Awakin Calls

Rikin Gandhi helped found is now the CEO of Digital Green, an agricultural development company.  Digital Green is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of rural communities across South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa through the use of videos on agricultural best practices, which are locally produced and showcased in interactive small-group settings. Whereas the traditional approach to agricultural extension services emphasizes the role of experts in providing top-down advice to farmers, Digital Green's approach empowers farmers to connect with and provide guidance to others who are similarly situated in their communities. Rikin co-founded Digital Green as a research project in Microsoft Research India's Technology for Emerging Markets team and now leads the spin-off of Digital Green that partners with government and non-governmental agencies to amplify the effectiveness of agricultural development globally.

Working in concert with local public, private, and civil society organizations, Digital Green helps local farmers produce 8-10 minute videos in which the farmers themselves star; check the quality and accuracy of the videos; organize and mediate local gatherings in which the videos are shown and discussed by community members; and gather feedback from community members in order to expand upon and improve the content of the videos.  In this manner, the Digital Green method "creates a new ecosystem of community learning where the community creates, disseminates, and evaluates the information." Digital Green thus "flips the broadcast paradigm" by facilitating the creation of content "by farmers, of farmers, for farmers."

Rikin’s journey to Digital Green began with a childhood dream of becoming an astronaut. He was inspired by the 1969 moon landing and the combination of "brains and brawn" exemplified by the astronauts. So he graduated with a Bachelors in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and a Master's in Aeronautical and Astronautical Space Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Rikin then planned to join the U.S. Air Force, but he was told that he would need to undergo a painful eye surgery in order to be eligible. He underwent the surgery and, in the interim, worked at a private space tourism company, earned his private pilot license, and performed research work at Oracle, where he received patents for linguistic search algorithms that he helped develop. Rikin was on the verge of joining the U.S. Air Force and taking one step closer to making his childhood dreams come true.

Then a personal shift occurred. After spending most of his life gazing outward and beyond the physical limits of the Earth, Rikin turned his gaze inward and back toward Earth. He learned that many astronauts experienced a transformation after going into space that caused them to look upon the Earth -- and themselves -- with fresh eyes. Many of these astronauts went on to become farmers and teachers in order to better connect to the world and its people. After some self-examination, Rikin realized that he "d[id]n't need [his] fifteen minutes of fame to go into space." He, too wanted to better connect to this world and its people.

In that spirit, Rikin became inspired by a "different sort of hero" -- the men and women who represent 60% of India’s population and who produce the second largest farm output in the world. Rikin consequently "reverse-migrated" to India and immersed himself in rural India and Indian agriculture. He worked at Microsoft Research India's Technology for Emerging Markets team, which led to the creation of Digital Green.

Digital Green's approach to agricultural extension services has been shown to be 10 times more cost-effective and 7 times more effective in terms of uptake than the traditional approach to agricultural extension services. There are several reasons for Digital Green's success, many of which have to do with the localized nature of Digital Green's offering and the technological innovations at the heart of Digital Green's platform. But, according to Rikin, there's another reason:  Digital Green's outreach to women farmers has been particularly effective, as women account for about 80% of Digital Green's audience and are especially receptive to content that features fellow women.

Since 2008 and as of June 2016, Digital Green has reached over 1 million individuals across 13,592 villages -- including villages from 9 states in India and parts of Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Ghana, Niger and Tanzania -- through 4,426 videos. Digital Green has received support from a variety of organizations, including, among others, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, U.S.A.I.D., Google, Cisco and Oracle. Rikin and Digital Green have received awards including the Ashoka Fellowship, TED Fellowship, MIT Technology Review TR35, CNN-IBN Young Indian Leaders, and Fortune Global Forum Visionaries. Digital Green now looks to capitalize on its success by expanding on the topics covered by the videos to include health and nutrition.

Rikin has found that his background in aeronautical and astronautical space engineering has come in handy in his current endeavors. "[T]he same principles of looking at a rocket from a system's perspective – human, machine, and environment – are still critical when analyzing agricultural development issues. Like engineering, development decisions need to be grounded in sound science and reasoning," Rikin says. Ultimately, Rikin finds agricultural development to be a "more challenging" and personally fulfilling enterprise.

Rikin is a licensed private pilot and received patents for linguistic search algorithms that he helped develop at Oracle. He has a master's degree in aeronautical and astronautical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor's degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.

 

Philippe Simonin had a dream to share dreams. Driven by a faith in creating a collaborative community where people support and help each other actualize their dreams, he founded Dreemit.org, a personal social online project aiming at creating hope and community.  Originally from a little village in France near the Alps, he now finds himself in the Bay Area, California, armed with a camera and an open heart as he dreams with people on the streets of San Francisco.

