How can I gain confidence that the choices I make will allow me to thrive? What implications do my choices have for myself and my community?
In October’s DwD, Eric Rosenberg shared how concepts from financial asset management might craft a broader ‘human portfolio’. We investigated the principles and practices of ‘value investing’ and its connections to wealth and well-being. Participants examined their inventory of existing prosperity tools recognize ‘expenditures’ for which they’re taking responsibility, and began creating a ‘choice architecture’ designed to realize a Life Well Spent.
About the host
Eric Rosenberg is a nature-inspired city guy with strong curiosities and big talent for turning what he learns and how he sees it into forms and content that engage us. He has a post-industrial sensibility, meaning his inclinations are toward a small-scale, grassroots way of life, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. Eric has degrees in finance, fine art, and education, which feed his passion to voice and gather people around the idea of developing their own human portfolio that serves as a foundation from which they design a life of their own choosing – a life well spent. Learn more about Eric’s own developing portfolio at healthymoney.ca.
Occupy DwD: The Innovation of Disruptive Democracy
Across continents, people in the developed nations have declared a time-out from the economic ravages dealt to Main Street citizens and working families by merely placing their bodies and minds in visible public spaces. Whether or not you have spent time at St. James or Zuccotti park, the message of this new medium of dissent is clear – people of all ages and walks of life have had enough. The mechanisms given to us to exert democratic change have proven insufficient to the extraordinary problems of the time. Politicians and their entrenched financial sponsors have perfected a parallel fantasy world where CEOs tell governments what to do.
This Occupy “movement of the people,” though started without a designed plan, represents possibly the most obvious call to systemic action we have seen in our lifetimes. Without presenting the media fodder of demands or talking points, a clear and common vision for creating a responsible political and economic system has taken shape.
For November 2011, DwD invited the emerging and expanding Occupy movement with global and local citizens to a dialogue on the future of responsive democratic governance. The call was to help frame the emerging democratic engagement, not as activism or problem solving, but as visioning and caring for a shared future.
(Video) Presenting the purposes of Occupy as visions for the long-term expression of the values, goals, and actions of the movement. (Below) Collaboratively constructing a field of purposes in a hierarchy from personal to the transcendent.
The purpose of this session was inspired by George Lakoff’s call for the Occupy movement to clarify its purpose through its shared morality:
In a series of 4 fast cycles (circle, cafe, purpose tree, and circle) we explored the shared territory of several questions: