Hi Charles, Great to get the opportunity to come by this way again. Here we are the eve of an election, the result of which, just might tilt events ,even just a little bit, towards a better day for us all in Global Village.One can hope. Last month I took a huge risk when I purchased another 40'ocean freight container; made arrangements for it to be parked at a depot near the Port of Tilbury( London)that I am totally unfamiliar with.And on 30/10/2008 flew down to Luton and trains to Southall.I had a delicious kerahi tandoori,pelau rice and mango milkshake that evening;and on the following day, I had arranged for a large furniture removal van to collect the library shelving from an Ealing Borough Council branch library prior to its demolition. This was later transferred to my container the following week.The shelving was to be shipped out later last month. Several days later I learned that the intended recipient school did not require any library shelving!What do I do with it?That's my problem. I came across these two quotes from a book I read recently Turning Risk Into Opportunity by Ronald Cohen " ...Risk is an emotive word that masks the value of uncertainty."...ibid "...Every time you dare ,there is the risk of failure.You dare because somewhere inside You know you can do it.Your self-confidence,your previous success,all tell you that it can be done." ..ibid Kind regards.Aye David

Hi David:

You personalize the issue of risk-taking beautifully, and I trust you will find an appropriate recipient for your shelving.

It sounds as though you are "scaling up" your activities -- are your resources scaling up appropriately, too?

One of your quotes mentions "the value of uncertainty" - that's an intriguing phrase, if anyone would like to comment on it.

Hi Charles and Friends ,
Yesterday morning some very helpful individuals in a rail transport company here in Scotland, assisted me to make arrangements to bring one of my containers MSKU 631190 back up here next week from London, where they will allow me to store it at their depot and unload the library shelving, which I can either donate to worthy recipients,barter ,sell or better still, use these resources creatively. Any suggestions? The alternative was to give up and sell my container at a loss along with contents.
It's been a busy week:-I have been all over the place trying to locate a large warehouse /industrial unit to store seven 40'ocean freight container loads of educational resources,somewhere in the industial belt between Glasgow and Edinburgh; Wednesday I got a good deal on another container purchased the same day and delivered that afternoon to a large community high school in Livingston, who have offered to let my social enterprise Surplus Educational Supplies Foundation, have their surplus to requirements educational resources, as the school is being refurbished; another risk taken as the construction firm who have the contract over the next fourteen months, could just fill it with junk.
I have just read two great quotes for the coming week.Thanks to Jo and Charles:
" Continuous EFFORT,not strengthor intelligence is the key to unlocking our potential."Winston Churchill

"The secret of that SPARK is no secret-that one should throw oneself with disciplined LOVE into all LIFE's moments." Was this Wordsworth or Hipbone?

Charles, Though I'd consider myself cautious and measured when handling money, in retrospect I've done things in terms of trust that some might find unusual. In many ways, I'm now falling in behind our founder who'd been pushed into a corner, to the point of having nothing to lose. He was homeless, living on the streets when seized with the desire to go to Russia with his remaining funds. He'd made himself unpopular with Russia's FSB, had been drugged arrested at gunpoint, made a nuisance of himself in a case of police corruption.

Then in Crimea, he'd told government officials where they could go, if they thought they'd help themselves to US taxpayers money. When they ignored him, wrote an op-ed for the Kyiv Post about the endemic corruption, of children frozen to death on the streets, not long after a native journalist by the name of Gongadze was found headless for trying to expose.

Then we were both pilloried for sticking to our guns about neglect and corruption in children's homes for the disabled, and on the way we both lost a partner and children we'd planned to adopt.

But others stood up to be counted. A local charity director declared "I can't say silent" when he'd discovered a boy in an advanced state of starvation for want of medical attention.

Nothing to lose when I find businesses that are our late paying customers, posturing over CSR. No reservations now about telling their CEO like it is - ie "what we do is difficult and sometimes dangerous for those working in the field, and your not paying has far greater impact than just putting us out of business".

If I'd thought about all of the consequences before starting, there's little doubt it would have deterred me, but having acted in the way we have, now there are no regrets. We did as far as I'm concerned what needed to be done.

Jeff

Hi Jeff:

Each of the three first people to respond in this event seems to have taken some fairly intense personal risks, and I'm wondering to what extent that correlates to the phase in which a visionary "seeds" an enterprise, more than to the "continuity" phase where an organization routinizes the process, scales up, etc.

I believe quite a number of people hereabouts feel the same way you do when you write:

QUOTE: If I'd thought about all of the consequences before starting, there's little doubt it would have deterred me, but having acted in the way we have, now there are no regrets. :UNQUOTE

Risk-taking does seem to be a significant ingredient...

I like to quote a poem/lines, I wrote in tough times -

"Do Scream"

When doors are closing

When residual air is reducing

When natural light is fading

When we start hearing- Our own voices

Then we have to But SHOUT, SCREAM, and YELL our hearts content

Otherwise

We are co-opted Or Silenced!

