Category: People Helping People

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Activism, Business-general, Democracy, Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Ethics in Government, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, language, People Helping People, Politics, poverty, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Palmer W. Cook
Photo of debris after Hurricane Katrina
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Palmer W. Cook

It’s not often you hear a self-professed liberal Jewish feminist open her talk with ten minutes praising the Pope. But that’s how Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything, The Shock Doctrine, and several other groundbreaking books, began her talk at Mount Holyoke College last night. While acknowledging a litany of areas where she and Francis have profound disagreements—among them same-sex marriage and a woman’s right to control her own body—she thanked him publicly for his attention to the planet in peril and its dispossessed people, saying he was a great example of what environmental leadership looks like right now.

And for Klein, those two areas—helping the planet and replacing poverty with abundance—are forever braided together. “Climate change is an accelerant to all the other issues going wrong…It’s not about saying climate change is so big that it trumps everything else. All are equally urgent, and we don’t win by pitting these issues against each other.” We win, she says, by joining forces to demand holistic approaches that simultaneously solve climate heating, create jobs and economic opportunity, and remediate ism-based oppression—by “connecting climate change with a broken economic model”—a concept she calls “intersectionality.”

(This is a message particularly dear to my own heart, and thoroughly integrated into my forthcoming 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World as well as my own talk, “‘Impossible’ is a Dare.”)

The impacts of climate change, she notes, often fall most heavily among the very poor countries, and the very poor residents of rich countries. Oil refineries, coal plants, and high asthma rates tend to be found in low-income communities, often with high concentrations of people of color. Rising floodwaters will inundate poor, tiny island nations first. “It’s not just about things getting hotter, but about things getting meaner. More militarized, more racist,” as we see in the response of countries like Hungary to the Syrian refugee crisis. Which she sees as climate-related, noting that the Syrian civl war followed the worst drought in Syria’s history. Climate change, she says, is also a women’s and a feminist issue; the impacts hit women disproportionately as well.

So her challenge to climate activists is to turn “disaster apartheid” (e.g., the detestable official response to Hurricane Katrina) into “energy democracy.” And that includes making sure that the communities hit hardest are first in line for improvements that meet their needs.

Hurricane Katrina, which inspired Klein to write The Shock Doctrine and begin her climate study that led to This Changes Everything, was a perfect storm combining “heavy weather and a weak and neglected public sphere.” She points out that by the time Katrina made landfall, it had been downgraded from a Category 5 hurricane to a mere tropical storm. The levees should have withstood the onslaught, if they hadn’t been allowed to fall into disrepair.

While the world looked on with horror as “FEMA couldn’t find New Orleans,” and “prisoners were abandoned, locked in their cells as the waters were rising,” evacuees were given one-way tickets out, and the elites seized an opportunity to remake the city as a wealthier place, with 100,000 fewer poor blacks, even tearing down public housing projects undamaged by the storm, to replace them with high-end condominiums.

Quoting Black Lives Matter leader Alicia Garza, Klein says it’s time to “‘make new mistakes’…we can’t demand perfection but we can demand evolution.”

Examples of the old mistakes we shouldn’t keep making:

  • “Projecting messianic fantasies onto politicians” and becoming disappointed when they fail to save us
  • Believing we can solve all our problems with market forces (she cites the recent Volkswagen fuel emissions tampering scandal as an example of why that doesn’t work)—or with technological fixes, which include not only wonderful new green energy systems but also environmentally catastrophic technologies like fracking (“the oil companies have figured out how to screw us sideways”), tar-sands oil, and massive pipelines such as the Keystone XL
  • “Building a movement entirely of upper-middle-class white people and wondering why people of color don’t join”
  • “Tearing other people to shreds” in bouts of anger disguised as political purity
  • Thinking that any one of us can do it all ourselves

Noting that fossil fuel companies will work extremely hard to protect their enormous profits and will try to win the public by pointing out the lifestyles of luxury fossil fuels have allowed us, Klein says we won’t win by trying to educate fossil-fuel billionaires like the Koch brothers. Furthermore, “we cannot look at this without looking at who burned what, when. Fossil fuels have allowed us to live the fantasy of a life apart from nature. But the response from the earth, though slow in coming, says there’s no such thing as a one-way relationship, and you were never the boss! We could see this as a cosmic demotion—or as a gift.”

