How to Citizen
How To Citizen with Baratunde reimagines “citizen” as a verb and reminds us how to wield our collective power. Learn new perspectives and practices from people working to improve society for the many.
How to Citizen
I post this quote from Peter Block's book "Community" every year. It doesn't get much attention because it's not built for social media: it's thick.
But there really isn't a better explanation of the "why" behind the work I do, and its encouragement for communities to move away from blame, apathy, and entitlement and towards possibility, intentional
... See moreBaratunde Thurston — How to Be a Social Creative | The On Being Project
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How to Citizen: “To citizen” is to show up. We just assume there’s something for us to do, and we don’t always know what that is, but we have an orientation toward, “Put me in. I don’t have to lead, but I have to be a part of the thing.”
Number two: “To citizen” is to invest in relationships with yourself, with others, and with the planet around you. We have inherited a story of separation of all these things, and they’re actually all one. The quantum physicist will tell you that really in a short sentence. So that myth busted.
“To citizen” is to understand power and all the different ways we have it. Eric Lou, I call him one of our founding guests, founder of Citizen University. He says: power is just the ability to get somebody to do what you want them to do.” And we have different ways of doing that. Physical force is obvious. Money, especially in this society, is pretty obvious. Ideas, sharing them. You’re very powerful, Krista. Putting our attention on something, we give power to what we give attention to, and we can choose, within default settings and design incentives, but we have the power to choose what we give our power to with our attention.
Fourth of four of these principles is: “To citizen” is to value the collective. We do all these things out of a sense of collective self-interest, not just personal, individual self-interest. Valerie Kaur was our very first guest for How To Citizen.
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