terry Howard

PROLOG: It’s 11 PM and from our living room we could hear the cranking sound of the garage door opening. Seconds later we heard his Mazda pull in. And a minute later he walked into the room, smile on face, and greeted us: “Hi mom, hi dad, I’m home!” From the perspective of African American parents of a young black male, there’re no sweeter sounds than those six words…. “Hi mom, hi dad, I’m home!”…., particularly given the current dangerous state of race relations in the USA.

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Around the world, Authors A-H, Healthcare, Teams & Leaders

Learn to Relish the Inconvenience – by Terry Howard

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Guess what readers? It took me 25 hours to go from Dallas to Germany a while back.

But don’t feel sorry for me because that trip was one of my best ever. Now before telling me to get a checkup from the neck up, bear with me for a moment. I’ll get to the rest of the story further down. I first need to come clean with you on a revelation.

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Levine articles, Religious Diversity, Social Issues

Chattanoogans Mourn the Fallen Five – by Deborah Levine

The traffic was fierce on Martin Luther King Boulevard as people flocked to the community-wide interfaith service at Mount Olivet Baptist Church. Olivet, had grown from humble beginning in the 1920s to one of the city’s largest African-American churches. Yet, the church was packed, overflowing with elected officials, police officers and FBI, military veterans, and media among the diverse crowd of Black & White, Christians, Jews, and Muslim. Together, we prayed over the loss of four marines and a wounded sailor, who would die just hours later. We prayed over the trauma to our entire community inflicted by lone gunman, Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez.

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Levine articles, Social Issues

Was Charleston Terrorism or What? – by Deborah Levine

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Nine people were killed by Dylann Storm Roof in Charleston’s historic black church and the debate about how to categorize his actions is fierce. Is it domestic terrorism or mass murder? Is it a case of drug-induced mental illness or a hate crime? The debate embraces some of the most controversial issues of our time: guns, race, alienated young men, and the confederate flag. The question before us should not be which of the labels and issues are relevant and correct. Rather, the question should be how to address the volatile mix now surfacing in terrifying blasts with increasing frequency.

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Authors I-Q, Social Issues

Los Angeles 1992 to Baltimore 2015: Washington’s Changed Response to Urban Crisis – by Bruce Katz

The recent unrest in Baltimore occurred almost 23 years to the day after the riots in Los Angeles set off by the beating of Rodney King. As many observers have pointed out, the factors that precipitated these events—concentrated poverty, high unemployment, abuse of police power—remain disturbingly the same. And like Baltimore (and Ferguson before it), the Los Angeles riots were treated as a “wake-up call” for the country. What has changed, however, is the nature and scope of the federal response.

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