But we do have many victories to celebrate, including Shell’s decision this week in the face of strong opposition from environmentalists to withdraw from arctic drilling…China’s major reduction in coal development and initiation of carbon cap-and-trade—due to public pressure even in that repressive society—when only a few years ago a new coal plant was opening every week…the 400,000 new jobs Germany has created in shifting 30 percent of its energy from fossil and nuclear to solar and wind (to name a few). “As I talk to people, the biggest problem is that they think they can’t win. But we are winning, as part of a global movement.

And just as the shock of the Great Depression economic collapse created space for New Deal social reforms, so the climate catastrophe, coupled with the current collapse of fossil fuel prices, with the price of a barrel of oil plummeting from $100 to $50 in three months,  could catalyze transformation: “integrated holistic solutions and a road map. There’s a progressive tradition of using these shocks to build….a moment where we can do things that weren’t possible before. We can shut down bad projects and bad policy. We can win a moratorium on all arctic drilling. It’s easier to bring in a bold progressive carbon tax…the political goal has to be a polluter-pays principle…the mostr sustainable route is weaving together the yes and the no.” She delighted in recent progressive electoral victories in Alberta (long controlled by tar-sands-loving right-wingers) and in the UK, where the Bernie Sanders-like Jeremy Corbyn has just become head of the Labour Party. Also in Alberta, she took hope from a conference that brought together union miners from the tar sands, environmentalists, and many other sectors and emerged with a progressive manifesto.

Before a brief Q&A, she closed her formal presentation with a clarion call to optimism AND action:

We need to move from a society based on extraction to one based on caring, including a guaranteed annual income. Caregiving jobs are climate change jobs. We must expand the caring economy and contract the careless economy. 2016 is a leap year; we add a human-created day in deference to the earth’s rotation. That’s an increased opportunity to build a much better world. We will be told it’s impractical. But $2.6 trillion has been divested from fossil fuel.

Quoting a woman leader in Nauru, a tiny Pacific Island being lost to climate change after a catastrophic history of exploitation by First World economies (Klein chronicles the sad tale in This Changes Everything), she continued,

“If politics are immovable, let’s change the politics.” Now is not the time for small steps. Now is the time to leap!

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, People Helping People, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Brilliant article in Yes Magazine by Mistinguette Smith: “6 Strategies to Make Powerful Social Change—Starting With “Stay Woke.””

One of the points I make when I give my “‘Impossible” is a Dare (NOT a Fact)” talks is that every one of us has the power to be an agent of change. For every Count Leo Tolstoy (born into wealth and privilege and used his position to work for social change), there are dozens if not hundreds of Martin Luther Kings, Gandhis, and Mother Teresas: ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Most meaningful social change gets accomplished by ordinary people, especially when they organize and work together. I personally started the movement that saved our local mountain. Bree’s courage and power are the norm, not the exception.

I’ve often heard very successful people get asked, “How did you do _____ before you were _______ (the successful person’s name, emphasized)? Even with my own rather limited fame, I’ve been asked “How did you save the mountain before you were Shel Horowitz?”

Here’s what they’re missing. What turned me from Shel Horowitz, self-employed marketing consultant working out of a farmhouse, to Shel Horowitz, locally famous saver of mountains, was going out and starting the movement to save the mountain. It was the doing that created the fame.

Yes, I did have the marketing skills to leverage that and eventually build a brand around profitability consulting for green and socially conscious businesses. Yes, I had the writing and research skills to create a body of work that attracted a major publisher and a celebrity co-author for my eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green. Yes, I created enough leverage from that book to be able to do my 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, comes out in March, with endorsements by Jack Canfield, Seth Godin, the founders of BNI and GreenBiz.com, the author of The New Rules of Green Marketing (among others), and essays from the authors of Unstoppable/Unstoppable Women and Diet for a Small Planet. I grabbed the opportunities to make more of a difference in the wider world, and not just my own community. But just because I made those opportunities happen doesn’t mean they weren’t available to others.

