Sustainability Leadership Abounds

We are pleased to announce the launch of our global sustainability leadership organization: Abound.

 

Commitment      Connection     Opportunity

Who We Are

We are leaders in businesses, non-profit organizations and institutions with a mission for sustainability who want to accelerate the pace of change. We believe it is time to re-imagine, re-design, re-organize and re-align to create a present that carries us through sustainability to a future of abundance.

We are all over the world. Headquartered in Portland, Oregon, we have chapters developing across the US and Canada, Japan and the Asia Pacific region. Our global mission is to:

• Strengthen and enhance sustainable leadership
• Develop powerful and deep connections between leaders
• Create sustainable abundance

What We Do

Abound is a membership supported, driven and defined non-profit organization. We provide:

• Leadership Circles: Peer to peer learning groups  committed to helping members deepen their individual, organizational, community and national leadership capacity.
• Learning Events: Integrated into the Leadership Circle experience, these learning sessions  provide participants with the hands on  expertise and learning they need to take their organizations beyond sustainability to abundance.
• Individual and Organizational Assessment: Every member will receive free initial assessments of their leadership capacities, strengths and styles.  After a year, follow up assessments will be made so each member can account for their growth and development.  Abound will also provide assessments of the member organizations to  determine the level  of sustainability the organization has achieved upon joining and over time.
• Knowledge Net: A repository of individual member, sponsor and supporter capabilities and knowledge which any member can access and harness for support.
• Research & Publishing: Thorough, relevant and leading edge research into sustainable practices and their connection to helping member organizations grow and thrive.
• Projects: Supporting members and gathering member support for community, educational and sustainable development projects.

Stay tuned for more…or check out our the Abound website at: www.aboundglobal.org

Tags: Abound, Canada, Japan, leadership, Leadership Circles, Portland Oregon, sustainability

Walking in the rain with my son

It’s easy to remember what I do this all for.

Rain dripping spring green leaves, conversations
ripples crossing puddles,
forming streams, rivulets running
down arms, creasing our fingers
intertwined, walking
downstream.

Tags: rain, spring, water

Social Media & Sustainability 2.0

We’ll be giving a talk on the connections between social media and sustainability next week. As I was doing some research on the topic I came upon this slightly dated piece over at Max Gladwell.

They make a good point that there is nothing “inherently green about social media.” Indeed. Social media is exactly what it sounds like: means for conveying ideas and information, connecting people and creating and maintaining relationships.

We also need to understand that sustainable sustainability is not “green” either. Or rather, it is “green” but it also red, orange, yellow, blue, turquoise, indigo, violet, etc. Simply, if we want to sustain our selves and the potential in the human endeavor for all sentient beings to prosper, we must go full spectrum.

We live in a value web. We need to manage multiple polarities and find a way to stream value into as many of the nodes of the web as possible. The more we are able to strengthen and enhance the web the more we are able to benefit in return. It is (almost) instant karma.

This is where social media comes in. The potential in social media to deeply interconnect us and provide cross-functional, cross-divisional, cross-industry, cross-sector collaboration is already being realized in technologies like Facebook and Twitter. A recent Business Week article shows how Accenture has developed enterprise versions of these systems as well. WiserEarth, an online community, also has adapted Wiki technology to connect sustainability-oriented groups and individuals. 

Social media can accelerate and deepen the connection process. Interconnection is a key success factor for sustainability, and beyond sustainability, abundance. In the end, though, it is not the technology that matters. It is the intent and capacity of the users. Designers can and will design user interfaces that can meet a wide variety of needs. If we want to get the most out of Web 2.0, I believe we first need to design Sustainability 2.0. Sustainability 2.0 is a full-spectrum, value web centered, coherent approach to doing well together. 

Let’s see what we can emerge.

Tags: abundance, Facebook, green, instant karma, Max Gladwell, polarity management, social media, sustainability, turquoise, Twitter, UDX, value web, web 2.0, Wiki, WiserEarth, yellow