Have you ever been invited to a meeting and when you arrive it seems that everyone else knows each other, but you? Picture senior management sitting around a big long table in silence, waiting for a meeting to begin. You get to sit at the far end of the table. You start up a conversation …
The Friday Post
Sydney bus sign – If you think violence against women is a big problem, tackle it when it’s little. Idea of the week – Project Auction Projects are pitched in front of invited philanthropists and corporate representatives, who then bid on projects they want to support. Relationships are developed between the entrepreneurs and their benefactors. …
Friday Post
What I’ve been hearing on Radio this week – Interview with Swedish journalist Elisabeth Asbrink and her dynamic new book: 1947: When now begins. 1947 was the year that WW2 formally ended, with the signing of the peace treaty in Paris. In the same year Simone de Beauvoir started writing The Second Sex, and George Orwell …
Under the Blanket
I found this image on the Facebook page of Dr. Djiniyini Gondarra OAM, senior elder and Dhurili Clan leader of the Yolngu peoples of Northeast Arnhem Land. It represents the reality he, and Aboriginal families, face daily. In a recent interview, frustrated by the incapacity of successive Federal Governments to understand and respect the rights of Aboriginal …
Friday Post
Re-learnings this week – 1. to first be the chaplain for others, the body plasma that enables others to make their unique contributions and ‘be the experts in their own lives’. (Michael White, David Epston and The Dulwich Centre). Rather than going straight to what I think. 2. to balance my critical side with positive …
Hospitality and the Herod Principle
More often than not, when we are invited to someone’s home, we will ask if we can bring something. A bottle of wine, flowers Cadbury ‘Roses’…? It’s a hark back to the Abrahamic understanding of hospitality; that when hospitality is offered, the invited guest unexpectedly turns out to offer, or be, a gift to …
Friday Post
What thought has helped me this week – Exercise is the training I must do to enable me to continue to do what I like doing. (rather than a boring interruption!) ‘Wow’ moment this week – Interchange between Sam Neil and Jimmy Barnes on QandA last Monday night. Followed later by an electrifying unplugged …
Moscow!
Unwinding in front of the TV on Tuesday night, I found myself watching The Busiest Cities on ABC.TV – a revelatory picture of the life of Muscovites today. 45 minutes into the program I was gobsmacked to see before my eyes, images of the conception I had for Oasis at Flinders University some ten years …
Takin’ it to the Streets
I’ve just come home from a workshop conducted on behalf of the Adelaide City Council to develop a plan of action aimed at addressing the well being of young people living in the City of Adelaide. I sense there is something fundamentally wrong with the whole approach. It seems so text-bookey! So politically correct, maybe? …
Friday Post
My first attempt at letting my friends know a bit more about me on a regular basis. (Thanks Nick in London for this suggestion and template to begin with!) Purchase I’m enjoying — Breville Nespresso coffee machine. Nespresso now recycle their pods; but in the meantime we’re using up cheap, out-of-date pods from one of …