I could be a congresswoman
Or a garbage woman or
Police officer, or a carpenter
I could be a doctor and a lawyer and a mother
And a good God woman what you’ve done to me
Kind of lover I could be
I could be a computer analyst, the Queen with the nappy hair raising her fist
Or I could be much more and a myriad of this
Hot as the summer, sweet as the first kiss
And even though I can do all these things…
~ Jill Scott
“The Fact Is (I Need You)“
HOPE Community Services is the largest food pantry/soup kitchen in Westchester County. HOPE Volunteer Coordinator Sue Gedney, New York State High Chess Champion Joshua Cola, 94 years old volunteer Iris Freed, and Terrance Jackson. Photo: http://www.geneshaw.com/
Following in the footsteps of people such as Jack London, George Orwell, and Steve Jobs, Terrance Jackson spent over two and half years homeless in New Rochelle, NY and discovered the power of empathy to fuel innovation and creativity:
I believe that empathy – the imaginative act of stepping into another person’s shoes and viewing the world from their perspective – is a radical tool for social change and should be a guiding light for the art of living. Over the past decade, I have become convinced that it has the power not only to transform individual lives, but to help tackle some of the great problems of our age, from wealth inequality to violent conflicts and climate change.
It is important to understand what empathy is and is not. If you see a homeless person living under a bridge you may feel sorry for him and give him some money as you pass by. That is pity or sympathy, not empathy. If, on the other hand, you make an effort to look at the world through his eyes, to consider what life is really like for him, and perhaps have a conversation that transforms him from a faceless stranger into a unique individual, then you are empathising. ~ Roman Krznaric
RSA Animate – The Power of Outrospection – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG46IwVfSu8
On his journey, Terrance learned it is important that we teach our children that we are all capable of doing work that matters, that our call is to step beyond our limits into an new understanding of what it means to be human, and that there is no conflict between science and the Bible.
Steve Denning’s Forbes article, “Roger Martin: How ‘The Talent’ Turned Into Vampires:”
How did America—a country dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal—become one of the most unequal countries on the planet? Why do the nation’s leaders now spend so much of their time feeding at the trough and getting ever more for themselves? Why has public-mindedness in our leaders given way in so many instances to limitless greed?
These questions are being raised, not in some anti-capitalist rag from the extreme Left, but in the staid pro-business pages of the Harvard Business Review, in a seminal article by Roger Martin, the former dean of the Rotman School of Business and the academic director of the Martin Prosperity Institute: “The Rise and (Likely) Fall of the Talent Economy.”
One key factor, argues Martin, is a fundamental shift in nature of the economy. Fifty years ago, “72% of the top 50 U.S. companies by market capitalization still owed their positions to the control and exploitation of natural resources.” But in the latter part of the 20th century, a new kind of organization began to emerge: an organization that prospered not by natural resources but through “the control and exploitation of human talent.”
If we are not utilizing over 50% of the population to their full capacity then how can we expect to thrive and prosper nationally or globally?
- There are currently only 15 women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies this is less than 4%.
- Women make up only 3% of clout executives of media, telecom and e-companies.
- Women hold 17% of the seats in the House of Representatives.
- Only 34 women have ever served as governors compared to 2319 men.
- In 2011, women comprised 18% of all directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films.
- Source: http://www.missrepresentation.org/about-us/resources/miss-representation-sources/
In Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg writes:
Conditions for all will improve when there are more women in leadership roles giving strong and powerful voice to their needs and concerns.
David Tepper
Top hedge manager, David Tepper, earned $1,057,692 an HOUR in 2012 — that’s as much as the average American family makes in 21 years!
Over the last thirty years, the United States has been taken over by an amoral financial oligarchy, and the American dream of opportunity, education, and upward mobility is now largely confined to the top few percent of the population. ~ Predator Nation by Charles H. Ferguson
The economic disaster was driven, Ferguson writes, by a combination of “very low interest rates, pervasive dishonesty through the financial system, massive lending fraud, speculation, demand for high yield securities, and not insignificantly, a squeezed American consumer desperate to maintain living standards, and told by everyone – including George Bush and Alan Greenspan, the brokers and the banks, that home borrowing was the way to do it.”
Charles H. Ferguson won an Academy Award for his documentary Inside Job.
On December 9, 1968, Douglas Engelbart demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor. The funding for Engelbart’s work was provided by the Department of Defense.
In another blog entry, we quote from a book telling us that knowing a person’s image of God provides us with an opportunity to understand the most intimate moral and introspective conversations they have. And if we know your answer to these two questions:
- To what extent does God interact with the world?
- To what extent does God judge the world?
Then we have tremendous insight into your entire worldview. So if our societal image of God is patriarchal and White what does this mean in terms of equity for people who are not White men?
From a Bible.org article we learn:
In 1887, Sayce first noted the parallels between Genesis 1 and the Egyptian cosmogony of Hermopolis: “the chaotic deep; the ‘breath’ moving on the waters; the creation of light; the emergence of the hill ‘in the middle of the waters.’” Unfortunately, his work was largely ignored.
In 1933 and 1934, Yahuda identified several similarities between Genesis 1-2 and ancient Egyptian texts. He also identified Egyptian influence throughout the Pentateuch.
In 1982, Cyrus Gordon showed similarities between the Egyptian and Hebrew traditions of the creation of man. He drew several parallels between the creation tradition of Khnum, the potter-god, and Genesis 2:4-25
StartUpTown 