From Debra Row, Ph.D., President of the U.S. Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development:

The Hispanic/Latino cultures will continue to grow in influence in the United States and have the potential to help build a more sustainable future. We at the Higher Education Associations Sustainability Consortium, in collaboration with HACU — the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities — are interested in exploring opinions and perspectives from people involved with sustainability who are Hispanic/Latino and could discuss with us the connections between their traditional cultures and sustainability values.  If you are interested in sharing your perspectives, learning more and possibly helping to design a national initiative on the empowerment of Latinos to help create a sustainable future, or know someone that might be interested, please email me directly (dgrowe@oaklandcc.edu).   We have already had one exploratory conversation and are excited about the possibilities, but now want to include more people in this initial exploration for a second conference call. 

Tags: hispanic/latino cultures, sustainability, sustainability office

This article by Jacob Seltzer ’17 appeared on Wesleying, Wesleyan’s student life blog. Read the original here. 

A couple days ago, a series of banners were displayed in Usdan urging students to not to use the word “townie.” The banners are part of an effort by the Middletown Wesleyan Relations Committee (MWRC) to work towards their wider goal of “expanding and strengthening the Middletown-Wesleyan relationship.”

The word “townie” is often thrown around on campus when referring to Middletown residents, often with negative connotations. I spoke with Haenah Kwon ’17, a member of the MWRC who worked on the banner drop, to learn more about the current campaign. She explained that the banner drop was an effort to start a discussion:

We wanted to ask the questions instead of just actually do a concrete project. We want to start the campaign with this and later we want to connect it to other students groups who are based in Middletown, such as Middletown potluck, to start a productive discussion and find a concrete solution, but for now we’re just aiming to stimulate discussion.

When I asked Haenah what term should replace “townie,” she responded with some questions of her own:

Do we need a term? Do we need to find a label? Labels put up boundaries between the two communities. Call them by their names. People don’t outright call someone like, “Hey Townie,” they just refer [to them] in conversation. But still that’s recognizing the wall between the two communities, so we want to stay away from that.

However, acknowledging the reality of the boundaries that exist, Haenah believed that if a replacement was really necessary, “Middletown residents” would suffice. She continued, “just ‘townie’ has so many negative implications.”

Tags: middletown relations committee, midwes, t-word, townie, wsa

An important event sponsored by Wesleyan Student Affairs and presented by Class Action:

All of us are affected by classism. It permeates our societal structures – on individual, social, cultural and institutional levels. None of us escapes its effects. Yet, classism is invisible in many ways. Most of us have had few opportunities to examine classism in our lives and in the institutions in which we participate. Few of us have had open discussions with others about our values, attitudes and conditioning related to money, status and power.

This workshop is a personal and experiential exploration of the dynamics of class and classism in a space for Wesleyan students.

Thursday, February 26
6:00 – 8:00 PM
B2/B3, South College

Tags: classism, student affairs, workshop

Including the Excluded - the final event in Ujamaa’s 2015 Black History Month series – will discuss the intersectionality of race, queerness, and displacement, and further conversation on #BLACKLIVESMATTER at Wesleyan. The discussion will take place on Thursday, February 26 at 7:15 PM in 41 Wyllys, room 112.

Joining us from Justice 4 Jane:

Al Riccio is a transgender organizer with Justice for Jane and the ANSWER Coalition in CT. His experience in community organizing includes providing LGBTQ education and resources to youth, struggling against police brutality throughout the state and engaging in nationwide antiwar work.

IV Staklo is a genderqueer organizer with Justice for Jane and the Party for Socialism and Liberation in CT. They are a Russian Roma immigrant and student. IV helped organize new Trans* Day of Remembrance direct actions in New Haven and works in solidarity with the local #BlackLivesMatter movement. IV writes for Liberation News on LGBTQ, mental health, Roma and Eastern European issues.

This event is co-sponsored QueerWes and SPECTRUM. Dinner will be provided.

