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Organization: Green Innovations Inc
To: Civic-Courage@yahoogroups.com
Priority: normal
From: "Philip Sutton" <Philip.Sutton@green-innovations.asn.au>
Date sent: Fri, 11 Nov 2005 05:02:43 +1100
Subject: [Civic-Courage] Celebrating courageous people; getting started
Dear Greenleapers,
Just a quick email about getting started.
Already about 12 people have shown interest. That's a good number to do something useful.
I've set up the Civic Courage list as a way to help us communicate and keep track of where we are up to.
I'm keen that we focus on effective action. So let's concentrate on the least amount of work for the most amount of benefit !
Francis Amaroux wrote in to say that the Australian Altruism Foundation has initiated the Turtle Awards - for 'people who stick their necks out for the public good'. So it looks like we don't have to get an award systems going in Australia at least. Is anyone from outside Australia?
http://www.altruism.org.au/turtle.htm
Tim Edwards wrote in to say that awards, by themselves, might not have much impact, because it is publicity and education that has the biggest effect.
So maybe we should do things that complement the Turtle Awards?
What prompted my original email was that the actions of some very courageous people had given me more hope and boosted my morale. Others had experienced this too. And also it seems like a good idea to encourage others to emulate these courageous people so that more can be done to turn the tide of social and environmental degradation.
Perhaps we could gather and circulate inspirational stories and perhaps build up an online database of inspirational people and actions? And perhaps we could help publicise the Turtle Awards and other similar programs in other countries? (eg. the Giraffe Project in the US http://www.giraffe.org/ ) Maybe we can help to engage other organisations in the Turtle Awards and in the promotion of courageous civic action?
I think it would be a good idea to have a quick discussion to clarify what we aim to achieve. Then we can figure out what to do.
I think we need to record the gems that arise out of our discussion so that we don't just talk past each other.
I'm happy to offer to facilitate the discussion/decision-making. And I can offer the use of the Greenleap list to make requests and to distribute outputs from the Civic Courage activity. But I'm very over commmitted so I can't offer to do the follow up work arising from our discussion.
How about we do the following:
- we introduce ourselves very briefly and say what it was about the idea of promoting courageous civic action that prompted us to respond to my initial email - please post to: Civic-Courage@yahoogroups.com
- we decide what we should do about the award concept. Should we try to add some value to the Turtle Awards? And if so what should that be?
- prepare a how-to guide on identifying issues that would benefit from some sticking out of necks (Note: this task has been delayed for a while)
- what else should we try to do?
After we've pinnned down our ideas about the direction of action we can move on to work out what we should do specifically.
Would anyone be willing to take on the role of extracting proposals and discusion arguments from the email contributions to the list? Please let me know as soon as possible. We can collect the material in a Treepad file - to make it easy to explore the core ideas and proposals. I can help people get started on this.
Also, would anyone be willing to talk by phone or email with some or all of the people on the list to see what their feelings and suggestions are? This activity could start as soon as someone is able to get going.
A little bit further down the track would anyone else like to take on some of the work of volunteer facilitation/management?
Does this seem like a good enough plan of action? If not could you let us know asap so we can revise and improve the first round of action steps? Ta.
Cheers, Philip
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