Social change can be based in very small actions. The backstory about Mistinguette Smith’s article is that her editor wanted to ditch the phrase in the title, “Stay Woke.” Mistinguette brought that discussion to Facebook, and that may have been why she eventually won the argument. But the key element to making the change is mindset. This is how I heard about her article before it was published, and how I knew it was published and could read it.

To accomplish positive social change, I think we need two things: one is the sense that we can make a difference and the willingness to try—something any of us can achieve.

The other is the motivation to achieve a higher good than simply obtaining power or profit.I’d even go so far as to say the need to make the world better is a basic human drive, just like food or shelter or sex. If we’re not doing this in some small way, we don’t feel complete.

Let’s look at the difference between two ordinary men who led their countries out of apartheid: Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe (formerly called Rhodesia). Both were hailed as liberators originally. Mugabe, a teacher and prison-educated lawyer, turned out to be a brutal thug, a dictator motivated by the desire for power and wealth.

But Mandela was clearly motivated by a desire to heal his suffering country. His actions were all about unity and reconciliation. He will be remembered as a hero to the end of time.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Diversity, Ethics in Government, General Commentary, language, People Helping People, Politics, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,
Justice Sonia Sotomayor works the crowd (Photo by Shel Horowitz.

By Shel Horowitz

Justice Sonia Sotomayor works the crowd (Photo by Shel Horowitz.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor works the crowd (Photo by Shel Horowitz.

Yes, you can be a United States Supreme Court Justice and still keep your humanity. In an hour and a half of Q&A at the Springfield Public Forum in Springfield, Massachusetts, Justice Sonia Sotomayor not only kept her content humble and hopeful, but did her best to make herself one with the audience.

She answered the first question from the stage, but then left her comfortable armchair, announced that she wanted to make herself more accessible to the people at the far corners of the room, pleaded with the audience not to do anything that would make the Secret Service agents too nervous to let her wander, and then answered all remaining questions while walking around the room shaking hands and getting photographed—and leaving the moderator (another female judge) gaping and wondering where her speaker was at times. I’ve certainly seen speakers mingle, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one who spent virtually the entire speech mingling. It’s especially remarkable in a government official; most of them stay firmly behind their podiums, clinging tightly. I can’t imagine Hillary Clinton doing that. But Sotomayor is like that; she spent her first weeks at the Supreme Court not just boning up on the then-upcoming Citizens United case but also visiting the far corners of the building and greeting the staff. She claims to be the first Supreme Court Justice to visit the telephone operators up on the third floor.

Hillary also probably has help writing her books. Sotomayor–like President Obama–writes her own, even as she acknowledged that writing didn’t come easily to her until a college mentor observed that she was thinking in Spanish (her first language) and translating.

Like Sotomayor, I grew up poor in the Bronx (and actually fantasized about becoming a social justice lawyer and eventually, a Supreme Court Justice—though I love the career I chose instead). And I was thrilled to hear her say things like:

  • “I wanted to write a book that would give people hope…if I [the child of an immigrant alcoholic, raised in the tough housing projects of New York] can do it, so can you.”
  • “Squeeze as much as you can out of every day. Give to others. Don’t take a moment to not live life at its fullest.”
  • “Affirmative Action was a door opener for a door that had been closed to people of my background. Many institutions like to do the same thing over and over. But that success formula excludes certain people. The question is, what did I do with that opportunity? I wanted my career to be a bridge between my community and the wider society.” She noted that others had been given similar opportunity but chose not to make the most of it.
  • “As a prosecutor, I learned how to seek justice not just for society but for the defendant.
  • “Every mentor has made a positive mark on my life, and I hope that I have for them.”
  • “Accept your limitations and your strengths.”

Surprisingly, when asked where in her career she had the most fun, she didn’t hesitate to respond “as a trial judge. Every day, you’re surprised! When I retire from the Supreme Court, I want to go back to it.” She misses the human contact with the plaintiffs and defendants, who are generally not present in appeals or Supreme courtrooms.