“When I came to San Francisco, I was amazed by the energy of the Bay Area and its people,” Philippe has said.  “The people of San Francisco and the Bay Area inspired me through their engagement; they taught me what it means to dream big and make a difference.  I loved it and wanted to share it. With two Japanese friends, Takuya and Eiko, we thought that it all starts with some people’s dreams and ideas. … Dreemit.org was born: What if we collect people’s dreams in life?”

Philippe has recorded 400 interviews of people from all walks of life in eight countries on their dreams and aspirations.  “My dream is to collect 1 million dreams, spread inspiration and build a positive community, helping as many people as possible to achieve their dreams,” Philippe has said.

“Dreams turned into reality are the quintessence of life ….  Experiencing this is unique, and a privilege. I wanted to share that experience with those far away.  So I left my mechanical engineering life and started a blog (making my parents worried): Now I interview strangers about their dreams! Once past the first uncomfortable seconds, when people look into my eyes and see that I mean it and I care, it’s wonderful.”

“I hear amazing stories. I’ve done this in eight countries — France, Sweden, Belgium, England, Spain, Portugal and Germany, as well as the U.S. — and so far Americans understand better than anyone the idea of a dream and tend to pursue their dreams more.”

Prior to Dreemit.org, Philippe worked mainly in the automotive industry in France, Sweden and Thailand.  He has more than ten years of experience in automotive technical program management, and has worked on several award-winning trucks.  He completed his engineering degree in France, Austria and Germany, and holds an MBA from the Lyon School of Management.  He also completed a one-year Transformation Programme in Positive Psychology and Collective Intelligence at the Ecole Centrale in Paris in 2014.

Though Dreemit.org is still in its infancy, it was awarded second place in the San Francisco Startup Weekend Hackathon in July 2016.  As Philippe has said, “I am getting amazing and positive feedback with some very friendly and profound answers from people who accept and trust me. How this project will evolve is still to be defined.  I will learn by doing with your help hopefully.”

 

“Even in the most challenging of times, there is the opportunity to learn, to love, to breathe.… I do not want to waste my time wanting, and waiting for, reasons for gratitude. The gift of my life is at hand, and it wants me to be fully alive, and wildly grateful, now. And again now. Unconditionally,” says Kristi Nelson, our guest in conversation this Thanksgiving Week.   

Kristi is the Executive Director of A Network for Grateful Living, a global organization offering online educational programs and practices which inspire and guide a commitment to grateful living as an engaged mindfulness practice, grounded in both wisdom and science.

Grateful living is, according to Kristi, “very much about planting yourself exactly in this moment in a spirit of sufficiency – what if this is all there is?” The practice encourages us to approach every moment and interaction as sufficient – “What if this is all there is in terms of time? What if I am all that I am in terms of my identity and what I bring to the world, and I’m enough? What if the people that are right in front of me are the people I’m meant to love? What if the life I’m living is exactly the life I’m meant to occupy?”

Even if we are facing hardship or illness or grief, grateful living encourages us to ponder, “What is the situation forcing me to notice? What is the situation forcing me to learn? What is the situation forcing me to let go of? What is the situation forcing me to see as an opportunity?” As Kristi says, at some point we can remove the “forcing” in the questions and replace it with “allowing”, because “people that are most at peace are those who are looking at the moment for its richness – not at what is lacking…. [We all have an] impulse that I do not want to feel at the effect of my circumstances; I want to feel a sense of agency; I want to open myself to participate in my experience in a way that doesn’t keep me from life [but] that allows me to live life inside circumstances I may not be choosing – to still have my full sense of engagement with my life no matter what, unconditionally. That’s what we are all longing for. [Gratefulness practices] allow us to consider that and move toward that.”

A survivor for more than 23 years of stage 4 atypical lymphoma that she experienced during “the prime of life,” Kristi has experienced first-hand the power of this form of grateful, “acute living.” After 11 diagnostic surgeries over the nine months that were required for her to be conclusively diagnosed with cancer, Kristi discovered that her cancer by then had metastasized to the spine, requiring her to have extensive back surgery and rods put into spine, followed by radiation and chemotherapy for stage 4 atypical lymphoma. She found that “while I was in hospital [I had] the opportunity to love the people who came in to take my blood every afternoon. If I can’t move my body out of this bed, then what can I do within this bed? [I had to consider] what is possible in this moment and then to go there. Otherwise we are reduced to our circumstances…rather than claiming our agency in that moment which is what makes an empowered patient…. How can I co-create my experience?”

“There was something for me about losing control completely…. I had to find those vestiges of what I could influence when so much was stripped away from me…. At some point I think I got very clear that I could either resist my circumstances or that I could try in whatever way I could not to be falsely optimistic or be Pollyanna-ish but to make the best of my circumstances…. What if this was all that I had? … We’ll never learn if we’re resisting the lives we are leading…. If we’re in resistance to what’s currently sown, and you want it to be otherwise, that’s the definition of suffering. So how can I break free from suffering and develop a kind of resilience to liberate myself into the moment as it actually is rather than how I think it should be?”

