mid-week Connect: 8/23/23 ~ Cultivating across cultures

Greetings and Happy Midweek!

Since I am enjoying settling into one of my new part time jobs, which is working for an urban farm (in St Pete, FL), I thought we could explore the topic of ‘cultivation’ this week, and see what cross cultural insights we can find. This fits into the PROcess component of our Global SKILLs PROACTive Framework, because cultivating anything is a process over time. *

As part of my job training, I observed a class this afternoon at a school garden. It was for young kids learning about growing healthy produce while they also learn helpful lessons in biodiversity and working together and interacting with nature even in their city home spaces and turning off the hose before you douse everyone in sight!

These are just a few examples of how it always is with gardening and farming - you get into it and find yourself cultivating so much more than crops. Add diverse cultural dimensions, and things get really dynamic since the process of cultivating has lots of nifty cross-cultural parallels. Choosing seeds is like getting together within and across communities and identifying goals people want to work toward together. Preparing the soil is your strategic planning and implementation, ideally based on everyone’s input (both cultural insiders and outsiders). Keeping the site properly cultivated (shaded, watered, protected, harvested) is sustainable and eventually successful programming. All this is part of why I just love gardening, I look forward to learning more about farming…and more broadly - I totally value cultivation!

How about you ~ what is one thing you have cultivated recently, and a cultural insight you can draw from it?

Share about that with a friend or note it here.

And check out the Global SKILLs LINKs below for more on cultures and cultivation.

Thanks for being part of this Connect community.

Until next week,

Betsy

Global SKILLs LINKs

~ Related Connect: 11/18/20 - Blue Zones

(use this link and scroll down to the date in my blog: https://www.globalskillspartners.com/blog-1 )

~ how about farm culture: https://www.farmanddairy.com/columns/farm-culture-is-an-important-part-of-every-farming-operation

~ this is the type of cultivating I am learning about in my new job: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2021.712733/full

~ and an opportunity if YOU too want to cultivate across cultures: https://wwoof.net/

Notes

* Through my business Global SKILLs and several partner subsidiaries I offer unique cross-cultural consulting and training including:

3 Dimensional Dynamics Model:

1st dimension = HOME ; 2nd dimension = HOST ; 3rd dimension = HARBOR)

PROACTive Framework:

PRO = PROfile, PROcess (which we explored this week), PROgram

ACT = Application, Collaboration and Transformation

~ contact me for more information on this model and these strategies and how you might use them in your current programming: betsy.barbour@gmail.com

2023 ~ Celebrating 40+ years of working in

intercultural communications and global community building

“It takes a community to build a community”

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Please do not reproduce or share without my permission (betsy.barbour@gmail.com)