Peace Corps Week 2026

by | Mar 1, 2026 | ASKing the World, Beekeeping, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Global Citizenship, Potpourri, USA

Peace Corps Week always brings me back to where so much of this journey began.

In 1997, I arrived in Paraguay as a beekeeping volunteer. I thought I was going to teach a skill. Instead, I learned how little I understood about place, community, and what it means to belong somewhere not my own.

Beekeeping taught me patience. It taught me to pay attention to systems I couldn’t control. It taught me that every hive is a community—fragile, interdependent, and shaped by forces far beyond what we can see.

But the deeper lesson wasn’t about bees.  It was about listening.

It was about sitting with people, sharing tereré, and realizing that knowledge doesn’t arrive from the outside—it grows from within relationships. It was about understanding that development, like ecology, is not something you impose. It’s something you participate in.

Looking back, I can see how much of my work today traces back to that experience.

The Geographical Imaginations Expedition & Institute.  The World as a Village of 100 People.  Global citizenship, human geography, civic imagination.  And a love for daily walking!

All of it, in some way, began there—in a place where I first learned to see the world not as a map to understand, but as a community to be in relationship with.

Peace Corps didn’t just shape what I do. It shaped how I see.  And maybe that’s the real work:  Not to “help” the world.  But to learn how to belong to it more responsibly.

To all those serving, those who have served, and to those who support(ed) us—thank you for being part of that ongoing lesson.

#PeaceCorpsWeek #GlobalCitizenship #Beekeeping #Interdependence #Service #GeographicalImagination

Global Cohorts, Deep Listening, and Regenerative Imagination

by | Jan 14, 2026 | ASKing the World, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Global Citizenship, Language, Pedagogy

As a lifelong learner, I’ve come to see leadership development less as the acquisition of tools and more as the ongoing refinement of how we orient ourselves to the world. This perspective was sharpened through completing the Global Leadership Diploma at the University for Peace (UPEACE), a United Nations–mandated institution that brings together learners and practitioners from across the globe.

What made the diploma distinctive was not simply the curriculum, but the way learning unfolded: in sustained collaboration with a globally diverse cohort. Participants came from different regions, sectors, and lived realities, and that diversity was not incidental. It was the medium of learning itself.

Working in a global cohort changes how knowledge is formed. Ideas are no longer universal by default; they are contextual, contested, and enriched through dialogue. This requires a different posture—one grounded in listening. In many professional cultures, leadership is associated with speaking early and often. In global spaces, those habits can reinforce existing power dynamics. The diploma consistently asked me to slow down, listen more carefully, and attend to whose voices enter the conversation easily and whose require more space.

Listening, here, is not a soft skill. It is a leadership discipline.

Another core dimension of the program was lexicon building. Across the five courses, we were introduced to—and asked to interrogate—shared language around global citizenship, regeneration, positive leadership, systems change, and social sector finance. This was not about adopting jargon. It was about sharpening meaning. Words like empathy, power, regeneration, impact, and sustainability took on greater precision as they were tested against diverse contexts and experiences.

Language matters because it shapes what we can imagine and what we can act upon.

This emphasis on imagination was paired with a strong focus on regeneration. Rather than framing leadership around sustaining existing systems, the diploma emphasized restoring capacity—within people, communities, and institutions. Regenerative thinking asks different questions: How do systems replenish rather than deplete? How do organizations align economic realities with human and ecological well-being? How do we design work so people can remain in it long enough for transformation to occur?

The final course, focused on finance in the social sector, brought these questions into sharp relief. Fundraising and budgeting were treated not as persuasion exercises, but as acts of clarity and integrity—grounded in honest storytelling about what the work requires and why. This reinforced a central insight: storytelling is not an add-on to leadership; it is how meaning travels across difference.

Across the diploma, three capacities emerged as essential for global leadership today:

  • Orientation: the ability to situate one’s work within interconnected global, social, and ecological systems.
  • Imagination: the capacity to envision alternatives beyond existing models and metrics.
  • Transformation: the willingness to change underlying assumptions, not just surface strategies.

