Events > Are You Down With D-I-T (Do It Together)?: Skills for Change in a Network Age
Event Information
If we look at social change efforts today, two of the most notable “memes” are found in the DIY (Do It Yourself) movement and “collective impact,” or multi-organizational approaches to change. Each has its strengths and down sides. DIY taps creativity and a self-starting spirit, though the emphasis on the individual may ignore public accountability and the importance of collaboration. Collective Impact leads with the understanding that change is systemic and not a solitary undertaking, though the focus can be on formal institutional actors and leadership, at the expense of community engagement and more distributed action.
If we bring the two together, we get “Do It Together” (DIT). At its best, DIT embraces a creative and self-organizing entrepreneurial spirit, and does this with an understanding that the larger “beneficiaries” are diverse, resilient, and thriving communities and ecosystems. DIT leverages the best of emergent net work and coordinated action to broaden and deepen change. So how do we really get down with DIT?
The focus of this workshop is practices for bringing DIT fully to life, through more skillful collaboration, systemic awareness, de-centralized network action, inquiry, listening, and dialogue.
Presenter Information
Curtis Ogden and Gibran Rivera are Senior Associates with the Interaction Institute for Social Change, a capacity building organization that does training, facilitation, and network-building consulting in support of progressive social change initiatives and agents. Curtis’ recent work has entailed leadership development and consulting with large scale multi-stakeholder efforts to strengthen food and early childhood development systems in New England with a "living systems" lens. Gibrán has devoted his life to the idea of democracy and to the work of emancipatory politics and focuses on the application of network theory to the work of social change and the current paradigm shift to build “beloved community.”
