News Updates

By Tamara Connell

Today we started off with some morning dance meditation, ate our breakfast, and the majority of the group heading up the mountain to summit Australia’s tallest mountain, Mount Kosciuszko. Having caught a bit of a cold, I stayed back to get some much needed rest, but the photos look spectacular. Hopefully someone else can share about this hike.

Once joined back at the hostel (which we have by day 3.5, completely taken over as if it was our collective home  - it is really quite amazing to have the opportunity to stay in one place for several days, all to ourselves), we set out to create action plans to take forward to the larger alumni group. We got a bit stuck on the ‘we’ question… and spent a solid amount of time exploring various options of where the ‘networks’ lines may be drawn. Finally though, I think we came to some good conclusions and hope to work more on this over the remaining days.

By Tamara Connell

The Monday morning started with a sobering acknowledgement of the tragedies of the forest fires burning nearby - the death toll nearing 90 at that time. We shared our reflections on this, and other results of our global unsustainable activities. It was emotionally quite heavy and a strong reminder to many of us that we need to take action now, not rest on our laurels. ‘Scaling up’ - isn’t that what’s needed? Is 10 times enough?

We connected again with the Vancouver group to hear from them about some of their thoughts on these three questions.

We proceeded on our ‘Thredbo workshop’ to brainstorm actions that we felt we could take - anything, big or small, short term or long. We freed our minds and wrote furiously. Categorizing these, we set ourselves up for Action Plan topics in the following day.

We filled our bellies with more home-cooked food and joined a ‘Storytelling from the future’ exercise to share what it is like some time in the future.

By Tamara Connell

We rose early this morning to meet up online with other alumni groups in Karlskrona, London, Vancouver, and Boston. The current students have spent several months working together with an outside contact to create the structure for an online sharing platform, so they spent some time sharing this work with us, and fielding questions from the larger group. It promises to have an incredible amount of functionality for the MSLS alumni group, including project collaboration, connected blogs, resource libraries of all types, etc. etc.  This looks like a great step ahead for us, potentially allowing us to work better together to scale up our positive impact. If you’re an alumnus, watch for this in the coming months!

For me, this call was a real technological feat, connecting us around the world - on quick count I think we had at least 5 locations and roughly 100 people on the same call. Amazing! (We later connected again with Ottawa, and had further online discussions with Boston and London.)

Follow the early regional check-in, we connected live with Dr. Bob Willard from his home in Ontario, Canada. Bob shared with us some the main ideas of his current work in progress - the third of his books, intended to be a ’sustainability champion’s guidebook’ for helping to transform your company - and we followed with a great discussion of related topics.

We then heard presentations on BTH (Göran Broman), MSLS (me), and The Natural Step (Richard Blume). Some great information was shared on the past, present and future of these 3 groups.

Overall, it was a day filled with many familiar faces from other parts of the world, and it inspired us to get to work answering some of the questions at hand:

How can we scale up the impact of SSD (Strategic Sustainable Development) 10 times?

• Who are ‘we’, and what is our work?
• What is the impact we want to scale up? Why? Where are we now?
• What do we do together which we could not do alone? How can we support each other, and what is our unique contribution? With whom can we collaborate?

We capped the afternoon off with a swim in a nearby creek. We were all alerted by the obvious smoke rolling into the valley from the reported forest fires.

For dinner, we were joined by Acacia Rose and her partner Peter, both local activists of the area. Acacia told us of her stories of fighting for the Snowy River to be maintained within public control. She shared the sobering reality that the water flows at a mere 4% today. She’s had some wins - one quite recently - but it appears that we need to really step up the charge to maintain the ‘commons’ in the hands of the communities, and to be more transparent in our governance and decision making.

While some went to bed, others stayed up to watch the Man from Snowy River, having just heard so much about the plight of this water supply.