Promoting prosperous places to grow up and grow old by fostering care communities and care economies for & by neighbors.
If it weren’t for my late father’s hospice nurse, I’m sure my mom would have fallen by now: he saw her moving about our apartment and told her to use her walker ALWAYS. She listened, and it has saved her from taking some tumbles. (I shared that with my mom’s permission and though this isn’t…Continue reading Fall prevention deception
I sat up straight in bed recently with Franklin Delano Roosevelt on my mind. Specifically, how his hardships with polio shaped him into the leader he became. My hardships are waning and not as dramatic as FDR’s, which left him paralyzed from the waist down, but they’ve left me feeling as if the person I…Continue reading Heeding FDR’s call to become fairly radical
I pass a house on my walks with a “ROB ME!” sign in the front yard often. OK, so there isn’t an actual sign, but newspapers piling up on the walkway as good as advertise that no one’s home. If I didn’t live so far away, I’d offer the house dwellers to collect their papers…Continue reading Low-hanging trust building
I put myself in a bad situation: By waiting too long to face the unknown by taking a new path in my career, life “helped” me into action with a blessing disguised as a health crisis. This pushed me to resign, which thrust me deep into unfamiliar territory. So in the end, I confronted the…Continue reading How neighbors can help us evolve and be prosperous
Village Company 360—the former name of A Village for Life—wasn’t my first pick for a business name. But the website addresses of names I wanted were taken or cost thousands, and my brain couldn’t access the name A Village for Life at the time. Anyway, the word “company” fixed those problems, and had the added…Continue reading The power of building boring businesses
The world is a great thing for everybody.There are so many things that are good. My heart melted reading those words from my five-year-old great-niece in a Valentine’s Day card to me, and I can’t say them enough. The world is a great thing for everybody.There are so many things that are good. Rather than…Continue reading Words from a child to help reshape our worlds
There’s a senator who would make me lose it. I threw a magazine across a room once to get his face on the cover out of my sight. Another time, hostile tears filled my eyes when I saw him on TV. Mercifully, I began to break free of this torment when the words of Booker…Continue reading A pre-Inaugration Day message
My dad, in his 70s at the time, saw a poster on the University of Dayton campus when he was an adjunct professor there. It read, “FREE PIZZA FOR SENIORS!” Dad was feeling like he could go for a slice, but it didn’t click until he showed up for one that “seniors” meant people in…Continue reading Why what wealthier folks are paying to age well matters to middle income earners
PART 1: To repeat from my recent post: “Certainty—or we can call it confidence—doesn’t come from thinking but doing. Instead of doing nothing because we’re unsure our village-growing ideas will work or help, let’s be citizen scientists and collect our own damned data!” OK, but who’s a citizen scientist and what’s data? Data is information…Continue reading Following our own damned data
Part 1: Receiving A RevelationPart 2: Unlocking True Power At first, I thought that true power—being aligned with my soul—would feel transcendent. Later, I learned that it feels more like satisfaction. That rang true when I heard it, based on the decades I’d lived in dissatisfaction and for other reasons I won’t describe here. And…Continue reading A 3-part personal story: Inheriting the Earth