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Our Affiliate Non-profit: Paths To Change Institute

Welcome

Welcome to Paths to Change. We are a network of activists, business people, scientists, spiritual teachers, thought-leaders, and other change-agents who are applying the disciplines and practices of Organizational Consulting, Engaged Spirituality & Lived Philosophy, and Strategic Activism to catalyze individual leadership capacity and to create highly effective groups, teams, organizations, communities, and social-change movements.

Our Passion

Our work centers on how to most skillfully address the unprecedented environmental and social crises of our time, particularly where environmental and human rights concerns intersect.

The call is clear. Global warming and other catastrophic environmental crises have finally gone mainstream. Many human rights crises — from the AIDS pandemic to global genocides and cultural destruction — are of similar proportion.

Given the enormous magnitude of the crises we face, clearly we must go well beyond the "business as usual" world-view.

Instead, the world needs a range of responses to catalyze and facilitate the required change.

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Our Unique Approach

To prompt and facilitate the needed transformation, Paths to Change brings to bear three primary approaches — or Paths:

• Organizational consulting, training, facilitation, and coaching;
• Engaged Spirituality & Lived Philosophy — spiritual and/or philosophical practices that seek to directly engage with and transform the suffering of the world; and
• Strategic Activism.

More than anything else in the full Paths to Change repertoire, our customers/clients and communities call on us for these approaches — either individually, or with the three Paths integrated in some way.

Additionally, we are among the few who are able to blend "clockware" and "swarmware" practices.

Clockware practices are conventional approaches that treat change like clockwork, and that involve traditional strategizing, research, planning, facilitation, management, and targeted outcomes.

Swarmware practices are more innovative approaches drawn from complexity science and from select ancient wisdom and mastery traditions, and are characterized by non-linearity, emergence, experimentation, diffusion, serendipity, spontaneous learning, and innovation.

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Our Work — and the Results

We offer a full spectrum of Resources and Services across all three Paths, to meet the needs of our customers/clients and communities.

Paths to Change Resources and Services include, but are not limited to:

• Communication Consulting
• Complex Adaptive Systems Consulting
• Conscious Marketing Consulting for Socially Responsible Groups
• Consulting for Socially & Environmentally Responsible Organizations
• Engaged Spirituality & Strategic Activism Retreats
• Event Facilitation (e.g. for conferences, symposia, etc.)
• Information Technology & Systems Integration — including IT solutions for project management, organizing and mobilizing constituent groups, helping groups to self-organize virtually (using Open Space technology)
• Leadership Coaching
• Life Coaching
• Organizational Development Consulting
• Small-Enterprise Consulting
• Visionary SoloPreneur Consulting
• Workshops/Training.

Additionally, our soon-to-be-completed online store will offer:

• Articles
• Books
• E-Zines and E-Books
• PDF Guides and Workbooks
• Blogs
• Downloadable Audio Talks and Video Presentations
• E-Learning Courses
• Webinars

To get a sense of what's in store, visit the web site of our team member, Ivy Sea. Ivy Sea Online has been recognized by Harvard Business School, CEO Refresher, Inc.com, and other high-calibre organizations as one of the best resources on the internet for entrepreneurs, leaders, and socially conscious change-agents.

Visit Ivy Sea Online's Resource Store now. »

Here's a sampling of Paths to Change members' distinctive results:

• Worked as the core planning team for the Fourth Parliament of the World's Religions » in Barcelona, Spain, in July of 2004.
• Developed and directed organization redesign for 90-person division of a multibillion-dollar corporation in the wake of a turbulent reengineering effort. The innovative design combined participation of entire division with rigorous business analysis. Consolidated several functions, established a business-partnership model, created new departments — all while reducing the budget by $2 million, with no layoffs.
• Invited by the Dalai Lama as one of a few select spiritual teachers to visit U.S. prisons to help to understand and transform the suffering of the incarcerated.
• Invited by Mahatma Gandhi’s grandson to be a U.S. Delegate to an international yatra (pilgrimage) in India commemorating Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Recognized by Harvard Business School as one of the best, high-quality resources on the internet, and sought out as a "cream of the crop" content partner for Inc. Magazine online.
• Supported union campaigns to bring retroactive wages, pensions, healthcare, and other just benefits to the low-wage workers in prominent hotel chain; and to transform the horrendous conditions under which farm workers labor. Went into the fields to bear witness to the suffering, wrote articles, mobilized faith communities and others, engaged in civil disobedience … winning just benefits for the hotel workers and "raising the bar" in the ongoing struggle for human rights for farm workers.
• Developed a high-performance team in a joint venture between a multi-state, healthcare preferred-provider organization and a medium-sized 20-year-old insurance company specializing in workers' compensation, designed to produce a new product. Based on the return on investment, the product was the most successful in the history of the company. Viewed as an industry innovation, the product was subsequently acquired by one of the largest healthcare insurance companies in the company.

