Christinaswwworld Unlimited

Wow, the last month of my life has been incredibly content rich. Processing all the themes that emerged for me from my Shine UK shared air experiences - particuarly with @DaveDawes , @RedButtonDesign and @liadavide , and from spending 3 intensely bonding days in Geneva with a powerful small group of women social entrepreneurs - all in transition with new innovations at late stages in their brilliantly impactful careers. Around those physical movement for real time immersion I've been trying to put an ambitious plan for cosi10.com together, and facilitated a session on Transparency at an all virtual "unconference" this weekend called Radical Real Time . I have also joined the Board at @ HubBrussels , which has involved (by my own choice) quite a few hours over the past few weeks, as I've sat in on some staff team meetings and attended lengthy General Assembly and Board meetings involving discussion about a lot of operational development issues. All this experiential ...

The first time I ever heard the term social entrepreneur was just a few days before my interviews to become an Ashoka Fellow in August 2001. At that point, I'd been pouring my soul into Life in Africa for nearly 3 years, and everything Ashoka stands for spoke to the very marrow of my being. It was an absolute thrill for me to learn that there were others around the world like me, driven by an inexplicable passion to do whatever they saw they could to develop new system changing ideas. I knew clearly in those days that the possibilities for using the Internet for development I was seeing from my side of the world could change whole global development aid system. I wanted to help shape that new people to people system, and it was exciting to learn from Ashoka that I was not alone in having the audacity to think that big. But by the time I was actually offered the Ashoka Fellowship - 4 months after the interviews - my immediate response was to turn it down. Sept 11 had happened, c...

There are stories I am afraid to tell. I wish I could tell you it's been all sweetness and light, working to try to empower African communities. I wish I could tell you that I achieved all - or at least part of - what I set out to accomplish. I wish I could tell you that I clearly see the lessons in whatever these trials and ordealswere supposed to teach me. Were I able to find nuggets of wisdom in the wreckage, I would want to share them in a way that inspires others to do better, to be smarter, to achieve more. I fear sometimes, that I might never find them. And yet, there is the painful process of sifting through the mess of memories that my mind's eye is compelled to try and do. I lie awake nights imagining where to begin, and how to combine the memories of magical experiences with an acceptance of how things changed... of how my understanding of what I was up against changed... of how I changed. Writing is a tool that can help me with the sorting through. But I fear som...