With a respectful tip of the hat in honor of activist Zilphia Horton, the title of this episode speaks to how one might harness an ember's kinetic potential, use its heat to rekindle the hearth, and its light to serve as a beacon, so others might find a way home, within a spirit of forgiveness and redemption.
While the original hymn proclaimed "this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine!," within this anti-fragile model, the "me" is transformed into "we."
Ruth and Kent are creating an Anti-Fragile Playbook; a step-by-step guide for those seeking to deliver a self-funded economic revival that addresses the root causes of generational poverty and trauma.
An anti-fragile system benefits from hardship and stress, which means the model improves even as things become worse, and in this podcast series it's been discussed how a step-by-step plan has been defined (following the Community Activation and Launch Methodology as a baseline framework) for igniting a rooted community activation that thrives in the context of difficulty.
Examples include:
- intentionally source and activate existing local leadership (rather than rely upon "experts" from outside the community)
- educate community members as "kitchen table capitalists" or "household entrepreneurs," optimizing productive capacity to tapping into existing fonts of great creative potential
- identify and activate soft capitals like time, attention, relationship, trust and wisdom for stronger communities - the foundation of any thriving gift economy)
- promote a philosophy of inclusivity for all, such as the economically disadvantaged, explicitly the houseless, single parents and the racially diverse, through a philosophy of otherhood to brotherhood
- promoting locally-sourced food and nutritional educational opportunities for expanding health as wealth
Because the authors of the AntiFragile Playbook are using themselves as test subjects, (igniting and launching a pilot community), the Anti-Fragile Playbook is continuing its continued evolution and improvement, and consistent with the Anti-Fragile Playbook: one activist became two, and soon afterwards were joined by a third to create a sustained grass-roots advocacy.
As the three (Ruth, Trudy, and Kent) continued to synthesize the model, they found that they've irresistibly attracted two additional persons (as well as a growing number of client communities), and so the "administrative committee" now numbers five, all serving as peers.
In this discussion, Ruth Glendinning and Kent Dahlgren share their direct experience with this "point of inflection" (from three to five), referencing various pertinent examples from adjacent domains, such as activism, parenting, management, and mentorship.
Ruth and Kent discuss how to curate an authentic sense of ownership, shared attribution, and stewardship, through a nuanced and subtle application of wisdom, and provide examples of why Ruth, Trudy, and Kent invest so deeply in broadening and deepening an investment among those typically described as the elderly: the value of wisdom capital is transcendent to that of ordinary money.
