Building a Movement
Building a movement for social change takes passion, energy and resources. Social movements have a life cycle: they are created, they grow, they achieve successes or failures and eventually dissolve and cease to exist. In this session Mary Rowe will highlight this lifecycle by examining a variety of tools to encourage innovative, holistic approaches to building a movement. Mary’s long and productive career has focused on facilitating solutions to complex problems in the public realm. In particular she played an instrumental role in advocating for a new deal for cities in Canada as Director of Ideas that Matter and currently works with a US philanthropic initiative fostering self-organization in urban communities.
(More Than) Five Good Resources
- Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience . Harper Collins, 1990.
- Kauffman, Stuart. At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-organization and Complexity . Oxford University Press, 1995.
- Johnson, Steven . Emergence: The Connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software . Scribner, 2001.
- Easterly, William. The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done Much Ill and So Little Good , Penguin, 2006.
- Goldsworthy, Andy (sculptor)
- Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business , Economies, Societies, and Nations. Doubleday, 2004.
- Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo. Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means for Business , Science and Everyday Life. Plume 2003.
- Pollan, Michael. The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals . Penguin, 2006.