We have to be silent

But We shouldn't be silenced.

Sep 9th05

You are asking very key questions, Sir.

The questions you are asking are the ones which keep coming back to us, for instance >HAVE YOU TAKEN RISKS THAT HAVE COME BACK TO HAUNT YOU?

The work we are passionately involved are identifying ways and means of meeting hunger in the neighbourhood, we did lots of experiments, just to ground the idea of sharing food and it took solid ten years to ground the "Value" of sharing food (please click the link >http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/videopod/default.aspx?id=33002.

Though my work doesnt generate money, it does bring in life.

I see the risk I had taken is to bring in smiles for the people who are around me, but I failed to generate confidence in my father, who raised lots of loans and he didnt share this to me,whenever I used to enquire, he used to say, when you cannot take care of yourself, How could you help me?

After his sudden death, as the only male member left in the family, I took the onus and cleared the loans.Now my mothers comes and regrets and she says.....if at all he believed you...........

This journey has deffinetly a price to pay and smiles we draw are the motivation but pain remains.

As we move forward we might succeed but we might not have people whom we want to show what we achieved(just to prove a point anyway), as whatever we do we do,we do because its not the mind but it's our HEART that speaks.

David, Jeff, Prakash:

The amazing thing, the internet-makes-it-possible thing, is that we know each other now, that our many previous conversations here on the Edge are building, with this one, and have indeed built, a community. I come here and I recognize friendly faces, and that is, to my mind, amazing. Not too long ago, it would have been literally unthinkable.

Talk about unintended consequences - and risk! It was the risk of nuclear war, as I understand it, that led DARPA to put together what became the Internet - and here we are today!

I'll respond to each of you individually, but just wanted to take the occasion to say how very grateful I am that the online world permits us to meet like this.

The internet / we can function like a reference library, allowing us to sear ch for specific informtion we need - but it can also be like the cafe that some bookstores have (here in the US and probably elsewhere), a place where conversations can start and friendships be established.

I hope friends old and new will join this conversation and others on SE and across the social enterprise network, so that we can move from information sharing to friendship, and from friendship to collaboration.

Because we could use each other's encouragement, insights and support.

Charles, what you say above, what David and Prakesh say too, prompted another couple of thought. One from the lyrics of a 40 year old Dylan song - hence the quote.

"And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin',
Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world,
Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin',
Heard ten thousand whisperin' and nobody listenin',
Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin',
Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter,
Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley,
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall."

Then there was Robert Oppenheimer, quoting famously from the Bhagavad Gita: "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one. Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Those were times in which the protest hymn was often the conduit for expressing our fears. In many parts of the world, there was no conduit at all. We didn't destroy the world, not in the anticipated holocaust, but we did have a wave that could drown the whole world, guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children. Focus and spending on our 60 year nuclear stand off left us blind to other perils just as great, as another President incoming, Dwight Eisenhower, had warned about the "theft from those hungry and not fed, cold and not clothed"

Access to information empowers, allowing us all to shout out our warnings. We hear them now, from those that would have seemed silent only a decade earlier, from where there is desperate need in Africa and Asia, repression in Burma and Tibet, conflict escalating in Eastern Europe.

We started out with one man's personal thoughts expressed to a President, relating poverty and exclusion to acts of self defence, with the nuclear threat still very much in mind. That's a large part of the reason for directing first efforts at the city of Tomsk in Siberia a nuclear stockpile with a large population of underemployed scientists, following on in Crimea where the Tatar community could still be manipulated into conflict. Swords into ploughshares, putting up proposals for a social enterprise faculty in a former Soviet University which manages the physics lab which produced their first fission weapons.

And if there's any consolation for Prakesh, I too have a father, a peace activist in his own way, who simply doesn't understand what I've got myself involved in, or how closely it aligns with the world he's wanted to be, since the 1930s.

Charles, I appreciate the effort you take to host these gatherings and build relationships between us.

I agree with what Jeff said "If I'd thought about all of the consequences before starting, there's little doubt it would have deterred me, but having acted in the way we have, now there are no regrets. We did as far as I'm concerned what needed to be done."

Since there is so much struggle in doing this work, the only reason many of us stay involved is that there are also many rewards. Most are not financial. But many, are just in the friendships we make, or in the ability to sleep well at night knowing we've done what we could during the previous day.

Of course, I'm not sure how many of us do sleep well at night. We are either full of ideas, or full of fears, not knowing how to pay the rent or the payroll due the next day.

In this environment, it is important to be thinking of how we can encourage more bright young people to enter these careers, and how we might make their road a bit less difficult than our own.

As so often, Daniel, all I can say is thank you, and I agree!