A Network for Grateful Living, founded by Brother David Steindl-Rast and directed by Kristi, provides online tools and support for off-line grateful living. Through Gratefulness.org, an interactive website with several thousand participants daily from more than 240 countries and territories, the Network is launching a curriculum to teach the fundaments of grateful living; piloting gratefulness practice groups around the world so people can gather in person with one another and have a curriculum to practice grateful living with one another; an online community; and tools and practices.

“We really think of grateful living as a movement,” Kristi says. “[It] has the power to really change the world because we believe that when you live gratefully you treat other people differently – that you are much more curious and inquisitive and respectful about other people, that you have a sense of sufficiency in your own life and abundance that make you want to be generous and make you less longing for other experiences.”

Prior to directing the Network, Kristi helped to lead, fund, and strengthen organizations committed to progressive social and spiritual change. In 2001, Kristi started a values-based fundraising consulting and training, and leadership coaching company, and in this capacity worked with organizations such as the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Spirit in Action, Wisdom 2.0, and The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, among others. During this same period, she was also the founding Director of the Soul of Money Institute with Lynne Twist, Director of Development at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, and Director of Development and Community Relations for the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society.

Kristi received her BA from UMass/Amherst, a graduate certificate in Business and Sociology from Boston College, and her Master’s in Public Administration (MPA) with a concentration in Leadership Studies, from Harvard University. She lives in Western Massachusetts with her family, and feels blessed every day to be surrounded by the glories of the natural world and a vibrant, loving community.

Join us in grateful conversation with this remarkable woman and leader!

 

"Women being fully expressed in the workplace is, for me, an integral part of being well and being whole," says Bonita Banducci.  "Calling out the brilliance of women both for my students and for women at large, men and women, to me is the access to just a higher level of self-expression for women -- actually men begin to understand where they are coming from (some self-awareness that they never have had) and ultimately women have a greater impact, a greater contribution, not only in the workplace but in all sectors of the world."

Understanding the workplace cultures of men and women -- and then "deciphering and naming in language the unique contributions women make in such a way that men can understand that contribution in their world of skills and objects and tools" -- is what Bonita Banducci has dedicated her career to.  Bonita boasts an expansive and powerful resume focused on workplace gender issues. Perhaps her storied career should come as no surprise, as her name in both Spanish and Italian means “Beautiful Great Leader”.

She is a teacher, consultant, author, coach, and has developed original methodologies to identify how the talents of women can be put to greater use within business contexts. Bonita’s work has been guided by the belief that greater consciousness about how women and men relate to each other, and of their complementary strengths, can be powerful keys to enhanced creativity, performance, and humanity at all levels.

Early in her career, a customer at her restaurant came to her with a question:  “How can a store be so well run without a hint of authoritarianism?”  As he walked out the door, she asked herself, “I wonder if it has anything to do with my being a woman?” For Bonita, that’s where it all started.

Bonita currently teaches Gender and Engineering for Santa Clara University’s School of Engineering Graduate Program and is a faculty member for the Women’s Leaders for the World Program and Women’s Startup Lab. “One thing I always advocate for,” Bonita says, “is turning a difficult situation, perhaps a conflict at work, into a teachable moment.  We can either let difficult things roll off our backs or we can be confrontational about them.  As a teacher, I encourage people to really analyze their problems and to teach one another.”

She is the president of Banducci Consulting and is a founding board member of the Global Women’s Leadership Network. She has delivered workshops at the University of San Francisco, Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, Stanford’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Global Tech Women, as well as at Women in Technology conferences like Society of Women Engineers and SCU Women in Business.  

Named one of 100 Women of Influence of Silicon Valley by the Silicon Valley Business Journal 2014, she was also a representative of the Commission on the Status of Women of Santa Clara County at the UN NGO Forum World Conference on Women held in Beijing, leading a workshop on Creating Partnership of Women in Business with Women in Development for Sustainable Global Development.

Along the way, she has authored several books and articles, including Making the Differences Work: Closing the Gender Gap--What we can do, Take Charge of Your Promotion, and “What’s Different About Women’s Leadership in Philanthropy?” The Transformative Power of Women’s Philanthropy.

Highlighting Bonita’s list of accomplishments are the frameworks she developed for understanding gender differences, Gender Competence® and the RISE Methodology.  Gender Competence is the understanding and skills for effectively managing gender differences as “competencies” so that the contributions women have to make can be understood and utilized in traditional business culture, with its focus on skills, action, objects and results.  The RISE Model replaces the language of Masculine and Feminine with cross-cultural terminology of Individualistic and Relational/Collectivist to focus on the different paradigms or lenses through which men and women often see the world.

Bonita encourages us to “ask questions of and listen to the women of an organization – and respond.  The experience of being listened to and being heard is an important factor in the change in perception.”  This reframing allows for more flexibility in understanding how different people look at the world.  Realizing that viewing one perspective as superior and the other inferior is limiting, she sets her goal to understand the differences so as to bring out the best in everyone.

