You may say I’m a dreamer

By Nikki Schlaishunt, Administrative Director

BEC board member Crystal Durham and I drove down to San Francisco this week to learn more about relational membership building—a new way of growing an organization and increasing the effectiveness of our work for the environment. We attended the annual luncheon for the Pachamama Alliance to experience how they do fundraising and membership building. And we learned about dreaming.

In the mid 1990’s elders from an indigenous people deep in the Amazon rainforest began to have dreams about a troubled world. They dreamed of ways to build a bridge between nations in order to save our world. The Pachamama Alliance is a cooperative between technological countries and indigenous peoples of the rainforest—we teach them the modern skills needed to save their land, and they teach us a new way of thinking about the world, a new vision that we need to survive. A vision that includes valuing the land, the air, the water, and all of the beings we share this world with.

We can dream that dream here—envision a world where there is peace and love and health and sharing, a world where we all deeply feel the interconnections between each other and between us and the earth. Dream, and then take action to make that dream reality. We have the power to go far beyond so called “economic recovery” which is really just a return to a system that does not work and is not sustainable. Working together, we can truly transform our world for the better.

Want to get inspired? Check out http://www.fouryearsgo.org/. Want to get involved? Join BEC and help us dream and build a sustainable, healthy community.

From the Fall/Winter 2010 issue of the Environmental News.