Friends and colleagues in Nepal, people I’ve worked with for the last several years in my travels there, opening space for peaceful development, send this report this morning, following Maoist attack(s) last week:

…Ram Bdr. Raut (national chairman of the NAINN peaceful development community) and his family was hardly survived due to heavy bombardment of Night vision helicopter and two way gun firing. One of the bumps was dropped very close just 8-10 meter away caused a serious damage in the house and all the glasses of windows and cupboards, kitchen utensils and the doors are smashed. Some parts of walls are cracked and hundreds of holes due to gun bullets. He and his family were hiding in the toilets of ground floor and they are hardly survived. Still his wife and children are mentally depressed and remain silence. Same thing was happen to other people of Palpa. Right now, there is no email and Internet for communication and telephone is partly working in the city. For your kind information, I am giving brief status of present Palpa according to sources of news media, Ram Bdr. Raut and other NAINN members.

1. According to civilian witness, 5000 Maoist attacked the Palpa District Headquarter.

2. Almost government buildings are completely collapsed including 23 civilian houses and gun bullets damage many other houses. For instance, District Administration (150 years old palace), District Development, District Auditing and Fund Control, Land Control, National Intelligence, District Scout, District Telecommunication, District Officers’ Club, District Jail, District Police and other police post and security guard offices and Paschimanchal FM Radio Station has destroyed.

3. Loss of civilian houses and government buildings and properties is still unknown.

4. Government claimed 34-security force and government officials have kicknapped including Chief District Officer but Maoist declared only 29 are in their controlled.

5. In the attacked, 11-security force, 6 Maoist and two civilians were killed and 25-security force is injured.
6. 136 people are freed from the District jail including five Maoist by Maoist.

The Tansen town (Palpa District Headquarter) has remained as a relic of war. People of town is still couldn’t sleep from seeing the battle. In this regard, please help us (NAINN) from CWRU to work hard to create positive pressure for government of Nepal and Maoist insurgents for peace dialogue and seize fire. I also request you to help to create positive pressure from international communities for government of Nepal and Maoist insurgents for the seize fire through peace dialogue. We realized, this is the high time to save the life and property of Nepal.

News like this gives new perspective to issues like “Upgrade Our Democracy” and “Create the New Philanthropy” being raised here at RecentChangesCamp. What should we be learning from Nepal this morning?

Reporting today from Day Two of the Rockford and Four Rivers Regional Food Security Summit, the latest in a line of events that dates back to the original summit that was convened in Open Space by the Chicago Community Trust in November, 2001.

More than 60 people, ordinary citizens that is, have gathered here at Rockford College, raised and discussed more than 30 issues, including land use, farming and gardening, food pantries, organics, community education, marketing, school lunches, fair trade, among many others.

We are using a weblog to post all of the proceedings and will be experimenting with that as a platform for sustained community action. There’s a lot of life in this circle. Maybe it’s all the organic food. Whatever the explanation, meetings like this give me hope for the future.

Not one hour ago I was reflecting on how I view my own work and practice, noticing that I tend to see myself primarily as an individual operator, citizen, practitioner. What I do as an individual links me to groups, but those groups do not define me. I expect my contributions and actions to define them.

This seems in line with a shift reported recently in City Journal:

And compared with the liberal philanthropies of a generation ago, social entrepreneurs focus less (if at all) on political advocacy or litigation aimed at policy change and far more on helping the poor to get ahead as individuals through job training, mentoring, and tutoring. “Changing the system,” in other words, has taken a backseat to incremental, verifiable improvement in the lives of those assisted. Without quite being aware of the change themselves, at least some in the nonprofit world have moved back toward the provision of what Andrew Carnegie, known for the free libraries he created across America after making his fortune in steel, called “ladders on which the aspiring can rise.”

As changing the system takes a backseat to helping people advance, would not institutionalized programs also be overcome by direct personal responsibility, contribution and action? This sounds an awful lot like SmallChange to me. Thanks to Lenore Ealy and her Philanthropic Enterprise email list for the reference.

Zoe Sullivan made a documentary film about immigrants and immigration. Now she needs funding to make copies and get this work out in the world. Here is her story:

I live in Astoria, Queens, which is part of New York City. A few months ago, I completed production of a short documentary video about the issues that immigrants with no papers face. That is what the dropcash campaign is for: to raise money to pay for making copies of the video.

The video project is something that I started as an experiment. For 13 years I had been doing community organizing work with the Humanist Movement, an international grassroots social justice organization that I got involved with in Italy. In early 2003, I felt my organizing work was the only thing that was going on in my life, and it was no longer satisfying to me, so I took a step back to find a more meaningful balance for myself again.

Doing the video I have discovered that I will not be dedicating myself to documentary filmmaking, but I am glad that I did it. Also, I really hope that many people can see the video and learn something about the kinds of hardships that immigrants face. It would be great if this could make people more aware of and sensitive to the kinds of obstacles that people have to overcome in order to live in the US.

As of today, she’s raised $100 of the $550 she needs. This is SmallChange. It makes a difference. And this is where to donate via DropCash. Contact Zoe directly at zoe_sullivan(AT)hotmail(DOT)com.

Iran Press Service is the oldest post-revolution English language Iranian publication outside Iran. Created in 1980 it is also one of the first Iranian Internet publications.

I don’t know if it’s more accurate or reliable than what comes through the mainstream media. I’m just glad to have an alternative source of information on Iranian nuclear diplomacy. Feels like I learn more reading Iranians on Iran, even when they report from Paris, than when I read Americans and Europeans, reporting from anywhere.

UPDATE: See also GlobalVoices for individual voices on Iran, thanks to Christy.

