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Happenings
Applications Open for 2014
We have opened applications for two 2014 sessions. One in August/September in Chatham, NY and one in October/November in Asheville, NC. It looks like ELL is expanding.
There are other groups who have been scheming about opening an ELL in their town. Let us know if you are too!
Fall 2013 Session Complete
We had a mini-session of ELL that was focused much more on our own internal development of facilitation resources and software tools for long-term support of our venture. Over the course of the session we had about 10 people participate. Our time was split between Chatham, NY and Great Barrington, MA.
Our inward focus meant our social media channels remained pretty quiet during this development period, and we're still working on getting the things we documented and built into a useful format to share. We're hoping our work during that session will make it easier for other groups to start and facilitate ELL sessions.
Fall 2013 Intensive is coming!
We're getting ready for our fall ELL intensive session where we'll be focused on developing StreamScapes -- tools for the next internet, economy, and evolution of humanity (organized into new coherent social organisms).
It starts in October, and if you think you want to be involved let us know ASAP because we're lining up housing and other logistics now. We're still looking for developers and UX/UI/Graphics folks.
We'll be posting info about all this soon when the StreamScapes crowdfunding campaign launches.
"Society is structured to prevent the people with the inspiration to make the world better from changing anything. There are legions of young people, full of energy and ideas, but nobody listens to them.
They don't have resources, connections, or experience. They're not taken seriously by the older generations who made this mess. So they're supposed to work McJobs, jump through hoops, and sell their soul to the devil of bills, responsibilities and debt. Then, once they pose no threat because their dreams have been strangled, maybe they could be allowed to lead.
Why wait till it's too late? Let's give them a chance."
-Arthur Brock
Change is coming in unexpected ways...
Many have awakened to the fact that "the system" just isn't working for most of us. We want to change it. We're overflowing with ideas, energy, and creativity, eager to make a positive impact in the world, but we struggle to find the resources required to make our dreams become reality.
Emerging Leader Labs are places designed to overcome that challenge. Part education (except you don't pay tuition), part job (except you work for yourself), and part social enterprise incubator (except our focus is on "social impact" first and "enterprise" later), the Labs are designed to nourish our wild spirits and the crazy projects that just might make the difference we need.
The Labs give emerging leaders the opportunity to come together in physical spaces, refine their visions, grow their skills and competencies, and gather the resources and support needed to translate their visions into projects that build a better world.
The leaders get to experiment with new ways of measuring value and learn to build meaningful relationships and trust while building a healthy gift economy. Our leaders give of their time and creativity to produce results in our communities, and our communities share workspaces, housing, and food to cover the basic needs of the leaders.
We are serious about producing results.
In fact, to continue to have access to a Lab's workspaces, infrastructure, resources, and community, our leaders are accountable to measure the value and impact of their work. This allows us to be transparent about the value we're producing in our communities and lets supporters see what kind of difference their support is making.
The first program of the Emerging Leader Labs was a 6-week Seed Project in the summer of 2012. During this sprint, we worked on developing our own visions and projects, while also building the core infrastructure of the Labs themselves. The intention was to use the Seed Project to develop the structure for Emerging Leader Labs as a replicable framework for collaborative learning. In the works is an open source kit so that groups anywhere can build on our patterns to start a lab in their own community.
You can Apply to Participate, Get Involved or find out more by checking out the Summer 2013 Overview.
