With news that Chicago would move to the next stage in the 2016 Olympic bid, Dan Bassill asked that we take the field for social justice with equivalent passion and dedication. Simply stated: let’s have a Gold Medal for work to end poverty. The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s Give and Take blog gave this challenge a controversial spin. What follows is my comment in reply (with a few additional links).
Dan’s challenge is posed for all of us. It’s great that his post is getting attention. If we look for controversy everywhere we are sure to find it even when it isn’t present.
What can the Chronicle do better in this regard? I think there are lessons to be learned in the positive media movement.
I’m not a Pollyanna. There are likely some significant factors regarding the Olympic bid that deserve critical exploration/attention.
The Olympics should bring out our best. Dan’s call should rouse in us that aspiration for addressing the most pressing circumstances in our society.
April 20 the eChicago Symposium was convened at Dominican University, April 20-21 a conference was convened by “A View from the Ground†at the University of Chicago on the 8 blocks of public housing known as Stateway Gardens, and April 21-22 Chicago hosts the Green Festival.
Each event has a deep and conscious grounding in questions of social justice. It feels like many of us are waking up and coming together.
Chicago presents itself as a global city, and aspires to being the greenest city. Calls for sustainable living, living well together and building the Chicago we want are bringing our attention to our institutions and to questions of social justice.
Philanthropy can take a more prominent role in this blurring of the lines between Environmental, Media, Technology, and Social Justice movements.
This convergence of movements is happening anyway, so let’s come together with Olympic aspirations in all that we do, whether we’re in Chicago or not.
Thank you Dan for challenging us to challenge ourselves in the Olympic spirit.
Note: you’ll find links and recent comments on these three events mentioned elsewhere on the wrythings.net blog.
Thanks for picking up the baton on this conversation. Let’s hope we can get others to join this team. I attended two forums last week. One hosted by Associated Colleges of Illinois, had a high profile economist pointing out the growing gap between how well the US prepares kids for careers and how well other countries are doing this. The speaker emphasized that the loss of jobs to other countries will increase unless we make greater efforts to prepare all youth for 21st century careers. I posted a link to the presentation on my blog.
The next day I attended a forum hosted by the Community Renewal Society. The purpose was to launch a campaign to draw attention to children of incarcerated parents. The statistics of this forum were the high costs of incarceration and the negative impact this has on kids of incarcerated parents.
Both events talked about the same problems from different perspectives. The goal of the T/MC and the conferences we organize in May and November (http://www.tutormentorconference.org) is to draw representatives from these different sectors into the same stadium of idea sharing, where we can work as a larger team, each with different talents, to help kids from poverty be better prepared to lead adult lives out of poverty…and out of the justice system.
As I’m organizing face to face events, I’m also trying to create on-line networking opportunities. The goal is not that every interaction goes through me, or through any other single leader. The goal is that more of the people who should be on the same team, are connecting and building relationships with each other. That will lead to new types of teams and better outcomes in the future.
The recent issue of The Chicago Reporter (a publication of the Community Renewal Society) is one of the vehicles of that campaign drawing attention to the children of incarcerated parents. It was also covered on WBEZ.
We can connect this with the population of Chicago Public School students currently homeless.