Notes from Bowen
Bowen Island has a new community foundation! After two years of planning to get this off the ground, it was a week of exciting firsts: bank account, post office box, and our first cheque! A community foundation is a collection of ‘separate funds that is established by local citizens and held, in perpetuity, to enhance the quality of life in their community’. Acting as a charity, it allows families, individuals, businesses and non profits to build permanent endowments. Stories abound of the kinds of great things that foundations are able to do and the kind of leverage that gets built from small beginnings, eg, The Vancouver Foundation:
'With its roots in the early 1940’s, Vancouver Foundation is one of the oldest community foundations in North America. The history of the Foundation has all the elements of a good legend. There is an unlikely hero – a little known woman by the name of Alice G. MacKay who had saved $1,000 from her secretarial job and whose wish was to do something special for Vancouver – particularly for homeless women trapped in a cycle of poverty. There is a benevolent power – in the person of industrialist/philanthropist W.J. VanDusen who makes her wish come true. And there is an element of magic – in the transformation of $1,000 into $610 million'.
From the stories I’ve read, it seems that while the ‘umbrella’ fund is growing, other things grow in a community too: a culture of philanthropy, capacity and self-reliance, celebration, responsibility, good work and collaboration on important issues.
One of our first initiatives will be to support the start-up of a Youth in Philanthropy Council. I have a feeling that this group of people will be out front, leading the way for the rest of us. Stay tuned for stories big and small.
Since hearing O'Keefe's memorial tribute in Florida to the astronauts of the Spaceshuttle Columbia, I've had some thoughts whispering around in the back of my head...thoughts of life lived excellently...life celebrating life...life making love to life.
Sunday journal
A beautiful, highly fragrant plant is blooming outside my door; thymelaeaceae edgeworthia is native to China and Mongolia,and it’s bark is used to make fine quality paper. A friend brought cuttings back from a trip and looking around, I notice several other species in my garden that came from seed pods or pieces of branch that have been given to me over the years. Sometimes though, I pocketed the small beginnings of plant life while wandering through other gardens. I always felt just a little guilty…until this story…. About 15 years ago my friend took responsibility for the new plantings at a community college. On a trip to gather ideas from the local botanical gardens, he took the tiniest piece of a plant and propagated it. It thrived and later become a planting in his own garden. Over the years his interest in gardening grew and he developed a friendship with the master gardener of the botanical gardens. She was invited to a backyard barbecue at his home last summer and nothing could have made her happier than spotting that same plant in his garden. The original had disappeared under her care and despite an exhaustive search, she had not been able to replace it…he confessed all and she happily went away with the start of a new specimen.
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I’m selling my home and a few people have wandered through looking at it today. During these showings I’ve been climbing up a hill in behind the house. From the top, there’s a remarkable view up Howe Sound over a grouping of smaller islands. It’s been great to sit up there looking down over everything…and it’s given me some reflective time to let go of this particular house. Sitting on a rock today, I remembered an interview I heard with Wade Davis about the nomadic people of the Penan. In the interview, he named less than 15 possessions that they have carried with them throughout history. In their language, there is no differentiation between the material and the non-material things they treasure…no difference in ‘currency’ between a spear and an idea...definitely no concept of 'owning' property.
Voice of a Penan elder: 'The land is sacred; it belongs to the countless numbers who are dead, the few who are living, and the multitudes of those yet to be born.'
Davis says ‘Dependent on the forest for life, and each other for survival, the Penan have, in effect, institutionalized individual generosity as a means of insulating the group as a whole from the inevitable uncertainties inherent in a hunting and gathering way of life.’
for more of this story, visit: www.context.org/ICLIB/IC29/Davis.htm
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I’m drinking a cup of tea I brought back from Mexico. It's full of minerals and according to the smiling women in the little grocery store, is meant to be an aphrodisiac as well. Every country seems to have this kind of heightened folklore around a particular food or drink…would be good to have a love potion for the planet right about now.