When asked why the greatest legal minds in the country have so many split decisions, Sotomayor pointed out that this is part of the Supremes’ mandate. “The case wouldn’t come before the Supreme Court if the answer was clear. We don’t take cases unless there are disagreements in the Circuit Court decisions. That’s why we have 5-4 decisions. It doesn’t mean that the four are wrong, but that the five thought another way. Some people say [the split decisions lessen their faith in government]. I hope the split means you have more faith in the government, because if everything is 9-0, we’re not taking the care we need to. And if there’s a [written] dissent, at least somebody heard you.”

Dissents, for her, are also cause for optimism. “We can write our dissents and hope to influence Congress or a future Supreme Court decision. You have to feel optimistic that things can change. You have to hold that hope, so you can let go” and accept being on the losing side. “I remain optimistic, despite what’s happening in Congress right now.

And she asks each of us to take responsibility, to do our part for a better world, even if it’s as simple as casting a vote or calling a loved one. “Whatever you do, do it with passion and caring. Not voting is the greatest act of being a traitor. What counts is caring enough to make your voice heard. Every day, I try to become a better person, a better Justice. How many of us forget to call a friend who’s sick or suffered a loss? Every day I try to remind myself that the world doesn’t revolve around me. Every night before you go to sleep, ask yourself these two questions:

  • What have I learned that’s new today?
  • What good have I done today?

“If you can’t answer those two questions, don’t go to sleep. Send someone a [‘thinking-of-you’] email. Go on Google and learn about something.

Known as a Justice who asks a lot of questions during oral argument, Sotomayor was asked if she often changed her mind based on the lawyers’ responses to the Justices’ questions.  And she said that she changes her thinking based on the oral argument, though not necessarily her vote, about 20 percent of the time. To future lawyers in the largely student audience, she advised, “Be happy when we ask questions. We engage you in engaging us.” But she said often, the real benefit to her in oral arguments is from listening to the questions of her colleagues. “I see what road they’re going down, what they’re thinking.” The Justices don’t discuss cases before oral arguments, so these are the first insights she gets about a case’s direction.

In the past, the Court was a very contentious place, with some Justices not speaking to each other for years. That changed, she said, when Sandra Day O’Connor (the first woman Justice, appointed by President Reagan) came onboard. She insisted on building collegial relationships, through instituting several changes including a weekly lunch. “She made a huge difference. There’s an ethos now that if someone says something they shouldn’t have, they call and apologize.”

She chose law, she said, because “I wanted to guide people into making decisions that were fair to themselves and to other people.” It was a way to help people solve problems, and it did not require singing, dancing, or drawing, didn’t require the patience of a teacher, and did not involve medicine; as a diabetic since age 7, she felt she’d spent far too much time in hospitals to want to work in one. When the moderator shot back that Sotomayor was the best salsa dancer she knew, the 61-year-old Justice said she’d taken lessons at 50, when she got tired of being the only Latina she knew who didn’t dance. She asked her mother why she’d never been taught to dance as a child, and her mom replied, “You were always outside chasing fireflies. We could never get you to be still long enough.”

Her final advice was to remember the people who helped you and to overcome your fears. “Every job I’ve had, every obstacle I’ve overcome, I’ve been afraid. None of us gets anywhere in life without the help of others. Nobody accomplishes alone. We are each of us blessed with the good and the bad I hope each of you can appreciate the blessings in your world.”

Note: material in quote marks and not in brackets are as accurate as my notes, memories, and ability to decipher my scrunched handwriting allow (I had no paper so I was writing on the backs of business cards). I apologize for any transcription errors I may have made. Material within square brackets is paraphrased.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Ethics: General, Green Business, localism/locavore, media-general, People Helping People, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

I’m up to the part of Naomi Klein?‘s This Changes Everything where she talks about the interconnectedness of geolocalized people’s movements opposing “extreme/reckless resource extraction” (e.g., tar-sands oil, fracked gas and oil, mountaintop removal for coal). She dubs the movement “Blockadia.” She also casts very appropriate darts, just before this section, at the crazy idea that we should avoid climate catastrophe by throwing so much pollution into the sky that the sun can’t get through. Talk about a cure worse than the disease! Hard to believe some scientists are actually serious about this.