Tags: #blacklivesmatter, intersectionality, justice 4 jane, queerness, queerwes, race, trans rights

Betty Lou. Rachie Weisberg. August 2013

In the Summer of 2013, Rachel Lindy ’15, Rachie Weisberg ’15, and Isaac Silk ’14 spent six weeks living in the Coal River Valley of southern West Virginia—an area highly affected by mountaintop removal coal mining and teeming with activist resistance. During this time, we developed a multimedia project that explored the future of the region and its inhabitants in a post-coal economy, attempting to place this change in the larger context of social and environmental justice issues. By sharing these images and stories, we hope to provide the Wesleyan community with a sense of the deep complexities surrounding the coal industry, and to encourage dialogue around the often absentminded nature with which we consume fossil fuels.

This exhibition made possible through the generosity of the COE’s Visualizing the Environment Program, the COE, the Green Fund, and the CFA’s Feet to the Fire Program. The project will be on display in the Zelnick Pavilion through February 27.

Tags: arts, Center for the Arts, coal, college of the environment, Feet to the Fire, photography

From our friends at Kai Entrepreneurship Wesleyan:

Tags: kai entrepreneurship wesleyan

The first of four lectures in the Centralization and Decentralization series, hosted by the Allbritton Collaborative Course Cluster Initiative:

Tags: Allbritton Collaborative Course Cluster Initiative, cluster, cspl, Jason Sorens

The Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship presents

 STRUCTURE LAB
 Tuesday, March 3, 2015
6-9 p.m.
Allbritton 311

Joy Anderson ’89, President of Criterion Institute and instructor of Wesleyan’s “Money and Social Change” course, is a prominent national leader at the intersection of business and social change. She will bring her patented program — Structure Lab — to campus in this hands-on, learning-intensive session for anyone with an idea for a new enterprise, who wants to build business skills, or is just curious about the ways organizations function.

Registration is required, and space is limited. Structure Lab materials are approximately $25 per participant, and the Patricelli Center will be purchasing these for you. If you register and do not show up, you may be billed for your unused materials. 

REGISTER NOW

About Structure Lab

The overarching theory of change of Structure Lab is that legal structures manage relationships.

The labs are not reduced to focusing on any one kind of structure and maintain a signature comfort living in a space of blurred lines, emerging forms, and new innovations. Structure Lab is not only for the entrepreneur, but also for investors and ecosystem players, situating the labs in Criterion’s mission of shaping markets and systems to create social change.

Criterion responded to the need for both creativity and clarity in the social change space with the creation of Structure Lab. Initially supported by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Structure Lab is a learning experience that provides a framework in which to think about structure as part of social venture strategy.

The enterprise of social change is in flux. Terms of capital are shifting. New legal forms are emerging and the marketplace is more open to new organizational forms than ever before. Such periods of flux are rife with unpredictability, yet these periods are also rich with possibility; new approaches emerge and the rules of the game change.

What this means for you is that significant opportunities exist among the corporate forms that structure our organizations: for profits, non-profits and all the permutations in between. Structure Lab provides participants with a simple and accessible way to evaluate various structure options and to move forward strategically toward achieving their goals. Structure Lab enables participants to explore what is possible.

About Joy Anderson ’89

Joy began as a high school teacher in New York City Public Schools. She went to New York to understand how power works in big systems and stayed for eight years because she fell in love with the students. Joy played leadership roles in the teachers union and managed federally funded programs for the school and the district.

After leaving New York, Joy transitioned from a school teacher to an entrepreneur, founding Criterion Ventures in 2002, co-founding Good Capital with Tim Freundlich and Kevin Jones in 2006 and leading the development of Rockefeller-funded Healthcare_Uncovered from 2006 until 2009.

Literally hundreds of ventures have been shaped by Joy’s insights and experience. As faculty on the leading social innovation award programs, including Unreasonable Institute and Echoing Green, she advises the next generation of leaders. As chair of the board of directors of Village Capital and through involvement in Investor’s Circle, she is actively involved in shaping early stage social investments. And through her role in developing and leading Structure Lab© workshops she has helped over 300 organizations think through their legal and financial structures.

A serial entrepreneur and consummate networker, Joy’s leadership and expertise have been at the forefront of the development of the social capital markets over the last 10 years. Her interest in the role of finance in changing the world was sparked during her eight year consulting relationship with the General Board of Pensions of the United Methodist Church.  She was instrumental in her board position at Lutheran Community Foundation in their recent $10 million allocation to social investment. As a recognition of her business leadership, in 2011, Joy was ranked 51st in Fast Company’s annual of the 100 Most Creative People in Business.

