LeadWell Foundation

You're thirsty... where do you turn?

Bottled water? We hope not after you watch this short video from the Story of Stuff project:

The challenges of global fresh water supplies are mounting, and our unbridled consumption of bottled water is not helping matters. Certainly overpackaged, and often drawing from what are otherwise identical public water supplies, the challenge of bottled water isn't entirely a matter of manufactured demand (the video's main viewpoint).

Instead, many people fall into the trap of apparent convenience (including us, at times) surrounding pre-packaged water. In reality, making a difference simply takes a bit of foresight and planning. Get a re-usable water bottle, or take a favourite glass or cup to work (we're fond of a nice mug from one of our favourite East Coast pubs), but use your local tap water supply wherever possible.

Above all, we encourage you to THINK about where your water is coming from, no matter how you consume it. For a handy resource on water footprint issues of all sorts, visit the Water Footprint Network.

From the brilliant mind of Philip Zimbardo and the incredibly talented pens and animation magic of RSA Animate comes this ten minute exploration of how our individual and societal attitude toward time influences the way we view the world, and what this means for things like our sense of collective responsibility and the ways we educate current and future generations.

The concept of time is inherently personal, though aggregated on a societal (or organizational, or community) basis, it starts to have a larger cultural meaning. As the video points out, many of the pressures of modern life have to do with time: how to "spend" it, how to allocate it across all the competing demands for it. Saddest of all is the finding that, if we could add an 8th day, many would choose to spend it on work and other trappings of success, rather than making their lives more meaningful in other ways.

What's your concept of time? Let us know through comments on our Better Futures blog!

[ Recorded October 27, 2009. Playing time is approximately 37 minutes ]

This is the first recorded and broadcasted webinar in a series that the Foundation has helped to host for the Canadian Community Leadership Network (CCLNet), exploring issues of community leadership development in the Canadian context. This webinar features panelists Judith Maxwell, Mitchell Temkin, and Sid Frankel, with moderator Martin Itzkow from the CCLNet board of directors.

Note: audio quality on the webinar is poor to fair, due to an un-muted participant microphone causing background noise on the teleconferencing system. This is not a fault with the TalkShoe.com recording or your video/audio player.

Our featured website for October 2009 is the home site for Social Innovation Generation (SiG).

SiG is a collaborative initiative which seeks to address Canada's social and ecological challenges by creating a culture of continuous social innovation. A collaborative partnership between The J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, the University of Waterloo, the MaRS Discovery District, and the PLAN Institute, the initiative's ultimate goal is to support whole system change through changing the broader economic, cultural and policy context in Canada to allow social innovations to flourish.

SiG's focus will be on fostering social innovation to achieve impact, durability and scale, with key theme areas of re-engaging vulnerable populations and linking social and ecological resilience.

More about SiG...

Our featured website link for September 2009 is the Institute of Wellbeing, home to the Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW).

As their site highlights, wellbeing is not just about our economic wellbeing, based as this is on centuries-old practices of gauging national progress based solely on financial and economic indicators. In today's world of government and business policy, there is a distinct need for a more balanced system of national accounts that also looks at non-economic factors. The Institute of Wellbeing — and the CIW within it — is gaining international attention as a showcase for this type of thinking.

The Foundation has been a fan of the CIW since its first early days, and we're pleased to see that the initiative has recently been stimulated through the release of the first report in June of this year (click to visit How are Canadians REALLY doing?), and through the pending work on the remaining indicator areas.

Have thoughts on the CIW and how it can be used? Let us know your perspectives by visiting our Insights blog to comment on this story, or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .