Power Our WorldMedia Accelerator & Impact Network
Power Our World
On Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday – February 12, 1809
we recall Lincoln’s prophetic warning in his 1838 Lyceum Speech and its message for us today (read by Alan Reinhardt).
ALTON – campaign to end free speech
ALTON – History’s Message Today
Monday – Wednesday – April 26 – 28 – OUR PLANET – OUR FUTURE – Nobel Prize Summit by the National Academy of SciencesCritical Pathway: Implementing Comprehensive Design Models for People & Planet
Hosted by The Peace Department
12:00PM-1:30PM EDT
Register here.
Acting Today for an Ambitious Tomorrow
Hosted by 3M
12:00PM-1:00PM EDT
Register here.
The SDGs and International Collaboration
Hosted by the NASEM Science and Technology for Sustainability Program
1:00PM-2:00PM EDT
Register here.
Full session descriptions here.
PCC Forum: New Terrain: Soil Health as Human Health
with Lauren Finley Jacobs. In a time of ecological destruction, an oppressive globalized economy, and health concerns of epic proportions, solutions to world problems can seem fragmented. This talk will address the connections between soil health and human health as well as the various scales one can participate in tending living soil. The war on germs and the war on weeds both contribute to the poor health outcomes of modern society. Using systems thinking, Lauren will outline why current agricultural and industrial food practices are toxic to our planetary health.
POW! [Power Our World] Impact Forum
Sunday March 21 @ 1 PM PT/ 4 PM ET
MC Zann Gill. Co-Hosts: DW Jacobs, Gillian Julius, Jill Nephew, Joseph Okpaku, J. Scott Turner
It took a pandemic to wake us up to race and gender discrimination and . . . to the big question raised by End Pandemics:
We’ll open with a not-yet-published original song called
Joe DeCicco [aka Operator Error] Composer.
Joe was also the composer for our experimental film YELLO WORLD, which has now won eleven festival awards in eight countries: Canada, Germany, India, Japan, Netherlands, Russia (2 awards), Spain, and the US (3 awards).
Lyrics – Zann Gill. Voices by Joe DeCicco, Andrew Eisner, Mark Finnern, Zann Gill, Richard Greenwood, Jim (Sky) Schuyler, Igor Stalew.
Lisa Maydwell, award-winning Screenwriter, Film Director and Producer, will present the trailer for her film THE FINAL ROUND – ROUND 16, a documentary about Robert W. Lee, Founder of the International Boxing Federation and a Boxing Scandal involving Don King in the early 2000’s that shows the power of sports to address racism. She’ll also introduce her current project, an animated educational series called Grandma’s Closet about impressive black women in history. Both projects show how the pandemic can inspire us to look inward to find our strengths and outward to tap the power of media to make an impact toward social justice.
We’ll show the one minute End Pandemics film, a powerful impetus to shift the conversation from “I’ve been vaxxed. Everything’s going to be fine” to looking at the root causes and interconnected indicators of systemic collapse: global fires, Texas storms, COVID, destruction of natural habitats, ocean plastic.
Bruno Laporte, partner in End Pandemics, who was Director of Knowledge and Learning at the World Bank Institute before founding Leadership, Knowledge, and Learning, will describe his work with End Pandemics.
Daniel Swid, Technical Co-Founder of End Pandemics and Generation Blue, will describe the collaboration platform he’s evolving to coordinate cryptocurrency investment and the rapid one-year growth of these initiatives to 70+ organizational partners.
Steven Galster, Founder of Freeland and End Pandemics, describes the mission of End Pandemics.
We’ll use the End Pandemics short film as a launchpad for pandemic wakeup insights from this amazing group:
• What have you realized as a result of this pandemic lockdown experience?
• How can we as individuals be transformed by this experience?
• What do we see as the impact of the pandemic on education, equity, arts, culture, environment, innovation, other domains?
The official program will be 90 minutes, but feel free to stay longer to continue the dialogue. Please send us your thoughts about this program and ideas for future programs.
Note: The program will be recorded, but only short highlight clips will be published. If you do not want your comments to be published, please let us know in the chat.
Next Now POW! [Power Our World] Impact Forum
Tuesday February 23 @ 6 PM PST/ 9 PM EST
co-sponsored with Next Now and The Future Salon
MC Mark Finnern; Co-Hosts Bill Daul, Zann Gill, Joy Mountford, Jim (Sky) Schuyler, Kimberly Wiefling
Major shifts are shaping our democracy and our freedom. Please join us on the 23rd of February at 6pm PST, and we’ll together try to make sense of what is going on and explore what we can do to nudge our society towards a positive future. Our three guests bring diverse perspectives:
John Robb: There is a big danger that Long Night is near. To prevent that we need A Digital Bill of Rights.
Ismael Gahlimi calls for a New Rationalist Movement: with courage, unity, and rationality we can chart a different course and overcome our current problems.
Lauren Cory is a former Director of the Mid-Peninsula American Civil Liberties Union founded a century ago and increasingly timely. She will explain why she believes that to lower distrust we must change our approach to problem-solving. More “facts” are not the majority of the answer.
Please add your links in this Future of Democracy document to good content to help frame our conversation.
Fighting for more freedom is nothing new, as many pro-democracy songs show: We have a collection of songs in English and German for you to enjoy and play/sing. We started a small YouTube channel where we introduce some of these songs. Mark Finnern will perform one of them as the opening act of the Future of Democracy 2.0 Salon. We are also collecting cartoons, screenshots, or funny tweets that give us comic relief. Add yours too!
The official program will be 90 minutes, but feel free to hang out longer afterward with your favorite beverage or snack!
Coming full circle: In 2004 Mark Finnern’s Future Salon hosted an Extreme Democracy Future Salon with Tom Attlee introducing the Tao of Democracy; Ross Mayfield his chapter in the Extreme Democracy book, and Zack Rosen introduced Civic Space.
Tuesday January 19 @ 6 PM PST/ 9 PM EST
co-sponsored with Next Now and The Future Salon
MC Zann Gill; Co-Hosts Bill Daul, Mark Finnern, Joy Mountford, Jim (Sky) Schuyler
Lauralee Alben presented her poem, GRIEF CRY in a powerful short film, published in Poetry and Covid by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. She’s the Founder/ CEO of the Sea Change Design Institute, which works with diverse organizations, such as the Environmental Defense Fund, Apple, Procter & Gamble, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium. She’s a member of NextNow, an AIGA Fellow of the American Institute for Graphic Arts, winner of the Design Management Institute’s Muriel Cooper Prize and one of the I.D. Forty, named “one of the most influential people in design.”
Dorothy Fadiman is an Oscar-nominated, Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker who studied Communications at Stanford. She went on to become a Writer, Director, Producer of 25 films documenting high impact stories. The subjects of her work range from Latino immigration to Native American struggles for the right to vote to AIDS in Ethiopia to women’s rights in the United States. All of her films focus on social justice, human rights and personal growth. She presented the trailer for her film: Stealing America: Vote by Vote on the timely evening before Biden and Harris take office.
Michael MacKay, once hired by SONY to predict the future of cinema, is now independent, showed a segment from the series AMERICAN MC: HELL’S ANGELS – THE PRISON RUN (100% Real Deal – Zero Staging) on which he was the producer who designed an 18 camera shooting configuration to film in real time, no setup and no second takes. 18 cameramen embedded in the motorcycle gang captured this unique culture, taking Direct Cinema to new heights and giving us a glimpse of the values of some of the 74+ Million people who voted for Trump.
The presentations by Dorothy Fadiman and Michael MacKay are seeding forthcoming film projects.
Notes from recent sessions of the Next Now POW! [Power Our World] Impact Forum.
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The POW app makes media actionable and sparks a story-project feedback cycle. Stories (whether fiction or documentary) inspire projects, which in turn spark new stories.
The idea to couple movies with games gave movies a new engagement platform. The next breakthrough – for movies that raise cultural, environmental, and social awareness – is to couple them with the POW! Impact Platform, expanding the Story–Project feedback cycle.
The high impact films featured in this POW! round all show that media is not just predictive; it’s constructive. Stories make change happen. These films were selected because new knowledge raises new questions that renew the timeliness of their message.
Why we champion diversity. Our creatives include elders, people of color, women, those who are committed to follow their authentic, creative paths. Their vision opens new doors. With the next generation of social media coming, POW! supports the mission of equal opportunity, independent of race or gender.
A community circle is an ancient form of personal and community connection to spark creativity. The POW! platform supports Topic Pods led by individuals or organizations on themes introduced by media stories or projects that can inspire new stories.