"I think that by actually calling out the brilliance, by deciphering and naming in language the unique contributions women make in such a way that men can understand our contribution in their world of skills and objects and tools, that makes a tremendous difference. ... The real win is when we can collaborate with these differences [the masculine and the feminine]" in a synergistic way.

Join us on November 19 to hear more about Bonita’s remarkable journey.

 

“The evidence is overwhelming, it is irrefutable.  Sleep is the single most effective thing you can do to reset your brain and body health each and every day,” says Matt Walker, Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory.

Calling the global sleep-loss epidemic “the greatest public health challenge we now face in the 21st century,” Walker examines the impact of sleep on human brain function in healthy and clinical populations.  Through his work at UC Berkeley, he has been at the forefront of sleep research. He has linked sleep deprivation to psychiatric disorders, obesity, risky behavior, post-traumatic stress disorder, learning, and memory loss in old age.  He found a link between poor sleep and the build-up of a protein linked to Alzheimer’s, a major breakthrough in our understanding of the disease that shows just how critical good sleep is to all of us.

And recently, his research demonstrates that a poor night’s sleep may also hinder one’s ability to accurately read the emotions of others – an impairment that may have wide-ranging consequences for our social interactions.  “Few things come unhinged as quickly and profoundly as our emotional stability…when we are not getting enough sleep,” he told the Wall Street Journal.  Fatigue-induced misinterpretations and miscues can wreak havoc on relationships.

“If you would ask me what the future of sleep is, ironically I would tell you it is about a return to the past,” he says.  “Because in 1910 the average American adult was hitting the sweet spot of 8 and 1/4 hours of sleep a night.  Now that number is closer to 6 and 3/4 hours.  The decimation of sleep throughout industrialized nations is having a catastrophic impact on our health and our wellness.  It is a silent sleep loss epidemic.  I believe it is now time for us to reclaim our right to a full night of sleep, without embarrassment, without the stigma of laziness.  And in doing so, we may remember what it feels like to truly be awake during the day.”

Dr. Walker earned his PhD in neurophysiology from the Medical Research Council in London and subsequently became Professor of Psychology at Harvard Medical School. He is the recipient of funding awards from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. He has been featured on CBS 60 Minutes and the National Geographic documentary, Sleepless in America, among other programs.

Dr. Walker is the recipient of numerous funding awards from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, and a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. To date, he has published over eighty research studies describing the critical importance of sleep for learning, memory, creativity, emotional regulation and cardiovascular health.

Robert Yazzie is a citizen of and Chief Justice Emeritus of the Navajo Nation. He served as Chief Justice of the Navajo Nation from 1992 through 2003.  During that time, he promoted the development of Navajo common law and helped articulate the Navajo "bill of rights."  In an effort to further the Navajo – as opposed to the Western colonial – paradigm of law and justice, he looked to the teachings of the early Navajo Elders and, drawing upon their wisdom, promoted the use of Navajo peacemaking techniques, or hozhooji naat'aanii, in a variety of settings (including, for example, domestic violence disputes).  He refers to Navajo peacemaking – a circle practice that has been likened to contemporary restorative justice practices – as "original dispute resolution" or "ODR."

Justice Yazzie sees many differences between the Navajo peacemaking model and the Western colonial model of law and justice.  In the Western model, justice is rendered "vertically" by strangers holding power within hierarchies, and coercion is the driving force as they pursue their preeminent goal of "truth" – and the consequent assignment of fault.  In the Navajo model, by contrast, the focus is on consensus-building rather than truth-seeking, and healing and solidarity (rather than punishment) are the driving forces of the process.  The Navajo process calls for full participation of victims, offenders, relatives, and members of the community, and justice is conceived of in horizontal terms – that is to say, "no person is above the other."  "In a circle, there is no right or left, no beginning or end.  Every point (or person) on the line on a circle looks to the same center as the focus.  The circle is a symbol of Navajo justice because it is perfect, unbroken, and a simile of unity and oneness." 

Justice Yazzie says "the Navajo understanding of 'solidarity' is difficult to translate into English, but it carries connotations that help the individual to reconcile self with family, community, nature, and the cosmos – all reality. . . . Most importantly, [Navajo peacemaking] restores good relations with self."  Put otherwise, under the Navajo paradigm, people are equal in the law rather than equal before the law, and the focus is on promoting human flourishing rather than assigning fault.

Robert Yazzie grew up in a traditional area of the Navajo Nation and attended Oberlin College in Ohio.  Following his graduation from the University of New Mexico School of Law in 1982, he practiced law in the Navajo Nation courts, acted as a Navajo-English interpreter in US District Court, and served as a consultant to law firms.  After seven years as presiding judge of the district court in the Navajo Nation in Window Rock, Arizona, he was appointed Chief Justice of the Navajo Nation in 1992. 