She points out that these technologies are far more intrusive and polluting and resource-intensive than the old-style mines and wells—and that the opposition often parses out as saving our water from destruction, modeling around the Precautionary Principle of not unleashing technologies we can’t control, and using the positive framing of protecting our water (very similar to the way I framed Save the Mountain 15 years ago—the successful movement to keep a nasty housing development off the Mount Holyoke Range in my town of Hadley, Massachusetts, US). I have said for many years that we have plenty of substitutes for oil, but if the water is gone (or unusable), so are we.

Like everything I’ve ever read by Klein, the book is impeccably researched—including interviewing primary sources directly and even suffering through climate-denier conferences and similar events in person; pursuit of the truth can be painful, sometimes.

And she isn’t afraid to go after the movement’s sacred cows. She scolds some very prominent environmental groups including The Nature Conservancy for betraying their core mission in the service of their large extraction-industry funders—even putting an oil well into one of its nature preserves, where the bird it was set up to protect can no longer be found. And she finds Sir Richard Branson’s proclamations of concern for the planet to be at odds with his actions. (I’m hoping she’s wrong about him. Even if she turns out to be right—and she might well be—he has certainly used his considerable charisma to educate the public on climate change.)

Environmentalists need to take these accusations very seriously. We need to know who we fund, and what they do with the money. And we definitely need to build the movement that insists upon meaningful action to stave off catastrophic climate change—which would have been much easier 20 or 30 years ago, but, I believe, is still possible now.

However, I break with Klein over solutions. She has essentially no faith in the business community or in technology, and she seems to think that any time an environmental group partners with a polluter, that group is sullied. Maybe I’m less of a purist than she is. But I’ve just finished another wonderful book, The Necessary Revolution, by Peter Senge et al. Reading the two together was very interesting, because Senge’s book is full of great examples of NGOs and corporations working together to tackle problems in a very meaningful way, while Klein’s is the counterpoint of these partnerships leading to a failure to address the deeper issues.

I also read almost daily reports in the sustainability press (GreenBiz, Sustainable Brands, Triple Pundit, 3BL Media, Rocky Mountain Institute’s Solutions Journal, and Guardian Sustainable Business, to name a few) of the amazing small-scale, eco-friendly technology innovations that give me hope. And I’m painfully aware that we knew all the way back in 1983-84 how to build a beautiful, modern, net-zero-energy home even in extreme environments, and that our failure to make this the norm is inexcusable.

Technology doesn’t have to be about extreme extraction, GMOs designed to absorb more pesticides, nuclear power, or blocking the sun. Science and engineering can actually be the climate movement’s friends. Unlike the crazy unproven schemes requiring billions or trillions of dollars and dozens of years to ramp up, these innovations often combine deep conservation, greater efficiency in harnessing clean renewable energy, and even the fascinating science of biomimcry to slash energy use, carbon footprint, and waste—right now.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, censorship, Democracy, Diversity, Ethics in Government, localism/locavore, People Helping People, Politics, propaganda, Psychology, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , ,

In his daily blog, Seth Godin wrote today,

The last hundred years have also seen a similar ratchet (amplified, I’d argue, by the technology of media and of the economy) in civil rights. It’s unlikely (with the exception of despotic edicts) that women will ever lose the vote, that discrimination on race will return to apartheid-like levels, that marriage will return to being an exclusionary practice… once a social justice is embraced by a culture, it’s rarely abandoned.

Unfortunately, those “despotic edicts” are all-too-common. While the general trend is not to reverse progress, there are far too many exceptions:

And, sadly, dozens more examples from around the world.

If you think “it can’t happen here,” do some research on Berlin in the 1920s–or read Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale). Or look at the scary anti-Arab and anti-Muslim acts of violence that started showing up regularly in the US starting in the aftermath of 9/11/01 and are still escalating.

