Category: Articles
The Fragility of Community
Community is more than the sum parts of physical infrastructure, much more than the social environment in which people live and fundamentally more than the services which people have come to expect. Community is the primarily intangible environment where people co-exist, raise families and build memories. The challenge of building community capacity and subsequently using […]
Lessons Learned from Working in Rural and Peripheral Communities
(The picture is from the Lower North Shore of Quebec in the winter. My Colleague Vicki Driscoll arrives at the airport to pick me up as we prepare to travel along the coast to the string of rural communities not connected by a road network. This transportation works well during the winter season) This was […]
Summer was Easy
Here I am half way through my current volunteer contract in Ukraine. For me it’s been six months of travel, interaction and learning. Yet, at this stage there is so much I don’t understand much less appreciate and language is only a minimal component as even the people whom I have met that have been […]
Ukrainian Reflections – after three months
(This was taken on a train from Kyiv to Uzhgorod a frequent trip for me. While it was a 17 hour journey it was always fun and often insightful as you met many people.) Saturday the 14th was the beginning of my third month in Ukraine. As I write this it is once again on […]
Community Sustainability – a spiritual mission
Present societal change is causing both reflection and reorganization of the fundamentals of our society, institutions, and approach to government. Theses shifts have been evident for the past number of decades but now the limits of sustainability of our present social and economic structures are being reached.
Community Economic Development
Community Economic Development (CED), the development of communities by the people that live in them, in the Canadian context, has had a very varied history and one could suggest a very checkered past. One could even say it is still a history in the making as in the country among communities, policy makers and others […]
Moving Beyond the Shadows – a time for honest contemplation
I have been contemplating the concept of “shadows” for sometime. A thoughtful statement by a colleague and friend initiated this reflection as he suggested that the work of building community requires those doing the guiding to appear as shadows. This reminded me of Scotland where oftentimes, my suggestion to those with whom I worked, was […]
Disposable Life – throw away thinking
It’s amazing that at a point in time in human history, when people are supposedly most learned, sophisticated and advanced, life is so expendable. I say life because most everything in life to day is disposable. A society has been created whereby things are acquired and disposed with little regard for the nature of their […]
Global Development – the local challenge
The changes taking place in society are so pervasive that they are causing fundamental shifts in our thinking, attitudes and our approaches to development issues. The integration of economies, shifts in manufacturing bases, communications developments and technological developments are having impacts, causing stress and re-evaluation of institutions, programs and methodologies. In essence, we are arriving […]
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