Justice Yazzie has said of his Western education that while it provided him with some tools, it did not provide him with the vital knowledge that he was seeking.  He said, "I had to relearn my language and traditions and go back to a spiritual power base before I could begin to change [myself and the systems around me]." 

In addition to writing about Navajo justice, Justice Yazzie writes about the ongoing legacy of colonialism and Social Darwinism in the United States.  While the Navajo may never achieve the political sovereignty that they desire, he says, the Navajo "can achieve internal sovereignty" by engaging in individual and collective healing processes, such as those embodied in Navajo peacemaking.

Justice Yazzie was formerly the Director of the Dine Policy Institute of Dine College (Navajo Nation), where he developed policy based on Navajo wisdom and applied traditional Navajo thinking to contemporary problems.  He is the author of articles and book chapters on many subjects, including Navajo peacemaking, traditional Indian law, and international human rights law.  He has taught at the University of New Mexico School of Law, Northern Arizona University, and Navajo Technical College.  He has a global audience and has frequently visited foreign lands to share his wisdom about traditional indigenous justice and governance.

 

In 1980, Keith McHenry was a college student trying to raise money for a friend who had been arrested at an anti-nuclear protest. To help pay for the lawyers, Keith was planning a bake sale; in a fateful moment, he saw a poster that read:

It will be a great day when the schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to have a bake sale to buy a bomber.

Keith had been studying about misplaced priorities in society and government while in Boston College at the time, and the poster gave Keith and his friends a fun idea: “to dress up in military uniforms at the bake sales, and pretend we were from the Air Force and we were trying to buy a bomber.” The gimmick would be a great way to start a conversation with passersby who might not ordinarily be reached through a protest or a sit-in.

As Keith (who hails in part from a military family) and his friends studied injustice and interacted with their community, their central idea came into focus: what the world needed was food, not bombs. It was from this seed that the volunteer organization Food Not Bombs sprouted, and has now blossomed into more than 1,000 chapters worldwide.  Since that day he saw the bake sale poster in 1980, Keith has recovered, cooked and shared vegan food with the hungry for over 35 years.

No longer centered on bake sales, Food Not Bombs volunteers salvage surplus food that would otherwise go to waste, prepare it, and serve it for free in parks, on street corners, and at protests. The food is vegan and nutritious. Volunteers distribute fliers and engage passersby in conversations about the connections between industrial agriculture, military spending, and poverty. 

Keith explains, “We are trying to model a post-capitalist society by showing first that there is abundance—because there is an abundance of food, no one should go hungry. At the same time, we work cooperatively by using the consensus process. We are a leaderless movement where everyone’s opinion is respected equally and we try to draw out the best ideas and feelings of each of the people in our collectives.”

Keith helped found the second chapter of Food Not Bombs in San Francisco, where he was one of several volunteers arrested by the police in 1988. In the following years, Keith was arrested over 100 times for serving free food in city parks (in violation of various local ordinances governing mass feedings) and spent over 500 nights in jail. Once when he was arrested in Orlando in 2011, he said, “We don’t fault the city of Orlando for being in this dilemma, because it really is a national problem. There needs to be a national solution.”  On another occasion, officers ripped off most of Keith's clothes, lifted him by his arms and legs until his ligaments and tendons ripped, kicked and punched him, and stuffed him into a stress position cage suspended from the ceiling. After three days in the cage, he was freed in his underwear at about 3:00 AM and walked to Saint Mary's Hospital for help. This was to be the first of three times that Keith was held in that cage, unclothed and in a stress position for multiple days, by the San Francisco police.

In 1995, when Keith faced life in prison because of California’s “three strikes” law, Amnesty International adopted his case and recognized Food Not Bombs volunteers as prisoners of conscience. As news spread about the arrests, new chapters of Food Not Bombs arose in major cities across the country and around the world, including Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Australia, and Latin America. 

Food Not Bombs is often the first and most generous provider of food and supplies to the survivors of disasters, such as the Asian tsunami, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and the September 11 attacks in New York. Food Not Bombs also provides meals for protesters, such as a 100-day occupation in Kiev, Ukraine during the Orange Revolution, and a two-month Peace Camp on the West Bank in Palestine. Volunteers also served meals at the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle and at Occupy Wall Street protests. In each instance, local Food Not Bombs volunteers organized themselves without central planning.

Keith envisions this model growing even more, and possibly emerging as an alternate mode of governance: “Maybe there would be a spokes council meeting where two or three people from Food Not Bombs, two or three people from Homes Not Jails, two or three people from the Food Not Lawns gardening collective would all come together to make decisions in a larger community. And so the whole idea is just a small infrastructure of a cooperative, noncompetitive, sustainable way of organizing community, as opposed to the capitalist, exploitive system we currently have.”

