Working with Difference: Practices for Cultivating Change
September 20th, 2018
Bridging differences is an essential step toward a more resilient future. In order to address current and impending impacts of climate change, we must work collaboratively. This means constructively engaging with organizations, communities, and individuals with unique histories, values, and cultures. In this session, you will practice frameworks and learn about case studies that can unlock our most creative responses to climate hazards, all of which are enabled by collaboration.
The Center for Whole Communities employs systems thinking, behavioral psychology, and neuroscience to gain insight into enacting change. Join this session to put theory into practice, cultivate your own relationship-building capacity, and collaborate effectively in building community resilience.
Presenters:
Ginny McGinn, Co-Director, Organizational Development & Programs
Ginny McGinn is a mother, artist, organizer, meditator and radical change midwife. Throughout her career, she has been deeply involved in the work of social and organizational change and in building partnerships across lines of power and privilege. Ginny has a profound interest in how change happens, from the level of individual transformation through the level of entire communities or systems, and it is this process of change that she seeks to continue to study and facilitate in her leadership at Whole Communities.
Previously, Ginny served as president of Bioneers, a national nonprofit dedicated to disseminating practical and visionary solutions for restoring Earth’s ecosystems and healing human communities. While at Bioneers she and her colleagues greatly expanded the reach of its programs by launching satellite conferences and building partnerships in cities around the country, creating access for many who would not have otherwise had it.
Cultivating practices that support whole communities (lowercase intended) and bringing those practices into our daily lives is the focus of her current work. Through “Whole Thinking in Practice” we are able to stay present, make better decisions, and act on behalf of the whole as we go about our work in organizations and movements.
Ginny facilitates and consults on organizational change around the country, using the Whole Thinking Practices and the tools she and her colleagues have helped evolve at Center for Whole Communities.
Josh Car
rera, Program Manager, Center for Whole Communities
Josh Carrera is a proud New Yorker that grew up in Brooklyn to a first generation Ecuadorian immigrant family. During his years in college and graduate school, Josh’s interests led him to study sustainable development and international relations in Ecuador, Mexico, and Brazil. More recently, Josh has been involved in local environmental and housing issues in his native city. One of Joshua’s proudest accomplishments has been organizing a six-day volunteer event where New Yorkers planted close to 8,000 trees over six days at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. Josh is a founding member of Mi Casa No Es Su Casa: Illumination Against Gentrification, an activist project which uses art as a form of protest against the rapid neo-colonization of Brooklyn neighborhoods. Josh is a proud collective member of Mayday Space – a social justice movement space where he is working on building a radical library that values truth, critical thinking, and justice. In his free time, Josh loves to take salsa and bachata classes or photograph the newest city he is visiting.
