What does it feel like to you to be doing your work today, here now?
I am not asking, what do you do? Nor am I asking, how much do you make? Nor even, what is your next action step?
Instead, I am asking, What it's like to do you now? That is the sort of question I ask in the podcast Spiritual Capital and the book-in-progress that asks the question: "Why Spiritual Capital Matters." And I ask the question mostly to woman-led entrepreneurships and to changemakers of color. They truly are at the epicenter of the emergent.
Some days, a lot of days, the Now feels to organizational leaders like perpetual crisis. The institutions that used to provide stability and shelter feel instead like they distract and disable us. The church that used to feel like home, the government that sometimes made us proud, the corporation that promised what our families needed--all these institutions make the present moment feel harried, unmanageable, precarious.
Shoot me an email at spiritualcap@gmail.com or drop me a line on social media if you would like to share your perspective and be a guest on Spiritual Capital.
I first learned about social commerce back in 2007 on a cold January morning in a rhetoric class.
A student raised her hand and asked if anybody had heard of Product (RED), the cause-related marketing campaign that Bono launched to leverage corporate profits for the Global Fund and the sub-Saharan AIDS crisis. I have been writing about social business ever since. At first, I was fascinated by the ways that social commerce blended economic and social capital. Lately, I have been thinking about the spiritual capital underwriting it all.
Although I am especially interested in engaging voices from communities of color, because that is where some of the freshest changemaking is happening—and needs to happen. But for all of the people I talk to, the present moment is not just about precariousness. It is about latency. Potential. Something about to show up. For social entrepreneurs, and, really, for all alert organizational leaders, the Now is not safe or predictable or manageable. But it is ripening. Which suggests that the trick is not just to cope with all the boring craziness of late-modern life, but also to develop practices that cultivate resilience, yes, and a readiness to share what we have and what is to come.