In 1995, Keith co-founded Indymedia, a global open publishing network of journalist collectives reporting on political and social issues. Keith was also a pioneer in the Low Powered FM radio movement and a co-founder of San Francisco Liberation Radio. He is a co-founder of the October 22nd No Police Brutality Day protests and he helped start the Homes Not Jails squatters' movement in the United States.

In 2012, Keith founded the Food Not Bombs Free Skool, which teaches a summer course covering social issues, community organizing, and sustainable agriculture. He has co-authored Food Not Bombs: How to feed the hungry and build community and wrote and illustrated Hungry for Peace: How you can help end poverty and war with Food Not Bombs.

Most recently, Keith published The Anarchist Cookbook, which includes "recipes" for social change as well as for tasty group vegan meals. Asked why he supports veganism, Keith recounts, “I had to kill seven roosters when I was 15 or 16 ... And that was such an obviously violent act—sticking the knife in the head of these roosters, and all the other hens and roosters on the farm were flipping out when I did that. The goats were upset. Everybody was screaming—it was like a Hitchcock movie or something. And that’s when I became …I started feeling from that age that the violence against animals was based on the same the kind of excuse that the state and corporations use for violence in war.”

Keith was the recipient the 1999 Local Hero Award by the San Francisco Bay Guardian, was named Resister of the Year in 1995, was given the Advocate of the Year Award in 2006 by the Arizona Coalition to End Homelessness, and was presented with Noam Chomsky Award in 2012 by the Justice Studies Association.

Keith lives with his partner and fellow Food Not Bombs activist, Abbi Samuels, in Santa Cruz, California and at their farm in Taos, New Mexico. He enjoys tending to their gardens, sharing meals with the hungry, maintaining one of the movement's websites and helping coordinate logistics for Food Not Bombs globally. He is an experienced public speaker giving presentations at colleges and conferences all over the world. Keith also draws, paints, and writes about social justice issues.

Cierra McNamara is a meditator, inventor, and Denver-based entrepreneur.  She believes that each person has within themselves a “reservoir of wisdom, creativity and resilience that is cultivated through moments of stillness and silence.”  This belief has driven her to found a meditation center, develop an adjustable meditation seat, and share her love for inner strength, peace, and well-being with anyone who walks through her door.

In 2011 Cierra founded the Mayu Sanctuary, a member-owned, -operated, and  -supported community meditation center in one of Denver’s busiest neighborhoods.  With the goal of bringing meditation into the lives of ordinary people, she created a quiet, peaceful environment to allow people to slow down and reconnect with themselves.  Mayu is unaffiliated with a religion, lineage or tradition and does not promote one teacher or type of meditation technique.  Visitors to the center are welcome to practice formal prayer or meditation of their choice, or informal silent activities such as reading or journaling.

Cierra opens her door to meditators of all levels of experience to attend a class or simply drop in, and offers support and resources for those who struggle with anxiety, depression, anger, grief, and illness or pain.  Visitors have grown alongside the Sanctuary, evolving from customers to members and advocates as the community has grown stronger and more supportive.  Five years after its founding, Cierra shifted the Sanctuary from a traditional for-profit business model to a co-op.

Over the years, Cierra has developed a multi-faceted philosophy, which forms the foundation and direction for her work.  For her, Mayu exists as a reprieve from the difficulties of daily life, to provide a peaceful environment for people to reconnect with their own inner resources, to promote the advancement of mind-body disciplines, to demonstrate that every moment in life is precious, to spotlight often overlooked beauty, to provide continual reassurance and support to those who seek a well-lived life, and to encourage well-being in all forms.

In addition to her work at the Mayu Sanctuary, Cierra has also spent the last six years developing the Mayu Seat with her husband, Sean.  Dismayed with the lack of seating options for meditators who don't sit on the floor, Cierra and Sean took it upon themselves to design a high-quality, versatile seat that gives all the ergonomic advantages of traditional meditation cushions and benches.  Because they understood the importance of creating a seat that could adapt to every individual's needs, they set out to make the chair as customizable as possible.

“Even in the midst of life’s most tumultuous moments, there exists in everyone an undisturbable place of clarity that arises with awareness in the present moment.”  In the years to come, Cierra hopes that the Mayu Sanctuary will “continue to evolve, offering services and companionship to anyone on their inner journey.”  Because she believes that contentment is a long-term endeavor that requires an on-going commitment, she will continue to provide both literal and figurative stillness to her community of member-owners.

Join us on October 22 to learn more about the tremendous work Cierra is doing and hear where her journey will take her next.

 

Dr. Jeannie Kahwajy is the founder and CEO of Effective Interactions, a firm specializing in personal effectiveness and organizational achievement.  She is an expert in the mechanism of interpersonal influence and focuses on applications in leadership, decision making, negotiation, and learning: how to be heard, how to turn around difficult situations, how to help people explore new ideas, and how to get others to want to follow you.

