by David Gershon
Date: Tuesday, February 20, 2024 at 9 AM Pacific Time
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Cost: Suggested donation $10 US.
We will offer this program free to those whose resources are limited.
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About the Author
David Gershon, founder and CEO of Empowerment Institute, is one of the world’s foremost authorities on behavior-change and large-system transformation, and applies this expertise to issues requiring community, organizational, and societal change. His clients include cities, government agencies, large organizations, and social entrepreneurs. He has addressed a wide diversity of issues, ranging from low carbon lifestyles, livable neighborhoods, and sustainable communities to organizational talent development, corporate social engagement and cultural transformation. Over the past thirty years the empowerment programs he has designed have won many awards, and a major academic research study described them as “unsurpassed in changing behavior.”
David used this empowerment proficiency to organize at the height of the cold war, in partnership with the United Nations Children’s Fund and ABC Television, one of the planet’s first major global consciousness-raising initiatives—the First Earth Run. Building on his background as the Director of the Lake Placid Olympic Torch Relay, he used the mythic power of relaying a torch of peace around the world to engage the participation of twenty-five million people in sixty-two countries, the world’s political leadership and, through the media, an estimated 20 percent of the planet’s population in an act of global unity. Millions of dollars were also raised as part of this event to help UNICEF provide care for the neediest children of the world.
Gershon is the author of eleven books, including Social Change 2.0: A Blueprint for Reinventing Our World, winner of the 2009 National Best Books Award, and Low Carbon Diet: A 30 Day Program to Lose 5,000 Pounds, winner of the 2007 “Most Likely to Save the Planet” Independent Publisher Book Award. He co-directs Empowerment Institute’s School for Transformative Social Change which empowers social entrepreneurs and change agents from around the world to design and implement cutting edge social innovations. He has lectured at Harvard, MIT, and Duke and served as an advisor to the Clinton White House and the United Nations on behavior change, community empowerment and sustainability issues.
Description of the Book
If change is the mantra of our moment in history, Social Change 2.0 may be poised to become its bible. Drawing on his three decades in the trenches of large-scale societal transformation, David Gershon described by the United Nations as a graceful revolutionary, offers an original and comprehensive roadmap to bring about fundamental change in our world.
So many of the assumptions we have been operating with as a human community have proven faulty that we must now literally re-envision them. And with the accelerating unraveling of our planet's life support system and the deterioration of so many of our social systems, we are being called upon to create rapid transformative change. But the current social change tools at our disposal of governmental command and control, financial incentives, and citizen protest - Social Change 1.0 - were designed for slow-moving, incremental change.
Not only must we reinvent our world, but also the process by which we achieve this reinvention. If the current social change tools are not sufficient, what else do we have? According to systems theory, when the current solutions prove inadequate for the magnitude of change required, a system goes into stress and begins to break down. What is required to help the system evolve is a second order change solution or a solution capable of transforming and reorganizing it to a higher level of performance. Social Change 2.0 represents such a solution for our social systems.
It has a simple and some might say radical premise: that the natural starting point for changing our world for the better is us. That taking personal responsibility to make the needed changes within ourselves and our communities is the foundation for changing our institutions, not the other way around. That people are willing to make these changes if empowered by a personal vision and the means to bring it to fruition. That these changes can be accelerated and reinforced with the right laws and financial incentives, but the process begins with us.
To bring about this type of change we need leadership schooled in the competencies of transformative social change. With our planet on the line and with such a propitious opening available for transformation available as the world strives to reinvent itself, change leaders need to playing at their best. Social Change 2.0 provides a blueprint to help them do just that.
About the Facilitator
Gard Jameson received his Ph.D. from Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2005. He teaches Chinese and Indian Philosophy in the Philosophy Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Prior to his tenure at UNLV, he spent 25 years practicing as a Certified Public Accountant and Financial Planner at Piercy, Bowler, Taylor & Kern and Touche Ross.
He is the author of three books, Footprints on the Sands of Time (1985), the story of his mentor, Dr. Raymond M. Alf, Phaethon: Our Mythic Moment (2009), an ancient Greek tale that illuminates our current predicament, and Monkey: Our Mythic Moment (2012), the grand epic of China.
Gard helped found and chairs the boards of the Children's Advocacy Alliance and the Interfaith Council of Southern Nevada. He is the Treasurer of VMSN (Voluneer in Medicine in Southern Nevada). He also helped found the Nevada Community Foundation.
Gard also serves on the board of the Stillpoint Center for Spiritual Development and the Alf Museum of Life in Claremont, California, and is the associate pastor at Grace Community Church in Boulder City, Nevada.
