Halcyon brings you exciting examples of activism in action, by individuals, organisations and societal groups striving to make positive social change. Please contact us to share with your own activism-related stories.
This paper is an evolving examination of issues around, and responses to, the challenge or improving the lives of and caring for elders, on the emotional, mental, physical, practical, spiritual levels.
Pre 2018
Each week, Halcyon brings you a short, sharp and stimulating read - 7 issues that have witnessed significant change over the past 7 days.
I have listened to and would recommend the following podcasts (2015-2018 recommendations to follow):
2014
Please see below change concerning the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Goal 2 to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.
Poor nutrition causes 45% of deaths in kids under five each year.
The depth of the food deficit (in kilocalories per person per day) remains very serious in many parts of the world.
A result of poor diets over long periods is a retardation of growth – the height of children is too small for their age. This is referred to as stunted growth. Children with stunted growth are at greater risk for illness and death.
Imagining, while still healthy, donating organs to total strangers without expecting anything in return. The BBC nterviewed a man who did just this after his wife committed suicide.
She had been suffering from progressive multiple sclerosis, and when the pain and suffering became too much for her to bear, she took her own life, leading him to a suspended prison sentence - for failing to stop her - and ultimately to the decision to help others to live by doing as much as he possibly could - by giving away one of his kidneys and part of his liver, and then waiting to become a bone marrow donor.
"Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done and why. Then do it" - Robert Heinlein
Jane Goodall's Chimp Greeting from The Jane Goodall Institute on Vimeo.
As one of reportedly fewer than 10 people ever to be invited to study for a PhD at Cambridge without a prior undergraduate degree, Jane Goodall was promptly told by "experts" there that all her field work on chimpanzee behaviour was wrong, and that she should not anthropomorphise them with names, still less assign them thoughts, personalities and emotions.
Today, we know that she was right and they were wrong.
What radicals should be doing right now is studying and thinking. You need to put in your ten years at the library, the way Marx did. You need to be figuring out what makes human beings tick and what, if any, direction is to be found in history. And I don’t mean some half-assed sci-fi anarcho-Gaia nonsense you cobbled together before you dropped out of Bard- I mean serious study, working toward an alternative to a global bourgeois democracy. What radicals need most right now isn’t action but theory - Thomas de Zengotita
The four cardinal virtues- courage (andreia), moderation (sophrosyne), wisdom (sophia) & justice (diksiosyne) are ordered by practical wisdom, realised by interaction within the world, the capacity for knowledge in action - Dave Snowden, KM Australia 2009 presentation
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost- that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them - Henry David Thoreau