Whereas management consulting too often focuses on the "what" of business – strategy, execution, financial modeling, etc. – Jeannie believes that the key to unlocking individual and team potential is to tackle the "how" of interaction.  "If you don't get the people part right, nothing else matters."  Her approach is scientific, innovative, and counterintuitive, achieving breakthrough results with senior executives in major corporations on six continents.  She has also addressed 160 US Ambassadors and the top 50 at the US Department of State with the message of how we can create peaceful and profitable relationships through the language of leadership.

Dr. Kahwajy's research, teaching, and client engagements focus on specific ways leaders can transform their interactions to make those interactions – and themselves – more effective.  At the core, her work is about learning the skill to bring love and transformative participation into every interaction, though primarily in the workplace.  She believes it is possible for a single participant in an interaction to adopt behavior and successfully alter the communication dynamic, even when interacting with someone stuck in another mode.  This permits applicability of these techniques far beyond the traditional approaches which pre-suppose an alteration of behavior by both parties.

Her research interests flow from a few basic questions:  Why do we perform better in the presence of some people?  Or why do we give the benefit of the doubt to one person but not to another?  What causes us to WANT to hear, help, trust, or promote someone?  What creates goodwill?

“I was always curious about how when you’re talking to someone, magic seems to happen,” she says.  “Things come out of you and out of the other person that you didn’t even imagine.  So you both leave transformed.  There’s some magic that happens in the inner space between people.  One of my favorite quotes is that ‘The meaning of life is not what happens to people.  The meaning is what happens between people.’  And we are here to inspire people.  My dreams happen to be around the magic of interpersonal interactions.  And being surprised.  And trying to get that alchemy going in every situation we are in.  How my readiness to learn is the key to influencing and inspiring others.”

According to Kahwajy, “There’s something going on that’s very powerful and overlooked in the interaction between people. If you look deeply,” she continues, “what you can learn or see is that other people pull out your greatness and you pull out their greatness. It’s a skill.  It’s this force of receiving that elicits their greatness, and that’s really the mechanism.” 

That fundamental skill of receptiveness, according to Jeannie, is one that can be taught and learned.  If you want to be an exceptional communicator, she teaches, set people up to be better able to be receivers of information.  In other words, set people up to play a game of catch with you, instead of a game of throw at you (and them). “This is all accomplished by our going first, by our achieving a ‘state of receptiveness’ ourselves: ready to catch especially what we don’t expect or ready to learn what we didn’t know we didn’t know.”

Dr. Kahwajy holds multiple degrees from Stanford University – a PhD in organizational behavior and PhD Minor in social psychology, an MBA, and an MS in engineering-economic systems with a concentration in decision science, as well as a BS in systems engineering from the University of Virginia. She continues to advise executives and teach leadership and interpersonal dynamics inside companies and in top executive MBA programs around the globe.  Her Harvard Business Review article, “How Management Teams Can Have a Good Fight,” has recently become an HBR Classic.

Before devoting her full-time efforts to private consulting through Effective Interactions., Dr. Kahwajy was professor of organizational behavior at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland, a management consultant with Strategic Decisions Group in Menlo Park, CA, and a member of technical staff at Bell Labs.  She has held positions in technical marketing with Bell Atlantic, worked on the equity derivatives trading desk in London with Banque Paribas and was on a USAID team that advised the Czech Minister of Privitization during their economic transition in the early 1990s.

Elle Luna is an iconic designer, artist, painter, and writer.   If you’ve used ever the Uber app … If you’ve ever swiped an email on your iPhone… If you’ve ever deferred an email for some date in the future… If you’ve ever self-published on the open Medium platform … then you have experienced some of her celebrated work.  From designing some of our most widely used digital apps as a designer at IDEO and for Mailbox, Medium, and Uber, Elle is currently a noted painter and writer.  She speaks to groups around the world, and inspires women globally.  She is now at the intersection and hybridization of three domains: creativity, technology, and the feminine.  She is working to bring the tools of design, art, storytelling, and technology to awaken the feminine at a global level.

Elle began her design career at IDEO where she worked as a Senior Designer to disrupt markets for Fortune 500 companies and organizations through multi-channel, mass-market holistic solutions.  She led IDEO design projects including the World Cup in Brazil and the US Treasury Department, where she stewarded, from the ground up, startup designs for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in Washington D.C., created as a part of President Obama’s Wall Street Reform Act.  Reflecting on her IDEO learnings, Elle has said:  “I think back to the different phases of a project at IDEO—it’s not so different from life, really—I’m [now] in the exploratory, divergent phase. The part where you brainstorm a lot and encourage wild ideas and defer judgement.  I believe that the longer you can hang with that ambiguity or unknown, the greater the results will be at the end.”

