Raising Children

Throughout the United States, local school districts are cutting back on teachers and curriculum while increasing class size.  With our current economy, it doesn’t appear that this trend will soon be reversed. This grim prospect depends upon whether we have...

The community is the natural nest for hatching new enterprise — it is the birthplace and home of small business, which provides the largest growth in employment. Friends and family often provide the capital and sweat equity to start...

A sought-after mediator, poet, community organizer, and Zen priest, Pua attributes her abilities as a cultural translator to a personal heritage as varied as her homeland, Hawai’i. She’s Japanese, Chinese, Native Hawai’ian, German, and French, and grew up poor...

The path to restoring function to the family in a citizen society, not a consumer society, is quite simple. It begins with five questions.   1. What functions can we put back into the hands of young people?  Whether they are our kids...

When family members do not work or live well together we sometimes call the family dysfunctional. We prescribe professional help for the family or advocate for social policies that would support it—child care, parental leave, extended unemployment insurance, debt...

The phrase social innovation is surfacing everywhere.  The European Union has just launched Social Innovation Europe.  The UK has multiple initiatives around social innovation. President Obama has an Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. The Canadian Government has established awards for social innovation. ...

We cannot build strong neighborhoods and communities while laboring under the principles of traditional economics. The dominant economic thinking begins with a religious belief in scarcity and self-interest. This rules most modern economies and continues to dominate what we...