Although this is a pessimistic post, I am ultimately an optimist. I think Godin is basically right–but there are many, many exceptions. Let’s work together for a world in which those exceptions are no longer tolerated–we can do this!

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, People Helping People Tagged with , , , , ,

Guest Post By Yosef Rabinowitz, Managing Director, TBRC Cost Recovery

Yosef Rabinowitz, founder of TBRC Cost Recovery
Yosef Rabinowitz, founder of TBRC Cost Recovery

Back in 2003, I signed up a small business for telephone and internet service through one of the carriers that we represent at TBRC. After a few years of the client being on the service, I received a call out of the blue from a telephone bill auditor whom the client had hired to examine their monthly bill to see if there was any money to recover for past billing errors or if there was any way to save money going forward. The client wanted me to assist the auditor in his search.

In that instant, given that I had what I thought was an excellent relationship with my client, I felt blindsided and quite upset by the fact that he didn’t call me first (especially since we also do phone bill audits). My reaction internally was “Well that’s gratitude for you! After all the lengths we’ve gone each year in order to make sure that they’re getting great service at a great price? No WAY am I going to help them out with this audit.”

After about 30 seconds of (silent) childish brooding, though, my ego gave way to reason, and I did the right thing by guiding the auditor through the various charges on the client’s bill (he had never seen a bill from this particular carrier before).

That evening, as I went to bed, I had a bit of crisis of conscience. Even though I did assist the auditor, how could I have even THOUGHT to not help him, even if he’s a competitor and encroaching on my “turf”, so to speak (or so I felt in the moment when he called)? That’s not ME! That’s not who I am! I wrestled with this issue for several days (mostly in a state of quiet shame) before a friend pointed out a very basic concept of life:

We’re all human, and in the eyes of the law and common decency (and God, for those who believe), we humans are ultimately judged by our actions, not by our thoughts. So while I may have been upset at myself for even considering doing the wrong thing, I ultimately did what was right for my client (and my conscience) in the face of initially strong feelings to the contrary. I saw his point and felt a lot better after that.

Fans of the original Star Trek® series will recall the episode where Capt. Kirk comes through the transporter and is split into two beings…his good side and his evil side. The “evil” Kirk wreaked havoc on the ship with his impulsive behavior. However, the other Capt. Kirk, with only his good side and no access to his ego/evil side, couldn’t make any decisions. He NEEDED the “evil” side for that. And so do we. The bottom line is that life is going to throw “situations” at us from time to time. It’s OK (even natural) for ego to kick in at the beginning and make us WANT to lash out and do the wrong thing (it’s there to alert us that a need of ours isn’t being properly met), as long as we eventually keep ego in check so that we can move in the right direction.

Epilogue: Helping the auditor (rather than impeding his audit) worked out well in the end. Afterwards, he introduced me to the other 40+ telecom auditors in his company and a number of them have since referred clients to us for carrier services.

Yosef Rabinowitz is the Founder and Managing Director of TBRC Cost Recovery, LLC, a New York City-based consulting firm that examines business and nonprofit telecommunications bills for past billing errors and future savings opportunities. This article originally appeared in the June 2015 issue Off The Hook, TBRC’s monthly newsletter.

 

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Demographics/Psychographics, People Helping People, Protests and Crackdowns Tagged with , , , , ,
Arky Markham, 100, watches as (from left) Marty Nathan, Mayor David Narkewicz, and Lisa Baskin light birthday candles
Arky Markham, 100, watches as (from left) Marty Nathan, Mayor David Narkewicz, and Lisa Baskin light birthday candles

If your image of a 100-year-old woman is a quiet old lady vegetating in a nursing home, let me introduce you to Arky Aisenberg Markham.