Global cohorts provide a necessary space where these capacities can be practiced together. They allow lifelong learners to continue building their lexicon, refining their stories, and deepening their listening in community.

As our understanding of global challenges grows more complex, leadership development must move beyond isolated expertise toward collective learning across borders. Experiences like the UPEACE Global Leadership Diploma demonstrate that when diverse cohorts are given time, structure, and trust, they can cultivate the orientation, imagination, and regenerative thinking our shared future demands.

To read my course by course reflections, click below.

Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Social Change

Global Citizenship Education

Regenerative Leadership

Positive Leadership

Tackling Finance in the Social Sector

 

CAMINANTE, No Hay Camino

by | Dec 18, 2025 | ASKing the World, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Global Citizenship, Language, Pedagogy, The CAMINANTE Project

 

Caminante, no hay camino — se hace camino al andar.
Traveler, there is no road. The road is made by walking.

As I complete Tackling Finance in the Social Impact Sector, the fifth and final course in the UPEACE Global Leadership Diploma, I find myself returning again and again to this line from Antonio Machado. Not because the course was poetic in tone, but because its methodology revealed something deeply human about funding and social change: there is no universal map of philanthropy—only practice, clarity, relationship, and motion. The road is made by walking.

This course did something quietly radical. It took a process that often feels intimidating, opaque, or performative and made it simple—almost elegant. Fundraising was stripped of mystique. Instead of jargon or heroics, we were invited to do something far more grounded: tell the truth about our work. Name the problem clearly. Articulate the gap honestly. Build a budget rooted in reality rather than aspiration. Ask for what the work actually requires.

It felt like getting back to basics.

And yet, as I worked through the steps, a deeper discomfort surfaced—one I would be dishonest to ignore.

In the social sector, we often rely on a familiar vocabulary: innovation, scalability, impact metrics, sustainability. These words circulate endlessly, as if saying them enough times might produce a more just world. But beneath that language lies a quieter truth—one most practitioners know intimately and rarely say aloud:

If I had a living wage, I could do this work sustainably.

This is not a complaint. It is a structural observation. It is the foundation upon which all “impact” rests. It was the truth that shaped The CAMINANTE Project years ago, and it remains the truth shaping my work today with The Geographical Imaginations Expedition & Institute (The GIEI). Transformation requires practitioners who can remain in the work long enough for transformation to unfold.

The course clarified the how of fundraising. But it also sharpened my critique of the systems we are asked to fundraise within. Three tensions stand out.

First, scarcity is often treated as a measure of worth. In much of philanthropy, low overhead and minimal compensation are framed as moral discipline. But chronic under-resourcing does not build resilience—it erodes it. Austerity produces burnout, turnover, and fragility. Initiatives struggle to adapt, retain people, or weather complexity. Supporting the human capacity behind the work is not excess; it is foundational infrastructure.

Second, certainty is demanded in an uncertain world. Funding structures frequently ask practitioners to predict outcomes that cannot honestly be known in advance. Yet the most meaningful social change is emergent, relational, and iterative. Understanding develops through practice, not prediction. As Machado reminds us, al andar se hace camino—the path becomes visible only by walking it. When certainty is demanded too early, imagination narrows and learning is constrained.

Third, funding decisions are often distant from the lived realities of practice. Many are made far from classrooms, communities, and the daily tensions practitioners navigate. This distance tends to produce compliance rather than collaboration, reports instead of relationships, metrics instead of meaning. And yet, when funders engage with proximity, humility, and curiosity, something shifts. A shared language emerges. Trust deepens. The work becomes more honest—and more viable.

Actually, there is also a fourth tension I feel compelled to name.

There must exist hundreds—likely thousands—of thoughtful, rigorous, deeply ethical proposals that never receive real consideration, not because they lack merit, but because they seek to accomplish something that cannot yet be fully measured by our current metrics. Work that aims at shifts in mindset, meaning, belonging, imagination, or culture often fails to survive first-round filters. These proposals disappear quietly, not because they are weak, but because our tools for recognizing value remain incomplete.