Chris Macrae said this in an email today…

Using media to minimise how much time a person spends experiencing the edge of “their own make a difference capabilities” intstead of maximising this is a crime against all young people

In the height of Katrina news, I was cooking what started as a weekend course and soon threatened to become an entire school curriculum. My working title was “Ready for Anything.” I think I like the idea of sharpening our “edge of our make-a-difference capabilities” even better.

as some email conversations and weblog reading progesses, i’m still rolling around a bit with this question: what is grassroots?

i’m willing to accept the value of searching out and connecting 30000 “grassroots” projects for humanity. i understand the whole range of comment on globalization and grassroots. i understand, too, that so many dualities, so called patterns of opposition, need mending and marrying. so the title of the overall project caused some confusion for me.

thinking about 30000 “good” projects leaves open the possiblity of defining good. 30000 marriages is more interesting yet. thrilling to think of 30000 projects that marry one something with another something else that shouldn’t be able to fit with the first something. i *think* this might be the thing that resolves some of the things in this recent 30000 post: the marriage of former-president and citizen-activist, the marriage of world-futures and seven-year-olds, the marriage of global-brand-coke and renewable-energy.

it seems to me that the important practice to be established is one of finding pieces that common knowledge says can’t go together and then finding the uncommon wisdom that most definitely, practically and obviously does unite the two. a practice of shocking ourselves with bits of a new world coming together, rather than with the foundations of an old world breaking down and apart.

take this New Yorker invitation via mark dilley: “…If you find the media’s Iraq coverage unsatisfactory, pick up the phone. Don’t call the Times, or CNN, or Rupert Murdoch; call Baghdad. There are a couple of Iraqi phone books available on the Internet, and plenty of interesting people willing to share their stories directly…” would these conversations be grassroots action or globalization? i think yes!

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Chris Macrae has an interesting (and complex) web of blogs on sustainability, grassroots, value, trust-flows, globalization and more. This is an interesting entry point: Searching 30000 Grassroots Projects for Humanity by 2010.

Some of the projects listed are not what I would expect in a list of “grassroots”, but maybe the definition is up for review, toward a marriage of corporate and community activity. I guess my own definition still revolves around local, individual responsibility and action, driven and directed by personal passion rather than organizational strategy. Even if organized strategies do emerge.

Grameen Bank would be an example of local, personal initiative snowballing to the level of global organization. Their core work is still driven by and grounded in personal responsibility for local lending and administration. I’m less clear about whether the activities of private citizen and former president Bill Clinton qualify as grassroots efforts, even as I suspect they do much good. And what of experiments like SmallChangeNews.org? Is there a minimum threshold for initiative?

Catalytic Communities is something that absolutely qualifies as a genuine, and effective, grassroots effort. Let’s not forget that they still need a few dozen supporters by Saturday, 31-December to pledge $10 per month to cover core funding for 2006. Please join us in pledging, if you can.

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What a deal. Pledge $10 a month to support a fantastic community program, and if 199 others do the same, you could win a free trip to Rio. Doing good doesn’t get much better than this. What’s more, 133 people have already signed up, so only 66 more needed — but the deadline is NOW — December 31st!

The goal is to raise core funding for Catalytic Communities, founded by my friend Theresa Williamson, to serve some of the poorest parts of Rio and replicate their successes around the world. It’s as simple as $10 a month!

CatComm is developing, inspiring and empowering a global network of communities to generate and share solutions. CatComm connects communities through spaces both physical and virtual. The “Casa” model networking hub in Rio de Janeiro offers a space for face-to-face events and Web access for community leaders across that metro region. A Community Solutions Database and other online tools make searchable, detailed, community-generated solutions to everyday challenges available across languages and borders.

Join us, if you can, in supporting this good work — and if we reach 200 pledges, you might get to go see it for yourself, in Rio. This is SmallChangeNews at it’s best.

Please do link to this, and spread it around, if you can!

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Some days ago, I received from my friend Tim Reeves a copy of the speech delivered by Harold Pinter on the occasion of his recent receipt of the Nobel Literature Prize. Pinter is a famous british playwriter, born in London of jewish descent, and has long been a human rights activist. His biography and a bit of his speech…

…As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false? Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavour. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realising that you have done so…

…I have often been asked how my plays come about. I cannot say… Most of the plays are engendered by a line, a word or an image. The given word is often shortly followed by the image… The first line of The Homecoming is ‘What have you done with the scissors?’ The first line of Old Times is ‘Dark.’ In each case I had no further information…

…A writer’s life is a highly vulnerable, almost naked activity. We don’t have to weep about that. The writer makes his choice and is stuck with it. But it is true to say that you are open to all the winds, some of them icy indeed. You are out on your own, out on a limb. You find no shelter, no protection – unless you lie – in which case of course you have constructed your own protection and, it could be argued, become a politician…

…I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory…

What have you done? Dark. Truth. Obligation. No further information. 2006. Is Upon Us…

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This just in from David Eads and friends, who’ve started a computer recycling project called FreeGeek Chicago that gets old machines refurbished and distributed to poor folks who wouldn’t otherwise have access to a machine. Can you help them with resources?

The idea is to do something akin to Working Bikes but with computers — we take old systems and rebuild them into simple Linux based boxes that we sell for $50 for a full system (keyboard/mouse/monitor) and responsibly recycle anything that we can’t use. We’re also starting an adopt-a-computer program where people can come in to our space and we’ll teach them to tear down a system and build a new one, and how to do a basic Linux installation. Then they get to keep one of the systems they’ve built.

This is a great example of SmallChangeNews, ordinary folks using what they have (and can get) to meet the needs and make a difference for others. They’ve had lots of demand for systems, and lots of interest in building from geeks and others, but it looks like the donation stream is too thin to support the level of demand. Contact FreeGeek Chicago.org if you can help!

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