Chris Langdon of Think the Unthinkable and I would like to invite you to join at least one small virtual meeting that we are organizing to explore and make plans for what we can do together to solve the world’s many social ills once the pandemic and the crisis it has produced come to an end.
Each group will have between five and ten participants and will meet for an hour using Zoom (I do wish I had bought Zoom stock at its IPO). For a detailed version of what we are thinking about, see my blog post– https://charleshauss.info/teachable-moments-learnable-moments/
We will be starting with people we know in the peacebuilding and social change/leadership communities where we have spent the bulk of our time professionally. More importantly, we plan to add individuals who have focused on other issue areas precisely because it is already clear that none of us has “the answer” when it comes to the pandemic or its implications.
Some of the initial meetings will be general. Some will focus on a specific issue(s) which the participants all care about (e.g., college campuses, reconciliation, leadership). Each will treat the current crisis as a teachable moment in which we all can:
- Learn some preliminary lessons from the crisis about interdependence, our need to forge cooperative solutions to the pandemic and on so many other issues, and more.
- Treat each discussion as an example of Sugata Mitra’s self-organized learning environments in which we will come up with at least one potential project members of the group could realistically could engage in once the crisis ends.
After that, we hope that some members of some of the groups will be interested enough to continue talking either one-on-one or in other small groups which we would create to begin making concrete plans for those projects, especially those that could either be taken to scale or seem to have potential to reshape one or more of the pressing problems our planet faces.
Our goal is to attract people from a wide variety of backgrounds and with a wide variety of interests—not just the peacebuilding and leadership fields in which we have both been working.
If you are interested in participating, send me an email at [email protected].
If you are interested but don’t have either the bandwidth or the time to take part, feel free to pass this announcement on to people you know who might be interested.