Currently, she leads Criterion Institute which serves as a think tank around shaping markets to create social and environmental good. Criterion houses three field building initiatives, Structure Lab, Women Effect Investments and Church as an Economic Being. Her speaking and thought leadership is focused on the practices of shaping markets, whether that is focused on how the church is both an actor and implicated in the economy, on how legal structures shape the possibilities of enterprises, or a gender lens on investing.

Joy’s intellectual interests draw on her research for her Ph.D. in American History from New York University. Her dissertation examined prison reform in the 1830’s and how individuals and organizations in democracies claim expertise in order to shape public institutions.

Tags: Structure Lab

The Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship presents 

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND STRATEGIC PHILANTHROPY: STORIES FROM THE FIELD
A Talk, Lunch, and Q&A with Anne Lebleu ’00

Thursday, February 26
12-1 p.m.
Allbritton 311

Lunch will be provided for those who register by February 25.

During this conversation-style workshop, College of Letters alumna and philanthropy cross-trainer Anne Lebleu will talk about her career in corporate social responsibility, foundation consulting and management, and other social sector work.

This lunchtime event will be relevant for students with a wide variety of academic interests, extra-curricular passions, and career aspirations.

Anne Lebleu manages the philanthropic strategies and operations of Arabella’s family and individual clients and provides essential strategic grant-making knowledge and expertise. Currently, she oversees the daily operations and grant-making activities of a foundation focused on environmental health and green chemistry, and is working with a family on developing a philanthropic strategy for barriers to K-12 education. Anne works with both new and established individual philanthropists and foundations to set up and streamline their operations, build their grant-making strategies, and develop their grant-making portfolios. She has conducted research on prize philanthropy and early childhood education and led external scans of fields such as green chemistry and childhood obesity. She has also facilitated family foundation meetings focused on next-generation inclusion, governance best practices, and family legacy exercises for foundation board members, and written operational and strategic succession plans for family clients.

Prior to joining Arabella, Anne was executive director of the James Marston Fitch Charitable Foundation, which encourages and supports the study of problems encompassed by the preservation and rehabilitation of America’s historic, architectural, and urban heritage. At Rafael Vinoly Architects, she managed the launch of the book Think New York: A Diary of Ground Zero, which documented the firm’s involvement in the Ground Zero master planning competition. Anne recently served on the 2012 grants committee for the French Embassy in Washington, DC, helping to review proposals on French-American partnerships among NGOs working internationally. She is also a member of the Facilities and Fine Arts Committee of the National Cathedral Chapter and the Vanguard Chapter of the Society of Fellows at the Aspen Institute.

Anne is a 2006 recipient of a Getty Graduate Internship grant, which allowed her to pursue her interests in arts and cultural philanthropy at the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles. She has a BA from the College of Letters at Wesleyan University and an MS from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning.

A fantastic opportunity from Jordyn Lexton ’08, Executive Director of Drive Change:

US

Drive Change is a food truck social enterprise – we build food trucks that hire, teach and empower formerly incarcerated youth. We aim to connect with the public and create a community of people who are hungry to reconsider the current criminal justice system. It is our mission to broaden educational and employment opportunities for young people coming home from adult jail and prison so they can live crime-free, bright futures.

We are launching our full re-entry program model this spring and we are broadening our structural capacity and personnel infrastructure. We are young (only a year old) but we are impactful (making waves in food, social innovation and criminal justice reform). We are growing: we will increase our program capacity by 150% in 2015. We need you to help us grow into a sustainable and efficient organization.

YOU

You are detail oriented, motivated, clever and dynamic. You care that the work you do directly impacts the world around you. You like eating delicious food. You like contributing to a just society even more.

You are organized (like, your favorite time of the year used to be “Back to School” so you could color coordinate your pens with your folders with your binders). You are an independent worker who is capable of taking initiative but also thrives in a group/team setting. You like to construct systems/structure and you are not afraid of numbers.

THE JOB

Drive Change is looking for operational support in areas of office administration and communications. We need a point person to manage our systems, communicate with executive staff and help us think thoughtfully about our office operations. We are excited to hire our office Admin Guru.

Read the full job description here. Interested applicants should send resume and cover letter to jordyn@drivechangenyc.org.

Tags: drive change, food trucks, prison reentry, Snowday, social entrepreneurship