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Since his inauguration, the Justice Department has reversed the previous administration’s efforts to uphold voting rights, served as an impediment to police reform, and weighed in against same-sex rights. It’s an agenda breathtaking in its scope.

Many Trump supporters believe themselves to be losing their country, something that leads them to prefer a social milieu more consistent with days gone by — one in which primarily white, middle- and upper-class, heterosexual, native-born men reigned supreme.

Moreover, in 2016, in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the Supreme Court ruled that for the sake of diversity, race can be one of many criteria used by a college as part of a more holistic means of evaluating applicants.

The bill not only gives cable companies and wireless providers free rein to do what they like with your browsing history, shopping habits, your location and other information gleaned from your online activity, but it would also prevent the Federal Communications Commission from ever again establishing similar consumer privacy protections.

When you make a voice call on your smartphone, the information is protected: Your phone company can’t sell the fact that you are calling car dealerships to others who want to sell you a car. But if the same device and the same network are used to contact car dealers through the internet, that information — the same information, in fact — can be captured and sold by the network. To add insult to injury, you pay the network a monthly fee for the privilege of having your information sold to the highest bidder.

“online communities” – the thousands of discussion forums allowing like-minded people to find one another, keep in touch, and share information. Most often these online communities are started by one or two highly motivated and unpaid individuals (aided by the amazing availability of free platforms to host such groups), and participation by all subscribers is intentional and voluntary. They operate on the principle of exchange, since if everyone lurks and never posts, no helpful ideas can emerge.

I asked them about how they worked with online volunteers and at first they said they didn’t have any.  Naturally, I soon changed their perception. In fact, NTEN depends on the freely donated time and skills of its involved members.

Why is it important to recognize this quasi-invisible workforce? Because seeing and valuing the volunteer nature of this service will let you appreciate and strengthen it. Further, it’s possible to apply the principles of volunteer management to make such volunteer participation easier and more productive. For example:

Corporations are interested in making skilled volunteering a larger piece of their community involvement activities, and companies like Microsoft, HP, American Express and The Gap are publically and actively building more skills-based and pro bono volunteering programs.

The skilled volunteering movement is also growing among individuals – organizations like Taproot Foundation and Catchafire have joined VolunteerMatch to connect skilled volunteers directly with nonprofit projects, and they are growing by leaps and bounds.

standardized taxonomy of skills that volunteers possess and that nonprofits search for.

The related field of appreciative inquiry offers similar flip-the-question approaches but is more specific, asking us to look for and build on the positive case or “outlier.” Is there someone in the community already exhibiting the desired behavior? What is enabling them to outperform? What resources are they tapping into that others are not? Not “Why are staph infections so high in the hospital?” but “Why are staph infections lower on the third floor?” Not “Why are sales down in Regions 6 and 9?” but “Why are sales up in Region 4?” Not “Why do so few graduates of our leadership academy get promoted?” but “Why did these seven graduates get promoted?” Why is the accident rate lower in _______? Why is the turnover rate lower in ______? Why are there fewer ethics complaints about ______ division?

They’ve been sold on meditation as a simple way to bear the unbearable.

In other words, if you’re stressed out, you’re not working hard enough on your personal focus strategy. You’re letting the team down.

the marketing of mindfulness as a solution to work stress and life balance rather than the complex spiritual approach to living it is meant to be.