This is not necessarily a failure of individual funders. It is a systemic limitation.

This reflection is my way of holding these tensions honestly. To do so even more, I chose a familiar form: a proposal. A one-page funding document. A hermit crab essay—a reflection written inside the very genre we are trained to master.

Sometimes the clearest way to reveal a system’s limits is to write from within its structure.

The hermit crab proposal linked here—What Does It Take to Fund Imagination?—is not a rejection of fundraising. It is an invitation to think more carefully about what we ask for, what we reward, and what we risk losing when we prioritize speed, certainty, and visibility over patience, trust, and the long play.

Because the road is made by walking.

With clarity and gratitude,
Kevin

What Does It Take to Fund Imagination?

by | Dec 17, 2025 | ASKing the World, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Global Citizenship, Mapping, Pedagogy, Potpourri, Public Geography, The CAMINANTE Project

Proposal: What Does It Take to Fund Imagination?

Applicant: A practitioner walking an unfinished road

Caminante, no hay camino — se hace camino al andar.
Traveler, there is no road. The road is made by walking.

1. Problem Statement 

Across the social impact landscape, there exist hundreds—likely thousands—of thoughtful, careful, deeply committed proposals that never receive serious consideration. Not because they lack merit, but because they aim to do work that is difficult to quantify with our current tools. They seek to shift mindsets, relationships, narratives, and cultures—the very conditions from which lasting transformation arises.

We operate within a funding ecosystem designed for projects rather than people, for predictable outputs rather than emergent learning, and for short-term proof rather than long-term transformation. In this ecosystem, imagination is praised rhetorically but rarely resourced materially.

We fund activities, but not the inner work that makes them meaningful.
We fund outputs, but not the worldview shifts that sustain change.
We fund what is visible, but overlook what is necessary.

As a result, practitioners are often asked to compress complex, relational, imaginative work into forms that favor certainty over curiosity and speed over depth. The work is reshaped to fit the metrics, rather than the metrics evolving to meet the work. Much is lost in this translation—especially proposals that seek to cultivate possibility rather than guarantee outcomes.

At the center of this problem lies a quiet truth that is widely shared but rarely spoken:

If practitioners had a living wage and long-term stability, much of this work could actually unfold.

2. Proposed Solution

This proposal is not for a single program or initiative. It is an invitation to rethink what we fund—and how.

If imagination is essential for navigating social, ecological, and cultural complexity, then imagination itself must be resourced. This requires funding approaches that behave less like transactions and more like companionship.

What this means in practice is support that offers:

  • Multi-year commitments that provide stability rather than perpetual precarity
  • Trust-based relationships grounded in shared learning
  • Space for emergence instead of predetermined certainty
  • Funding for practitioners, not only for deliverables
  • Accountability rooted in reflection and adaptation rather than prediction

When funding honors the slow, relational, meaning-making dimensions of change, practitioners are able to remain in the work long enough for transformation to take root. The result is not less rigor, but deeper integrity.

3. Project Activities

If imagination were taken seriously as a driver of transformation, the core “activities” might look different from what most proposals describe.

They might include time to think—still a radical act in a culture of constant productivity. Time to develop shared language for work that does not yet have a common vocabulary and/or lexicon. Slow cultivation of relationships with communities, not as pipelines or beneficiaries, but as collaborators in meaning-making.

They would include iterative prototyping that is allowed to be nonlinear and unfinished, sensemaking with peers navigating similar uncertainty, and reflection and storytelling treated as central practices rather than optional add-ons.

This is the work behind the work. It is often invisible, rarely funded, and yet indispensable for any change that hopes to last.

4. Budget Overview

A humane budget for imagination-centered practice acknowledges that imagination is labor.

Such a budget includes a living wage that allows a practitioner to remain in the work without chronic financial anxiety. It includes healthcare, stability, and protected time. It recognizes the contributions of collaborators and community partners through stipends rather than extraction.

