Thursday, April 19, 2007

New (to me) blog on changing the world


The blog is called SharingWitness and its got some important thinkers writing for it. I love the combination of voices, and the look (newspaper-esque). The categories cut across many of my interests. Its copyright date is 2006, so my apologies for not finding it sooner.

One thing occurred to me as I read through several posts. The authors are a robust mix of nonprofit professionals, social enterprise leaders, philanthropic executives, consultants, individual donors, foundation board members, and corporate givers. They are from several countries. Their posts are categorized under five broad areas:

And, of course, everything is tagged so you can think about these issues anyway you want.

This, to me, is a perfect representation of how we are thinking about ourselves in new ways, today. Maybe its because of digital media, maybe because of globalization, maybe its a new generation, maybe all of the above and other reasons as well.

Consider this: in a world where foundations have their own association, nonprofits have theirs, small foundations have theirs, corporate givers theirs, American, Canadians and Europeans each have their own, and social entrepreneurs have dozens - where did this cross-sector, cross-country, cross-issue, cross-role group come from?

And which kind of group - heterogeneous, online, global or homogeneous, face-to-face, nationally bounded - will we see more of going forward?

Yeah, Yeah, I know. You'll say both. But think about it.

3 comments:

Gillian said...

Hi Lucy,
I'm a regular reader. Thanks for this pointer to Sharing Witness, it looks great! I've added it to my feed.

Unknown said...

I think there's more staying power in local connections over the long haul, with the international as a regular wakeup to a wider world.

Unknown said...

Lucy,

Thanks so much for the kind words about Sharing Witness. I'm not surprised that you get what we're trying to do, since you've been doing it naturally for a long while now, but a positive review from you is high praise, indeed! Hope we can work together in the future.

Cheers-
Beth Scofield
Sharing Witness