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Our Customers/Clients and Communities

Paths to Change works with individuals, community-based organizations, socially & environmentally responsible corporations and other for-profits, governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other non-profits.

Given our three Paths — Organizational Consulting, Engaged Spirituality & Lived Philosophy, and Strategic Activism — the roles we play with customers/clients and communities will vary as best suits the need.

Depending on the project, we may work as fee-for-service, or from grants to support non-profits. At other times we may be citizen-activists in social change campaigns and actions; or we may offer complimentary events or online resources in our roles as spiritual teachers and leaders.

Here’s a partial list of our customers/clients and communities:

A selection of Paths to Change network-members' reviews and testimonials:

• "This book (Visual Thinking, by Paths to Change member Christine Valenza/Art for Change) reawakens the powerful part of us that is the image-maker, a resource that often lies dormant and unused. Visual Thinking is an excellent tool for teachers, tutors, and parents, who are working with students that are primarily visual learners in school systems that are not always designed for them. This is also a practical guide for anyone working with students with learning differences and looking for new ways to bring information." ~ Karen Nani Apana, Ph.D., San Francisco Waldorf High School Faculty and High School Mentor
• "Jamie Walters is a prophet of an emerging new economy of intelligent, caring, cutting edge entrepreneurs who seek to make a living — not a killing. Her book, Big Vision, Small Business: Four Keys to Success Without Growing Big, is a must-read for all who believe that business can and should be fun, life serving, and human-scale." ~ David C. Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World and A Post-Corporate World; board chair, Positive Futures Network.
• "I am grateful beyond words for the remarkable work of Caitríona and Michele. No spiritual teachers I know bring a broader, more relevant range of knowledge, experience, and well-honed skills for awakening us to fullness of being. While thoroughly schooled in ancient traditions, their work is fresh and bold, igniting both courage and joy for meeting the challenges of today's world. For over a decade my own life and teaching has been enriched by their adventurous creativity and passionate respect for life." ~ Joanna Macy, systems theorist, ecophilosopher, Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and author of World as Lover, World as Self and Coming Back to Life.
• "In addition to his technical excellence, Lawrence brings tremendous heartfulness to the work; his ethics and integrity are almost unparalleled." ~ Dr. Michael Applebee, Vice President of Organizational Development, Charles Schwab & Co., Inc.

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Our Team

Paths to Change has existed as a network of colleague-collaborators working together in formal and informal ways on specific projects since 1995 — bringing decades of experience individually, and a collective history that adds up to centuries. We reached a crucial decision to come together in a more formal, focused way in a recent re-organization.

Through mid 2009, we’ll be clarifying roles and responsibilities, and formal agreements between Team Members. We’ll also standardize our online profiles describing our backgrounds, areas of expertise, typical projects and results.

You can learn more about the amazing work of the current Paths to Change network members — Art for Change, InPartnership, Ivy Sea, Lawrence Ellis & Associates, Manzanita Village, and WHR Architects — by visiting the "Paths Network" section of our historic website.

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On the Horizon

During this same timeframe, we will also formally redesign our existing for-profit structures, and create a new nonprofit.

Over the coming months, the Paths to Change web site will evolve to reflect our new vision, direction, structure, resources and services, team members, logo and look, and more.

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How You Can Get Involved as a Donor, Client, Collaborator or Learner

A range of voices from ancient cultures and industrialized societies has confirmed that humanity is in the midst of a perilous transition. Ecological, human rights and other crises have challenged our very capacity to survive as a species. We are at a crossroads where we can decline, or we can make a shift to a life-sustaining civilization.

We invite you to join us in our efforts to strengthen the capacity of planetary change agents — individuals, organizations and movements that are committed to building a more just, caring, and sustainable world — and to help them organize effectively to foster the needed transformations.

You can get involved in several important ways: supporting our emerging nonprofit as a founding donor, collaborating with us, becoming a network collaborator, referring potential network collaborators, becoming one of our clients, and joining our mailing list.

Learn more about these and other opportunities to get involved.

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And Right Now

And, of course, we would love to have you as a Paths to Change client or customer. Though we are in the midst of a redesign, Paths to Change is active and available for consultation now.

Please contact us with any requests for information or consultation.

As we've noted, we're in the process of redesigning our brand new logo, look, and web site — including integrating content-offerings from various Paths to Change members' sites.

Even so, we invite you to visit our previous web site to learn more about Paths to Change, our projects, clients, and team members.

Visit our historic website. »

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