By Michael – When it became clear to me in May, 2016, that the US election was going to be a disaster, I began sharing with friends in Los Angeles my idea of traveling to Europe and Latin America. I wrote an article about what I believed were the underlying causes of a new kind of political disorder not just in the US, but worldwide, which published in July. By August, 2016, I was on the road.
I wanted to reconnect with friends around the world, but I have also been in search of new kinds of civic and political initiatives that are breaking the mold to reimagine politics and expand the range of what is politically possible.
This ongoing journey is an extension of my educational project, https://ReimaginingPolitics.org.
Having traversed California organizing, speaking and training progressive activists for several years as co-founder of the Courage Campaign, I know that many excellent local civic initiatives with significant potential go unnoticed by major US media, which tend to be clustered along the coasts with an urban orientation.
Since beginning my current journey, I have traveled to 17 cities in 12 countries. As in the US, I am finding wonderfully creative civic projects everywhere, some of them with enormous potential to change the way we think about and do politics across borders.
From new models of open source civic mapping to local and national movements working to preserve heritage seeds, and the revival of ancient “trafkintu” traditions of community building taking hold across the Andes, there are many more hopeful signs of robust civic innovation and scalable change than is widely believed. This is true everywhere I have traveled.
My first two reports on these initiatives, along with analysis of the US election, published in nine countries and five languages in February and March.
I am now writing a Series on Medium and on the Reimagining Politics blog to share the amazing stories, photos and videos of the people, places and political projects I have been privileged to know during my travels over the past 9 1/2 months.
I hope you will follow this ongoing political-cultural adventure and share your comments while also sharing with friends. Thank you.
More to come soon….
Photos by Michael: Night bus Guadalajara, Seed exchange Juanacatlán, México
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Thank you for reading my online Journal. If you like what I am doing with Reimagining Politics, please consider donating today. Our GoFundMe campaign is linked below.
Donors receive a free preview copy of my new ebook filled with great photos and stories about the amazing civic innovators I have met and worked with during my travels around the world the past 17 months.
