Month: September 2013

Volunteer vs volunteer board

I sit on the boards of a couple of local non-profits, and one of them had a planning meeting recently. At the meeting, the complaint was made that “the board members aren’t stepping up to help run things.”

I’ve heard the same sentiment a dozen times, and i bet everybody in town who sits on a non-profit board has heard it too. And it occurred to me that there’s a fundamental flaw with the way our whole area thinks about, and enacts, the board model. Continue reading “Volunteer vs volunteer board”

The market is a…

The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is — without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset — intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged, and widespread suffering of conscious beings.

–from The State of the Art, stories by the late Iain M. Banks, 1991

September Non-Disclosure?

DOLT September non-disclosure formLooking for the September Non-Disclosure Form (as mentioned in my piece in September 2013’s Tofino Time magazine)? Click the thumbnail to download it.

Wondering what the heck this is about? Read the piece (below) and all will become clear.

 

 

 

The DOLT Revolt
by greg blanchette 2013

I kicked up my skateboard, glanced up and down Campbell Street, and casually pulled open the door to the district office, like I was going in to sign up for a macrame class, maybe, or ask about the noise bylaw.

Laura was expecting me—all smiles as usual, but you don’t mess with a gal who knows a dozen ways to take you down with her bare hands. I nodded politely and gave the password. “You’re late,” she said. Continue reading “September Non-Disclosure?”