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Leveraging collaboration to tap into the potential of local foods

August 6, 2021

Leveraging collaboration to tap into the potential of local foods

 

salad in a take out box with heart shaped produce cutout

Photo Credit: North Coast Opportunities’ Caring Kitchen Project

With farming being the root of the nation’s food supply, former President Barack Obama’s administration launched a federal Local Foods, Local Places (LFLP) program in 2014. This initiative was designed to help communities develop creative approaches to tap into their own food producers and bolster their region’s economy.

Spearheaded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the program has since provided direct, technical support and expertise on how best to integrate entrepreneurship, environmental management, public health, and other considerations, to more than 125 communities nationwide, to develop specific regional projects targeting access to local food. That includes farmers markets, community gardens, cooperative grocery stores, and food hubs that improve environmental, economic and health outcomes.

“The program was a real boost for our community,” said Sherene Hess, Indiana County, Pennsylvania commissioner. Indiana County, located in west-central Pennsylvania, was one of 16 communities selected in 2018.

LFLP was born out of the former Livable Communities in Appalachia program, which was established to promote economic development, preserve rural lands, and increase access to locally grown food in Appalachian towns and rural communities. That program halted in 2014 and was replaced by LFLP, which continues the focus to support small towns and rural areas nationwide. Outside of the EPA and USDA, LFLP is supported by the Department of Transportation (DoT), Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), and the Delta Regional Authority (DRA).

There are three phases within the LFLP program: plan, convene and act. In the planning phase, the community and federal agencies develop a steering committee to outline goals for the project and identify other community stakeholders for community-based workshops…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Mainstream Journalism Doesn’t Exist: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

March 12, 2021

Mainstream Journalism Doesn’t Exist: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Journalists should be exposing inconvenient truths about powerful people in their own nation and its allies. Instead the people we call “journalists” criticize enemy nations, smear political dissidents, demand increasing amounts of censorship, and advance narratives that are convenient for the powerful.

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The “war on terror” is a false pretext for interventionism in the Middle East and the “war on drugs” is a false pretext for interventionism in Latin America.

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Lula being free and eligible to run again in Brazil is a very big deal with huge implications for US imperialism. This isn’t like some fake leftist getting into the Democratic Party or whatever, this is a real thing that will have real consequences in a nation with huge geostrategic significance to the US empire. The empire invested many years staging a coup in one of the largest nations on earth, and it’s not just going to let it be reversed without a fuss. I’m bit nervous about what will happen.

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The Monroe Doctrine is literally just the US saying “Latin America is our Africa. You guys get those brown people over there, these are our brown people over here.”

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I love how pundits talk about the Monroe Doctrine like it’s a real thing that has actual legitimacy. “Well we can’t have Russia and China interfering in Venezuela, that’s just the Monroe Doctrine.” No, how about you fuck all the way off from any country not named the United States of America.

We could be collaborating with each other and with our ecosystem to create a beautiful, awesome, healthy world. Instead we’re all competing with each other working meaningless jobs creating pieces of landfill which serve no purpose besides turning millionaires into billionaires.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

How To Beat A Manipulator

August 21, 2018

How To Beat A Manipulator

I’ve been busy working through some of my own stuff lately, while marveling at how closely my personal journey has been mirrored in the larger world. I wrote out the following as a personal exercise while meditating on all the similarities between abusive personal relationships with manipulators and our relationship as a species with the sociopathic plutocrats who rule us. I got a lot out of writing it, and it came out relatively readable, so I figured I’d publish it as-is in case anyone else finds it useful too. Here ya go!

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Humans are hackable. Ask any conman. Our desire to think we have control over our lives often hides this from ourselves, but most of us are highly suggestible and hypnotizable. If you think you’re not, you’re in more danger of being hacked than someone who has humbled themselves enough to see how this works in them.

There’s no need to be ashamed of being conned. Realizing that you’ve been, or are being, conned will naturally bring up feelings of embarrassment, but it’s never your fault that someone’s taken you for a ride. Get clear: conning someone is the crime; being conned is being a victim of that crime. That’s how the law sees it in fraud cases. Manipulators would love you to think that it’s your fault for allowing yourself to be manipulated, but that’s just another manipulation isn’t it?

Manipulators use one of our most astounding, useful, and beautiful human characteristics when they con us — empathy. Our innately trusting nature is the reason why we’ve been able to collaborate on large scales to create and innovate in extraordinary ways unseen anywhere else in the animal kingdom.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is the CEO obsolete? A look the emerging organization

April 30, 2018

Is the CEO obsolete? A look the emerging organization

Recently, the writer of a guest editorial in The Guardian Weekly proposed a solution to what ails the world’s business schools: Shut them down. The author, Martin Parker, claims there are 13,000 business schools on the planet and he says that’s 13,000 too many. He says the reason he knows a total shutdown is the only remedy that will actually work is that he’s taught in business schools for the last 20 years.

His detailed critique covers a lot of territory, but I found one part of it particularly interesting in light of what I’ve been reading lately. Parker wrote: “If we want those in power to become more responsible, then we must stop teaching students that heroic transformational leaders are the answer to every problem[.]”