She turned 100 yesterday, and celebrated with about 300 guests in a fundraiser for the Markham-Nathan Fund, one of several organizations she’s founded or co-founded (another is Social Workers for Peace and Justice). Attendees included Massachusetts Senate President Stan Rosenberg (who also happens to represent her district), Northampton Mayor David Narkewicz, State Representatives Peter Kocot and Ellen Story, retired Congressman John Olver, and at least three of Northampton’s nine city councilors–and a virtual Who’s Who of activists involved for decades in peace, labor, human rights, environmental, economic justice, and democracy work, including representatives of the 15 organizations the Markham-Nathan Fund supported this year. The event probably raised several thousand dollars for social justice work.

Arky walked to the stage under her own power and shot back one-liner after one-liner during several of the speakers’ remarks. One of the speakers, I think Rep. Kocot, remarked that Arky always showed us the right path. Arky immediately zinged, “the left path.” Rosenberg made a comment about coming back to celebrate her 200th birthday, and she shouted, in Yiddish, “ein hoonderd tsvantsich” (one-hundred-twenty) evoking an old Jewish blessing about living to 120. And it was Arky herself who gave the fundraising pitch. As she left the stage, the first several people to greet her were all female. She said something like, “Now that I’m 100, all the women want to kiss me. Where are the men who want to kiss me?” So I went up and kissed her. All her comeback lines were unrehearsed and spontaneous, and had the crowd laughing regularly.

This remarkable woman was already 41 years old when I was born. Wanting to do her part to stop Hitler, she was a military air traffic controller during World War II, then used the GI bill to get an undergrad degree in Spanish and a Master’s in Social Work, which led to a career working with various underserved populations, from inner-city NYC school children to her fellow veterans. She was in her 50s when she met and married George Markham; their first date was a rally against the Vietnam War, and they were involved in numerous peace and justice causes together until George’s death in 2009, at age 100.

Why were so many dignitaries in attendance? Because they are all activists! Their electoral political work is a direct outgrowth of their commitment to a better world. The Northampton-Amherst area may be a bit unusual in the percentage of progressive activists it sends to elected office–but I, for one, find it very refreshing to live in a place where elected officials are actually about peace and justice.

[Note: Arky died on June 11, 2018, ten days before her 103rd birthday.]

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Demographics/Psychographics, General Commentary, People Helping People, Politics, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,
Happy mother and baby
Happy mother and baby—photo by Cynthia Turek

The 2015 edition of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network’s World Happiness Report is out. It lists the five happiest countries.

Drumroll, please…

 

  1. Switzerland
  2. Iceland
  3. Denmark
  4. Norway
  5. Canada

Isn’t that interesting? Every one of the five is a social democracy with a strong safety net. The four European countries are also known for their leadership in reducing energy consumption and carbon footprint; in fact, Iceland’s stationery power needs are met almost entirely through (renewable, clean) geothermal and hydro. These are countries that take care of their own. Their citizens correctly assume that medical care, education, and so forth are their right, and that government will do what it can to assist in preserving the earth as human habitat. The social services are funded by higher taxes than we pay in the US, but they get something for their money. And none of them are highly militarized or known for excessive violence. (Yes the Swiss do have universal male military service— but they don’t fight wars, and in my two trips to Switzerland, I’ve hardly even seen a soldier.)

Despite the cold climates where all five are located, these are happy people.

Now, if only we could get politicians in the US to pay attention.

 

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Diversity, General Commentary, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

Starbucks has been getting a lot of flack since announcing its “Race Together” initiative. People are mostly either calling the company self-serving or questioning why a cafe chain would want to take on an agenda that seems so unrelated to its core business.

Now, I’ve certainly criticized companies for cause marketing that seems to have nothing to do with its purpose. For example, I’ve publicly questioned why Ford has chosen to support a breast cancer charity rather than something related to, say, transportation access.

And I’ve given space to Starbucks critics like Dean Cycon of Dean’s Beans, who says the coffee giant could be doing a lot more on sustainability, fair trade, and organic.

But I actually think this time Starbucks did something sensible and good, and I was really pretty shocked at the negative media firestorm.

