Ellen Whyte mostly hangs out in Portland, but recently toured Wisconsin's Chippewa Valley with Sue Orfield. She combines her beautiful voice & great musicians with a powerful personal understanding - of the blues, of rhythm, and of turning her life around. She's someone you want to know, both as a musician & as a person.
The topic is the Transition Town movement and the experience of Steve Chase, Director of Advocacy for Social Justice and Sustainability at Antioch University New England and involved with the Keene, NH, transition, and Ruah Swennerfelt, former long-time long-time General Secretary of Quaker Earthcare Witness and is currently involved with the Transition Town implementation in Charlotte, VT. Both are active with Quakers in Transition.
Addtional links and resources: TransitionNetwork.org, TransitionUS.org, and The Transition Handbook and The Transition Companion.
SuZ Ogden is an angeltonk Baptist Buddhist living in Oklahoma, with visits to California, Russia and Israel. In other words, she's all over the map, from nightclub singer to minister in the United Centers for Spiritual Living.
Ken Lonnquist is change-making, environmental activist, humorous & serious type of singer/songwriter. Ken produces a wide array of musical styles, though folkish is sort of home base for him. You'll find a spirit of deep connection with the Earth and a musical talent to add riches to your musical experience in Madison, Wisconsin, with Ken.
The Holistic Life Foundation does the amazing work of transforming lives & spirits in inner city Baltimore. The basic tools are yoga & mindfulness taught and modeled by 3 men in the hood. Ali Smith, Atman Smith & Andres Gonzales founded HLF fresh out of college in 2001, working with kids, at-risk people, the mentally ill, and everyone else, providing a model for changed and redirected lives.
Our racism is mostly invisible to us because all the assumptions around it seem "normal" to us, The authors of Seeing White: An introduction to White Privilege and Race lead us through a rigorous inspection of the history and present of racism in the USA - and the way out of this ingrained social construction. Jean Halley is in the Department of Sociology and Amy Eshleman is the Department of Psychology at Wagner College, Staten Island, NY, and co-author Ramya Vijaya is an Associate Prof of Economics at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey.
Jean Halley is also author of Boundaries of Touch: Parenting and Adult-Child Intimacy
A memorial Song of the Soul for Walkin' Jim Stoltz, the great hiker and minstrel of the open places, who left us 9/3/2010. Jim's passions and music are here guided by his wife, Leslie Stoltz, sister Susan Grace Stoltz, and long-time friend, Scott Carpenter.
Chris Picco is lead singer of Castles In Air, a Christian Indie band in Southern California. He's originally from Canada and part of his path to settling here with his American wife included a period in NYC helping out after 9/11/2001. His love of music is profound as you'll see on youtube, as is his Christian faith.
Peter Edelman's new book is So Rich, So Poor: Why It's So Hard to End Poverty in America, and he brings great credentials an passion to the concern. As an aide to Senator Robert Kennedy, having servied in Washington in various posts, including the one he resigned from during the Clinton administration in protest of the "welfare reform" that Clinton signed, he knows the nuts & bolts as well as the mechanics of government.
Also written by Peter Edelman:
Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men - with Harry Holzer & Paul Offner
Searching for America's Heart: RFK and the Renewal of Hope
Adolescence and Poverty - co-edited with Joyce Ladner
Featured Music
Hallelujah I'm a Bum - Pete Seeger