At first blush it seems as if we need more such leaders. But I think the point here is the same point which management consultant and author John Hagel is making in his book, The Power of Pull: This kind of thinking leads to passivity rather than the creative engagement which our society so desperately needs.

Hagel explains that what he calls “scalable” collaboration and learning are now the essential ingredients to have broad impact on society.

Legacy organizations (which means nearly all of our organizations) have largely been organized around economies of scale. Organizations can become more efficient in the delivery of goods and services, whether a corporation, a nonprofit or a government, if they scale up their size, break down and routinize all the needed tasks, and ruthlessly drive toward increased efficiency in operations. But, that works only up to a point because each increment of efficiency becomes harder and harder to achieve.

The result is what we see today. Employees working longer hours with increasingly stressful performance targets and less help to achieve them. Their routines and targets come from on high with little or no creative input from the employees.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ultrasociality: The Key to Human History?

December 21, 2015

Ultrasociality: The Key to Human History?

Peter Turchin’s book deserves to be devoured in a few hours, and that’s what I did. But, I emerged out of it with a sensation of disappointment (*). Possibly it was unavoidable: all the books that attempt to explain everything are destined to fall short in one way or another. But, surely, this is a book worth reading.

The concept of “ultrasociality” is becoming increasing popular as a tool to understand the characteristics and the evolution of human society. It is a concept taken from evolutionary biology that describes how some species attain evolutionary success by means of collaboration among individuals. The extreme form of this idea is found with social insects; ants and bees, whose behavior is usually termed “eusociality” (“the good sociality”). Humans don’t arrive at the degree of hyperspecialization of some insect societies, but they are more socially specialized than most mammals, hence the term “ultrasociality”.

The idea that collaboration is a fundamental factor in evolution is becoming more and more popular in biology. We are seeing the decline of some rather restrictive concepts that described evolution strictly as the result of individual competition alone. In the past, these concepts led to the idea that life was a battle of everyone against everyone else and the idea spread from biology to other economics and to politics. The consequence was a series of egregious disasters; for instance, the development of a style of management that encourages people in engaging in cutthroat competition with their coworkers. An example of how disastrous this idea can be is that of the management of Enron by Jeff Skilling, presently in jail for various felony charges (as described in Turchin’s book).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Collaboration and changing beliefs are two keys for a degrowth economy

November 24, 2015

Collaboration and changing beliefs are two keys for a degrowth economy

Brazil is an amazing country, full of natural richness and blessed with many beauties. It has, however, a terrible sin on his shoulders: the thought that everything has to be done in a different, shorter, and faster way – in a way that takes advantage of everything. This is also why Brazil is currently undergoing a huge economic and political crisis, particularly reflected by the lack of confidence of our people in our government. At the same time, this is precisely what makes people overthink their values, and so a silent revolution is happening.

I work with the Transition Town Movement in Brazil from the moment it has started in our country. Being one of the people who brought it here, I feel like a witness of how its seeds are growing and how we start thinking about another way of living that is more sustainable and resilient.

In the early times of the movement we talked a lot about peak oil and climate change and about how we can degrow our consumption and stop climate change. Today, however, with the passing of the years and the growth of the movement, we feel that one of the biggest contributions of the movement to our society is incentivizing cooperation between people and encouraging creativity to find solutions to these problems.

This collaboration is even creating new ways of doing business in Brazil, the “collaborative economy” or “reconomy” where growth and consumption are not the highest priority, but the pursuit of a meaningful and much happier life. In the light of this, there are suddenly many beautiful business proposals around where collaboration and not consumption is the key to this new way of living. Some of these innovative business ideas I would like to share with you here.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Collaboration, Adaptation and Risk: Innovate or Die

May 5, 2015

Collaboration, Adaptation and Risk: Innovate or Die 

Collaboration, innovation and risk are all intrinsic to adaptation. Without adaptation, every system eventually perishes once conditions change.

One feature of capitalism that is rarely discussed is the premium placed on cooperation and collaboration. The Darwinian aspect of competition is widely accepted (and rued) as capitalism’s dominant force, but cooperation and collaboration are just as intrinsic to capitalism as competition. Subcontractors must cooperate to assemble a product, suppliers must cooperate to deliver the various components, distributors must cooperate to get the products to retail outlets, employees and managers must cooperate to reach the goals of the organization, and local governments and communities must cooperate with enterprises to maintain the local economy.

Ideas, techniques and processes which are better and more productive than previous versions will spread quickly; those who refuse to adapt them will be overtaken by those who do. These new ideas, techniques and processes trigger changes in society and the economy that are often difficult to predict.Darwin’s understanding of natural selection is often misapplied. In its basic form, natural selection simply means that the world is constantly changing, and organisms must adapt or they will expire. The same is true of individuals, enterprises, governments, cultures and economies. Darwin wrote: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, or the most intelligent, but the ones most adaptable to change.”

This creates a dilemma: we want more prosperity and wider opportunities for self-cultivation (personal fulfillment), yet we don’t want our security and culture to be disrupted. But we cannot have it both ways. Those who attempt to preserve their power over the social order while reaping the gains of free markets find their power dissolving before their eyes as unintended consequences of technological and social innovations disrupt their mechanisms of control.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

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