Nice day for a walk

Today was a nice day for a walk, and some meetings and some reminders and some work.

It was a jam packed day. One of those days where you ask yourself what the hell you did all day. It was shortly before I asked myself this question that my calendar reminded me that today was the day that Christina and me begin our regular walk. We headed down Nicholson up in the Heights, then back up to her place where we hung with her brother talking education, “Waiting for Superman”, and laptops for kids in the ghetto. I’m going to talk to some folks at Google (thanks to some friendly secondary connections), and make this thing happen. Think Negroponte with some tracking and metrics. I’m so about this idea with this secondary education kick that I’m on.

This carried over into a Houston at SXSW meeting with Grace, Tim and Brian. This is really shaping up. Art Cars, Film, Artists, taco trucks, AIGA. Kick ass.

Grace and I hung around afterwards and I got to, for the first time, articulate my personal agenda as it relates to the countries failing educational system. Basically, I came back from Africa with the intent of infuse every conversation that I have access to, whether it be, Child Advocates, Creativity in Houston, speaking to kids, C2 Creative, Houston at SXSW, the film series, Block Party, etc, with some relevance for junior high and high school kids.

I’ve recently realized that with the current unprecedented cuts in Education spending, that the populous has a large responsibility to its students. We spend a good deal of time addressing the needs of the hungry, the homeless, the financially needy, but we shouldn’t stop there. There is significant work to be done at a deeper level. Where the public school system is failing the nation’s kids, we could be preventing the problems so often afflicting the under-educated adults in our city and country.

It also occurred to me that we are the products of some potential bubbles. Whether it’s a social media bubble, or a capital “C” Community bubble,– a lot of our current paradigms are specific to our generation. If we have any desire to sustain the momentum that we’ve been able to achieve we need to look beyond our peer groups and usher in, and play example to next generations. The social aspects of what we do, the “greater good” mentality, the coopetition sentiment, the open source, free-to-all ideas are unique to gen Y and millenials. If we have any hope for this to sustain, we can’t continue to ignore those who will proceed us.