So much of how we see the world is constructed by the frames in which we position our values and our ideas, in turn these frames ultimately shape our world view.  Frames clearly articulated by George LaKoff, are created through language.  Catapult Media has launched www.storyworks.ca  to begin to work in partnership [...]

As 180 countries are at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bali trying to figure what should be done once the Kyoto Protocol expires in four years. What kind of results can we really expect from these public leaders?
I suppose the question remains is do we have the elected leadership [...]

“A story is a re-imagined experience narrated with enough detail and feeling to cause your listeners’ imagination to experience it as real,” says storytelling guru and author Annette Simmons.
One of the things that I have learned working in the NGO community for two decades is that we have a hard time telling our [...]

Climate change, human rights, fair trade, good governance, peace, food security and access to health care and education are all part of a complex progressive global agenda. This agenda is lead by civil society organizations. Communicating the complexity of this agenda into digestible bits in the "era of the snack culture" is an enormous [...]

In a recent interview in the New York Times Magazine Al Gore says, “The monolith of apathy and opposition has begun to break up; and because social change, like climate change is nonlinear, the shift in public opinion may come about very suddenly.”
The tipping point may in fact already be at hand even in [...]

In a CBC interview aired May 17th, world-renowned author, philosopher and recent winner of the prestigious Templeton Prize, Charles Taylor says that in our post-911 adversarial world the absence of meaning in the lives of young men is fertile ground for suicide bombers. “We need to look into what makes this kind of meaning vacuum,” [...]

Today in Berlin Bono and Bob Geldof held a press conference to call upon G8 nations to meet their commitments to double aid to Africa by 2010. So far the G8 countries, including Canada are falling far short. Today, 41% of Africans are living on less than one dollar a day.
A report released [...]

One of the many results of globalization has been the emergence of global social movements to well … address the other results of globalization … such as unfair trade practices, increase militarization and massive human displacement, loss of food sovereignty and the lack of local accountability with decision-making powers shifting upward and in many cases [...]

So it has been a few weeks now since June Callwood died. A most remarkable of Canadian lives she lived and lived to its fullest. Many words have been said about her passing.
I remember when working with a NGO how I would craft the public service announcements each year that she [...]

You could have heard a pin drop in a room of several hundred professional fundraisers. As Stephen Lewis, the Ottawa AFP Conference keynote speaker said “The number one issue, bar none that I feel the most strongly about…
“is the presence of gender inequality it is doing such ravishing damage in the world it is [...]