Invitation in Projects: Our Day to End Poverty

When Jeffrey Keenan, a Global Supply Chain Manager for Adobe Systems, came to us with his interest in creating a book that would help everyday people have an impact on poverty issues, we setup a process that had invitation at its heart.  Reaching out to life-long contacts we formed a five person team with Jeff, Shannon Daley-Harris, a remarkable writing talent with a deep background in social change, and Karen Speerstra, founder of Sophia Serve, an editing and writing coaching service that focuses on creating positive change.

The book team worked collaboratively using web-based tools to gather ideas, hone chapters, and create a book that broke up the field of poverty issues into distinct categories, and gathered various resources, actions, and anecdotes relevant to each category.  As the process evolved the book team invited leaders from poverty-fighting groups to weigh in, review chapters, and offer their own ideas.  Invitation added content to the book, strengthened the ideas the book team had, and created an activated community around the book and within the broader community of existing poverty-fighting agencies.

Since Our Day to End Poverty's publication we have continued to invite groups and individuals to think creatively about uses for the book.  Congregations, companies, book groups, college professors and high school teachers have embraced the book in various ways and we have explored various tools to help continue looping more communities and individuals into the project.  The Our Day to End Poverty website, MySpace page and Facebook page are all examples of this ongoing effort.