Consider this:

  • In the post-Ferguson climate, where black communities are showing righteous anger about police violence, race is back on the agenda
  • Many legislative bodies are imposing onerous barriers to registering and voting, ostensibly to stop “voter fraud” (which is close to zero)—but whose deeper agenda seems to be denying the vote to people of color and those with low incomes
  • As a culture, when we want to talk things over, we do so over coffee—so what better place to start a national conversation?
  • Starbucks has thousands of locations in cities—Ground Zero for the recent race incidents; thus, the company has a vested interest in de-escalating tensions and opening dialog so those stores continue to thrive, in addition to the moral grounds it cites

While writing the message “Race together” on cups ends today, Starbucks continues to see fostering dialog on race as a priority. In a public letter yesterday to the company’s employees, CEO Howard Schultz wrote,

We have a number of planned Race Together activities in the weeks and months to come: more partner open forums, three more special sections co-produced with USA TODAY over the course of the next year, more open dialogue with police and community leaders in cities across our country, a continued focus on jobs and education for our nation’s young people plus our commitment to hire 10,000 opportunity youth over the next three years, expanding our store footprint in urban communities across the country, and new partnerships to foster dialogue and empathy and help bridge the racial and ethnic divides within our society that have existed for so many years…The heart of Race Together has always been about humanity: the promise of the American Dream should be available to every person in this country, not just a select few.  We leaned in because we believed that starting this dialogue is what matters most.  We are learning a lot. And will always aim high in our efforts to make a difference on the issues that matter most.

If this is self-serving, I say we need more of that kind of self-serving.

 

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Branding, Business Ethics, Business-general, Corporate Social Responsibility, Eco-friendly, Entrepreneurship, Green Business, Green Marketing, Innovation, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice, Socially Responsible Investing Tagged with , , , , ,

This is big: The Guardian reports from Davos that Unilever is actively considering going for B Corp certification.

If you’re not familiar, B Corp is a legal definition of a profit-making corporation set up to promote environmental and social responsibility rather than a primary goal of maximizing short-term shareholder value and damn the torpedoes. In other words, it is legally allowed to pursue the greater good, even as most corporations are restricted by law and their charters. Maryland became the first of 28 US states to pass B Corp enabling legislation, in 2010.

It’s still a new movement. Only 1203 certified B Corps exist in the world, as of late January, 2015. Unilever’s Ben & Jerry’s unit was one of the first B Corps, back in 2012—and Ben & Jerry’s CEO Jostein Solheim is leading the effort, apparently with strong support from Unilever’s sustainability-minded CEO, Paul Polman.

The B Corp certification process is long and arduous for an entity as complex as Unilever, one of the largest consumer products corporations in the world; it’s likely to take years. But just the act of engaging in the conversation is a game changer:

  • Unilever’s tacit endorsement of the B Corp movement confers legitimacy; if one of the largest and most successful business organizations in the world can embrace it , other companies will say, “perhaps we should look into this.”
  • The B Corp movement is still not very well known, compared to similar movements such as Fair Trade. With Unilever coming onboard, a lot more people in the business world will hear about it—and take it seriously.
  • It will provide Unilever with substantial marketing advantages for several years. If the company is able to harness them properly, it can expect to sway many now-neutral customers to Unilever’s vast portfolio of brands. (As a marketing and profitability consultant to green/socially conscious businesses and the primary author of Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, I can speak with some authority on this :-). )
  • Most importantly, it will show the entire business world that corporations don’t have to be rapacious; they don’t have to put short-term gain above the earth and its citizens (human and otherwise). It could even provide major leverage to overturn the body of corporation law that says corporations are legally required to put short-term profit ahead of all other considerations. And since most business people actually do want to do good in the world and many have felt burdened by this charter, this could create a seismic shift throughout the entire business community. (Some on the hard left will disagree that most business people actually want to do the right thing. Go ahead; the comments field is waiting for you.) Of course, there are a myriad of profit-making opportunities out there for activist companies willing to create and market goods and services that meaningfully reduce hunger, poverty, war, catastrophic climate change, and other suffering—you don’t need to be a B Corp for that. But as B Corp certification slowly becomes the default, it will speed that change.

In short, I’m heartened and excited by this news, and wish them success.

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