Citizen is a deeply honorable title. Yes, it is most commonly a designation bestowed by an accident of birth or location. But it can be so much more. In a truer form, citizenship is a merit that we earn by extending ourselves to others and contributing to the world around us. Citizens are involved and engaged. They are participants. They are doers.… Read more »
Category: Contribution
Peter’s Perspective: Lovers are Better Leaders
A fundemental tenet of my book, The Citizen Leader, is that citizenship challenges us to participate in efforts to better our communities and improve life for all — that we earn the right to call ourselves active citizens when we contribute to the communites where we live, work, play and pray.
Let me follow and add that our willingness to act, and by extension our willingness to contribute to the world around us at all, is linked directly to our feeling and beliefs about our communities.… Read more »
Peter’s Perspective: Citizen Leadership is the Prerequisite to Engaging Leadership
Q. What exactly is a citizen leader?
A. A person who brings their character and courage to making a contribution on behalf of the community and the common good.
Look closely at the people around you who are in positions of leadership or who aspire to positions of leadership.
Character: What are their guiding principles? Are their values ones that inspire you to want to follow their lead?… Read more »
Citizen Leaders: The Founding Members and Staff of Plastics Pollution Coalition
Plastic Pollution Coalition is a global collaboration and effort of individuals, businesses and organizations inspired by and working together towards a vision of a world free of plastic pollution and its toxic impacts on people, animals and the environment.
The Coalition was developed and is currently championed by this handful of founders and staff whose dedicated actions on behalf of the common good exemplify Citizen Leadership:
- Daniella Dimitrova Russo, Executive Director
- Dianna Cohen, Art Initiatives and Creative Director
- Julia Cohen, Coalition Manager
- Lisa Kaas Boyle, Esq.,
Words to Inspire: Christopher Evans
… Read more »In college, during the summer months, I was employed as a forestry firefighter. On wildfires, working with hand tools like shovels, heavy rakes and axe-like hoes, we formed up in lines to cut firebreaks before the advancing fires. We were always told by out growling boss to “take a swipe, kid,” at the vegetation with your tools and leave the rest for the person behind you, When you looked back down the mountain at the end of our line of workers, you’d see a clear, clean line of firebreak.
Words to Inspire: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The life of a man (or woman) consists not in seeing visions, and in dreaming dreams, but in active charity and in willing service.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kavanaugh
Citizen Leaders: The Six Founding Members of FoodCorps
FoodCorps is a nationwide network of volunteers combating our country’s childhood obesity epidemic by organizing and recruiting volunteers to develop and coordinate:
- School nutrition programs that teach kids what healthy food is
- School gardens that engage kids in learning about the food they eat and how to grow healthy produce
- Farm to School programs that put locally grown foods in school lunches
The FoodCorps mission and organization emerged from hundreds of hours of conversations with the input of thousands of individuals in the many communities it now serves.… Read more »
Citizen Leaders: All-Americans Hudson Taylor and Colin Joyner
Citizen leadership is:
Character and courage: men, women, young adults and teenagers acting and speaking with the courage of their character day in and day out, in private and public – at home, in school, at work, in their club, in church and temple, on a team, in a troop, in the support group, in the neighborhood.
Courage of character begins with their getting clear on who they are and how they want to be in the world, so they are or become the person they’d want to follow, and by extension the person others would want to follow.… Read more »