sharing about my 9-week sabbatical

[Jeff Brown]

Hi everyone,

I'm happy to let you know that I successfully completed my 9-week sabbatical yesterday (Feb. 1), and I am back actively in my role as Executive Director of the Compassionate Communication Center of Ohio.

I am very grateful for the support that I received from the CCCO Board, staff and volunteers that enabled me to unplug from my responsibilities and still keep the organization humming.

During my sabbatical, I got a lot of rest (both physical and emotional), spent time with family and loved ones, and explored some new areas of interest by reading two books from cover-to-cover (something I hadn't done in at least ten years).

Speaking of which, this period was the first extended break I have had from work in eleven years, which is shortly before I left my job at Bloomingfoods (a natural foods co-op in Bloomington, IN) to share Nonviolent Communication full-time... so I was more than ready for it!

Also, one of the things that happened is that I re-connected with my passion for social change, which is something I was very much involved in in my twenties when I worked for three political advocacy organizations.

I look forward to applying NVC principles more and more to structural and systemic change to organizations, in addition to individual change (healing, personal empowerment, etc.), and I already have some ideas about how we might do this through CCCO.

If you're curious about anything I dug into on my sabbatical, I recommend the following:

1.  Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux from Belgium.

2.  Emerge!: The Rise of Functional Democracy and the Future of the Middle East by Elza Maalouf, a Lebanese-American author.

Also, Elza is involved in a nonprofit organization founded by Don Beck (co-author of Spiral Dynamics) called the Center for Human Emergence - Middle East.

3.  The nonprofit organization, Institute for Cultural Evolution based in Boulder, CO, which a social policy foundation / "think tank" organized to help create forward movement in the American political landscape (they have a De-Polarization campaign).

I welcome communication from any of you and look forward to seeing you again soon.

Sincerely, Jeff
__________________________________
Jeff Brown, Executive Director
Compassionate Communication Center of Ohio 
2350 Indianola Ave., Columbus, OH 43202 USA (map)
614-558-1141 work ~ 812-320-3842 personal/mobile

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The mission of the Compassionate Communication Center of Ohio is to promote peace, eliminate violence and work through conflict by systematically using Nonviolent Communication (NVC). We envision a community where we live in peace and compassion for all.