After five years at IDEO, she started hearing about young, exciting teams trying to disrupt existing industries. She wondered how user-centered design might benefit the startups in her own San Francisco backyard.  One of them, a small company of about 25 people, was called UberCab.  “I was using Uber all the time in San Francisco, even though I hated the design.  And then I went to the Crunchies awards ceremony and at a post-ceremony event, where I was in a ball gown, I saw the CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick, sitting at the bar.  I … walked up to him and said, ‘I use Uber all the time and I absolutely hate the app.  I think you should bring me in to fix it.’  He replied, ‘Oh, yeah?  What are the three things you’d fix about it?’  I said, ‘I’d redo the logo, redo the entire app, and change the rating system.’  I think there was something about being in a dress that empowered me to say such things. And do you know what he said?  He said, ‘Be at the Uber office at 9am on Monday.’  I told him I couldn’t do it alone and he said he’d have a team for me.  I thought the offer was bogus, but I went to Uber’s office on Monday at 9am, laughing to myself, and Travis led me back to a project room with two other designers—they were from outside of Uber and he had flown them in from New York!”  The UBER app Elle designed four years ago is still being used globally, and won numerous awards, including the FastCompany Innovation by Design Awards, where it beat out even the Mars Rover and Tesla.

Soon after, Elle joined a small team of ex-IDEOers who wanted to revolutionize email for the iPhone.  Their venture, Mailbox, was an unmitigated success, and it was acquired by Dropbox one month after launch.  While she and her team were building Mailbox, she began having a recurring dream about a white room. The room had tall white walls, warehouse windows, and concrete floors.  She says that she would visit this room every night in her dreams and be filled with the most unbelievable sense of peace.  The morning that Mailbox launched, she had a surreal experience – realizing that while launching this company was one of the highlights of her life, she couldn’t understand what it had to do with the dream of a white room.  “I quit two weeks later in search of this white room—literally—and I found it.  It was an apartment for rent in San Francisco.  On my first night there I waited for the peace to arrive, but it didn’t.  I felt confused and overwhelmed, and so I asked the room ‘Why am I here?’ and, as clear as day, the room replied—‘It’s time to paint.’  I returned to one of my life-long passions (which I had long neglected)—making art as a way of understanding myself and, ultimately, the inner-connection of all things.”

After following her internal calling and having two solo art shows in San Francisco, Elle stepped back and took a larger look at the questions she was asking about her work and her life, and how the two intersected. What did it mean to create meaningful work?  To live a meaningful life? What was all of this living ultimately in service of?  She collected her questions into an essay titled “The Crossroads of Should and Must”—Should being what we’re obligated to do; Must being our heart’s desire, our innermost longing and knowing. Within the first two weeks, the essay was Tweeted to over 5 million people and read by over a quarter of a million readers. The post was then expanded into a full color hardcover book by the same name (Workman Publishing NY, 2015) and it is now in its fourth printing with over 100,000 copies in print. 

Elle then decided that she wanted to encourage people to reclaim their creativity, their time, and their ability to be creators.  Drawing upon an annual class at Yale by the legendary designer Michael Beirut, called “The 100 Day Project”, where students do one design action repeatedly for 100 days and share their projects on the last day, Elle decided that she wanted to do this 100 Day Project as a virtual movement, so she gathered some friends on Instagram and she launched the annual 100 Day Project in 2013.  She just concluded their third year, and the project has expanded into over 65 countries with over 50,000 people participating.  As the project has been described:  "The great surrender is the process; showing up day after day is the goal.  For the 100 Day Project, it’s not about fetishizing finished products—it’s about the process."

As the 100 Day Project was sweeping the internet and globe, large brands began reaching out to her with lucrative offers.  She was baffled, as she had created a bottom up, community-driven project.  Should she take on the corporate sponsorship?  Should she sell the idea to a big museum in New York?  It was tricky.  It heralded for her Chief Seattle’s question… “How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land?”  Ultimately, she declined the offers because she felt deeply and intuitively that a project based on global creativity is an entity that cannot be owned.  

Following time working with women in India and Indonesia, as well as her book tour, Elle began meeting women everywhere who felt disconnected from their MUST.  She began to wonder why women, in particular, were showing up in droves to her talks and resonating with the message of Shoulds and Musts?  She came to realize that women—through social, emotional, and cultural conditioning—have come to understand the nature of Should far too well and for far too long.  She is now focusing on using her energies and talents to awaken the feminine spirit.  Among other emerging endeavors, she is co-facilitating Aphrodite Emerges workshops.

As Elle has said:  “Taking the leap is the greatest gift I’ve ever given myself. It’s funny to go give talks because I don’t have any answers, only questions. But I feel like, if we can encourage people to do this heart-led, soul-led work, then it will be unbelievable.”  Elle believes that “everyone has a gift to give. And I believe that the whole world is waiting for us to give that gift to them. What if we could empower everyone to operate out of that place, instead of out of job titles or money or security, even?  Imagine a world where everyone gives their truest, most authentic gifts.”

Join us for a conversation with this remarkable artist, designer, writer, and spirit!