Murem Sharpe, the CEO and founder of the online audio service Evoca, interviewed Tom online. Tom has been using Evoca for online recording and archiving speeches for a number of years. This is the audio file, 21 minutes.
Will Guzzardi is the real deal. I’ve been urging cultural workers, nonprofit managers and social change agents to run for office for over 20 years. I tried it myself. Will is a grassroots journalist and has done investigative work on social change issues and has fully participated in the social change movements in his community of Logan Square. Now he is a candidate in the race for the Democratic nomination for State Representative of the 39th District. He has got the Democratic Machine on the run! Listen to this seven minute speech and you will know why the people of the 39th District are excited about the idea of having a real fighter for the 99% representing them – and not a mouth piece for large corporations, the tax evasion industry and big pharma – they ALREADY have enough paid reps shilling for them!
Join the push to take back our local government from the 1%!
Tom gave this ten minute talk at the University of Illinois Chicago’s Great Cities Institute forum on the future of nonprofits. Bottom line – nonprofits have failed us. Solution? Click here.
With the demise of Hull House one of the issues that lingers over the disaster is how nonprofit leaders have strayed so far from Jane Addams fighting spirit. From The Chicago Tribune:
“Chicagoans know Addams as a leader of the social settlement movement and co-founder of Chicago’s famed Hull House, which abruptly closed Friday after 122 years. But she was so much more. She was a tireless and strident peace activist, an invaluable voice demanding the right of women to vote and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. She became one of the most famous women in America and one of the most famous and highly respected Americans of her time.
She strongly felt that social services meant more than just feeding mouths and clothing bodies. Addams created a community, living with and getting to know the people she helped. She respected immigrant cultures, and provided education, training, citizenship classes and child care for working parents. She fought to improve their employment and living conditions.
But the gentle Jane Addams, whose father had been a banker and state senator, also turned out to be a politically savvy, down-in-the-wards street fighter, who wasn’t so gentle when it came to public corruption.”
The story recalls how she took on local ward boss Alderman John Powers and challenged his corrupt reign over the 19th Ward.
If America’s nonprofit leaders and Illinois’ nonprofit leaders had the will to fight that Jane had, perhaps our country and our state would not be in the pitiful state they are in. If Chicago’s nonprofit leaders had been in the political arena as Jane had been – perhaps there would’ve been more interest and support for Hull House as it hit the skids.
Let Jane have the final word (from Twenty Years at Hull House)
“Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon, and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world.”
So Hull House closed on Friday without a whimper. No one put up a fight. So maybe it deserved to die. Over 635 people have signed the online petition to save Hull House by the time of this writing but no one organization took the issue on.
I spoke to or reached out to leaders of organizations that had Jane Addams in their names. UIC’s Jane Addams College of Social Work (http://www
What about the professional associations of social workers around the world and the ones that represent Illinois social workers? Nothing.
What about schools of social work, schools of public policy, schools of public health and schools that teach about good government? Nothing.
Did the legislators of Illinois and Chicago who lavish hundreds of millions of PUBLIC dollars on greedy private companies raise a stink or offer solutions. Nothing.
Shame on them. Shame on all of us.
OK, that’s the past – what about the future?
What can we learn from this sad story?
Who will bring us together to discuss public priorities and public disasters such as this one?
Alan B. Krueger, Chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told us all in a speech on January 12 what we have all experienced – namely, that income inequality in America is at all-time high.
“My theme in this talk is that the rise in inequality in the United States over the last three decades has reached the point that inequality is causing an unhealthy division in opportunities, and is a threat to our economic growth.” You think?
It’s never been better to be in the 1%. Here’s the slide deck – review it for yourself.
The Rise and Consequences of Inequality in the United States: charts
How about a public bank for Illinois to make our money work FOR us and restore a little fairness and equity to our economy?
According to SlashGear, “Star Wars: The Old Republic is launching today and is one of the coolest MMORPG games I have seen in a long time. Any Star Wars fan will want to check this game out. The game launches officially today and last night many gamers around the world lined up to be among the first to get their hands on the game. Anything Star Wars related often means that geeks will be dressed up and apparently, that happened last night in major cities like NYC, Paris, London, and Austin. Players can choose to join with the Galactic Republic or the Sith Empire. There are eight Star Wars characters to choose from with a Jedi Knight, Jedi Consular, Smuggler, Trooper, Sith Warrior, Sith Inquisitor, Bounty Hunter, and Imperial Agent. The game comes with 30 days of game play. After that first month players need to sign up for monthly service at $14.99 per month, $41.97 for three months, or $77.94 for 6-months.”
Built at at an estimated cost of $115 million over three years this online entertainment is part of the ever-growing world of subscription based massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). The champ in that arena is currently “World of Warcraft” with 10 million subscribers as of November, 2011. That’s millions of people spending tens of millions of hours EVERY MONTH wrapped in a gauze of fantasy, playing alone in a room connecting with other people alone in their rooms to play at being warriors, killers, slaves, vixens, assassins, and various rogues. The amount of time and money we are spending playing online in this manner is staggering.
If “Star Wars- The Old Republic” proves to be as popular then we can expect to see young people loosing themselves online for hundreds of hours per year.
How can we make civic life and politics as interesting? Can we have Massive Multiplayer Offline Civic Life activities please? How can we tap all these players to play in their communities to volunteer, to serve, to challenge, to run for office and change this country for the better?