There's so many ideas in this conversation, I'm going to pick up on what Prakash mentioned with his poem, which I love, that the heart is a benevolent power that can't be silenced. Often others, like fathers, don't understand the path because its lit by an inner guidance rather than any outer conformity. Jeff, I think the " tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it" is the path of the heart, which is a triumph of hope over fear. The path becomes clear when the heart acts as agent of justice because a wave could still come to drown the whole world. We take risks not because we want to but because we have to.

Thanks, Jo.

QUOTE: We take risks not because we want to but because we have to. :UNQUOTE

In some ways, that seems like a suitable "bookend" to match the comment Dr. Prakash makes in a later post here, questioning whether things happening because we do them, or becuase they are bound to happen...

I suppose it goes all the way back to the Bhagavad Gita.

Hi Charles, Thanks for the acknowledgement.You build me up Man! I am sure Prakash and Jeff will join me in wishing You and Daniel, and all Stateside who join in these fora, the realisation of your best hopes in the days ahead,for we share in them too,for ..."Its a mutual joint stock world in all meridians..." said Herman Melville The only thing I haven't scaled up is funds at the moment, and I am now having to consider the possibility of selling several of my ocean freight containers.We'll see.Not yet at any rate . ..."Entrepreneurs do not just manage budgets to create value ,they leverage value to create budgets." Ronald Cohen

Hi David, good luck with your enterprise. I like what you were saying in your posts. The value in uncertainty that risk masks could be akin to the way resources get leveraged, or the way value is created from something out of nothing. Like magic, things have a way of working out.

Hi Jo,
Thanks.This afternoon I received a missive from a Senior Administrative Oofficial with the Grenadian Government who has been detailed by their Permanent Secretary to work with my Scottish registered charity Surplus Educational Supplies Foundation SCO39331, on the delivery of further shipments of educational resources to their Government Schools.I will keep You all posted with any developments on that score.
My current saying from which I take encouragement is as follows:-
" Every great cause is born from repeated failures and from imperfect achievements"Maria Montessori
Have a great week.

I just couldn't resist posting again >

What this dialogue did is, it touched the button where you have no option but to share.

What's the risk the world would face if you hadn't taken the risks you do? To this question I see the instant answer is,NOTHING, as the million dollar question I always have for this is > Is the result is because of your intervention or because it bound to happen so it happened................

As we move forward in life I see we do things because we are groomed to do so, might be because of education, upbringing, unable to accept whatever is going on or all three put to together or of any other combination.As long as we feel what we are doing is important we keep doing, what matters is, did we respond to situations or we only ended being mute witness.

I see we need to reduce the response time, systematically we are being infused to interpret things which we need to respond are the responsibility of some other person or institution, I see one has to ask oneself why you are being exposed to situation, where you are made to think becuase, you are being asked indirectly to act.

When you act, you will add on to memories. which help you to face situations and you will not be jolted and if you observe these memories act as shock absorbers and help us keep the balance.

Thank you!each one of you for making this dialogue filled with memories a wonderful cushion indeed, a warm pillow to sooth the tired brain.

Just a quick note to say thanks for your post -- your philosophy gains force from the actions you yourslf are taking!

Warm regards, Charles

To further this beautiful dialogue, I thougt we can also look at the ability to take risk gets enhanced "when you have nothing to loose further".

Explanation:

In my journey since in 1983 when my sisters body was conditioned to be handedover to us in CHENNAI, I saw how difficult to see a dead person, especially when you are biologically related.

That's my first lesson and that too when I was 18yrs old, that this life has an end.

I see and feel the first reaction I had then was, this body of mine has no importance.

And I see since then I took enough risks to learn the facts of life, heavy price I paid indeed both interms of money & time.

Now today I landed in a position that I dont know I should say this with pride or shame > I HAVE NOTHING TO LOOSE FURTHER, as the journey of understanding life had begun with death of my sister and in the journey of 25yrs, I lost my brother, my father and I addressed all the mistakes they commited and made all dependants secure.This I might have mentioned earlier posts, but this trauma is huge(Sorry for repeating). I always landed in situation where I have to mop the dirt and one of the fact of life is the choice we are left forth is to mop.

So when I see the mistakes policy makers and implementers should seriously consider is whether their thought and acts would add to the dirt.

ANY WAY WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOOSE FURTHER AND WE ARE SURE AND END UP CLEANSING.........

Charles, thanks for bring this topic up. I like a lot of what has been posted. A friend once told me, no community effort is worth your life. He was well meaning, but I wonder how we have moved forward into the future if no one risked their life to improve the well being of their community.

At this point I am working on starting a small business school which would promote creating business that lead to a local living economy. I am scared by all the uncertainty the project has from financing to will I have customers. However, my heart does not let me stop. I have nothing to loose, so that helps me be free an open to abundance. Wish all well in your endeavors!