It supports travel to the places where learning actually happens—not only to where the work is presented. It allocates resources for reflection, design iteration, and documentation. It protects time for reading, wandering, listening, and synthesis—the incubation periods from which insight emerges.

This logic has guided my work for years, including the development of The CAMINANTE Project: the recognition that sustainability for the practitioner is not indulgence. It is infrastructure.

5. Monitoring and Evaluation

Traditional monitoring and evaluation frameworks struggle to capture emergent, relational work. Yet imagination leaves traces, even if it cannot be reduced to a single metric.

Meaningful indicators include the quality and durability of relationships formed, shifts in language or framing within a community, changes in how people understand their agency, and early signs of cultural momentum. Practitioner sustainability—financial, emotional, relational—is itself a critical indicator.

Other signals may appear indirectly: unexpected invitations, new collaborations, stories that begin to circulate, experiments that open doors even when they “fail.”

Imagination cannot be neatly quantified, but it can be followed—like footprints across soft ground.

6. Expected Outcomes

If imagination were resourced with patience and trust, we would expect to see work with deeper ethical roots and longer lifespans. Practitioners would no longer need to contort their vision to fit short funding cycles. Funding ecosystems would begin to align more closely with human and ecological rhythms.

We would see cultural narratives shift slowly but perceptibly. We would see more proposals that do not promise certainty, but offer honesty. And we would see a growing number of CAMINANTES—walkers, seekers, wayfinders—creating paths that do not yet exist.

This is not idealism. It is simply what becomes possible when funding aligns with how transformation actually unfolds.

7. Vision Statement

A future in which those doing slow, relational, imaginative work are not surviving on the margins, but are supported with the time, trust, and stability their contributions require. A future in which imagination is recognized as essential civic infrastructure. A future built not through speed or spectacle, but through steadiness—through roads made by walking.

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Carrying Light Together

by | Dec 12, 2025 | Geographical Imaginations, Global Citizenship, Hagiography, Mapping, Potpourri, The CAMINANTE Project

St. Lucia Day has always felt like a soft interruption in December—a small lantern held up against the long night. But this year, I find myself thinking about the day not just as a celebration of light, but as an invitation to rethink the structures that shape the darkness.

The stories of Lucia are full of quiet defiance: choosing generosity over scarcity, service over status, courage over compliance. They aren’t just moral tales; they hint at the possibility that ordinary people can resist the logic of systems that normalize exhaustion, inequity, and the dimming of our collective imagination.

If anything, the world doesn’t lack light—it lacks the conditions that allow light to travel. We live within arrangements that reward speed, extraction, and individualism, while sidelining care, rest, and interdependence. Yet on December 13, this feast day quietly insists that illumination is not a solitary act. Lucia doesn’t walk alone; the procession follows. The light moves because many carry it.

I’m trying to sit with that truth: that the worlds we inhabit are neither inevitable nor fixed. They are constructed—often without our consent, but never beyond our ability to reshape. Celebrations like today remind me that imagining alternatives is not naïve; it’s necessary. The future is not something delivered to us from on high. It’s something we co-create, choice by choice, gesture by gesture.

So I’m marking St. Lucia Day with a kind of hopeful scrutiny. What are the systems that dim our capacity to care for each other? Where can we intervene with a small, steady light? And what happens when many of us decide that the light we carry is not for ornament, but for orientation—toward a world that honors dignity, gentleness, and shared responsibility?

And maybe there’s something grounding in marking this together, quietly, across time zones and borders. So on December 13, I invite you to light a candle at 9 p.m. local time (wherever you are)—not as a symbolic fix, not as a performance, but as a reminder that illumination grows in community. A reminder that even scattered across the globe, our small flames can echo one another.

Imagine what could be and act—however modestly—in alignment with that vision. Light does not banish the night, but it helps us walk together toward a dawn of our own making. That feels like a celebration worth returning to every year.

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