17 posts tagged with "inclusion"

Last year I read Jurgen Appelo's Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders. Despite taking many useful notes, I did not have the time to write up a full review / collect my thoughts on it. Overall impression: this books has tremendous value, and I recommend it highly to anyone in IT management / leadership (whether operations or software).

I look forward to re-reading it in the near future. For now, I will satisfy myself by re-collecting and re-pondering a few of those notes, starting with the topics of Knowledge and Diversity (from Ch 4 - The Information-Innovation System)

This is an age, in America, when to see people teaming across an open space that is not a ball field, is to see protest — most likely on the news, in a far away place. New York, Oakland; Cairo, Tunis; Barcelona, Athens; Delhi. Or perhaps it is the bustling crowd under the sodium light of a parking lot, in the wee hours after Thanksgiving dinner has been packed into the refrigerator. Waiting for this year's must-have bargain.

In honor and memory of Mr. Ronald White, of St. Paul, MN, I set out this evening to find a documentary on the Ojibwe people and/or language. His story, as a part of that people, is not mine to tell (in so far as I know some miniscule part). So I will share this documentary. It does not sugar coat the past, but neither does it dwell on it. It dwells on the present and the future of the native language and culture of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and other areas around the Great Lakes.

Two of many items that grabbed my attention and reflection: (1) opening comments noting how many people are concerned with the loss of habitat, but are not also concerned or knowledgeable about the loss of cultures. (2) "You don't have to say 'respect your elders' in Ojibwe - its built right in" — "elderly man" is "great being," and "elderly woman" is "she who holds together". Words for the sun and grandfather are the same, as are grandmother and the moon. You could ask "is the moon up?" and mean "is grandmother stirring?"

First Speakers: Restoring the Ojibwe Language on PBS.

In this scholarly work, Janet and Peter Khan present the theological grounding, social context, historical action, and modern implementation of the concept of "equality between the sexes" as found in the Bahá'í Faith. Well researched and clearly written, the book has much to offer to those who, from any background, wish to better understand the underpinnings and the implications of this critical spiritual principle.

Vanderbilt University, a large private school in Tennessee, is enforcing rules that require all student groups receiving on campus funds to open up membership to anyone - including officer positions (story on NPR). Naturally, this is of great concern to Faith-based organizations in particular: one can easily imagine a group of atheists gate-crashing a meeting and electing their own leader to be the President/Chair/Grand Poobah of the _ <insert religion> Association_.

This past Wednesday I was proud to take part in a banquet event on the theme of "Embracing Unity," sponsored by the non-profit Grand Prairie Unity Coalition, of which I am a new Board member. This was the 7th such banquet, which brought together people from many like-minded organizations, local / county / state politicians, and most importantly, around 40 students and family from the local school district. The organization's mission is to provide education and opportunities for cross-cultural association to the Grand Prairie community, and that mission was admirably pursued with Wednesday's event.

It was about three years ago, while attending a conference at Green Acre Bahá'í School in Eliot, Maine, that I had the bounty of making a sunrise pilgrimage to the burial site of Louis Gregory, Hand of the Cause of Bahá'u'lláh. At the time I knew little about him — that he was an early African-American adherent of the Bahá'í Faith, a fantastic and tireless teacher, well-loved by 'Abdu'l-Bahá, and thanks to the Master’s encouragement, one-half of perhaps the first black/white Bahá'í marriage in the U.S.