CoroGraduation - Coro's Graduation: A Personal Adventure in Immersive LearningI was moved and challenged by the invitation from the 2009 Coro Fellows class to be their graduation speaker. It said, “We as a class have decided that we would like to have a speaker at our graduation who can represent our experiences as Coro Fellows.”

I felt confident about this part since I was a Coro Fellow in Los Angeles in 1965, then on the staff from 1969 through 1977 in San Francisco, and on the Board in the 1990s and now again in the late 2000’s. I understand what it feels like to have a series of very disparate internship and projects experiences in government, business, labor, media, politics, and community organizations and try and make sense of the larger system. That’s what the 12 Coro Fellows do for nine months, along with the 66 different Tuesday evening and Friday seminars held to make sense out of it all.

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The Time is Ripe for Social Entrepreneurs

Coro Alums Using GS Tools

I found myself in Aptos, CA recently at an alumni gathering of Coro, the leadership training organization through which I got my start professionally. It stirred my thinking like an ice cream beater on a hot summer afternoon, and the results are exciting me almost as much as the ice cream I can remember from those days long ago.

I’m beginning to believe that our country can reinvent itself in the civic arena much as we did in the early 1900s, after the very uninvolved 1890s when millions were coping with the industrial revolution and the isolation and confusion in the new cities. Robert Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Communities, made this appeal to me several years ago, but I wasn’t optimistic then. I sense a quickening now.

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