¡Buenas tardes amigos!
The sun is shining over Barcelona and I, for one, am coming to the end of a thrilling month, full of projects taking off, creative performances and exciting plans. As we close this month and look forward to the next, here are 5 social ideas, tips and talking points, all of which I’ve come across or re-discovered over the past fortnight. Please enjoy!
1. What I’m promoting: Phone Free February 2025 – Please excuse the repeat bullet here, but we are on the cusp of commencing this year’s edition of our global campaign to promote healthier smart phone use. Yesterday evening, we kicked things off with our pre-challenge drop-in call and on Saturday, it all begins! We’re also thrilled to be featured most recently by The Washington Post in an article that went live yesterday: ‘Try Phone Free February to reduce screen time and improve your health‘. Visit our website to sign up and start re-negotiating your relationship with your phone!
2. What I’m re-visiting: Recipes for Wellbeing – This fabulous collection of exercises, reflection guides and group activities has grown enormously over the past few years since I got to know the founder and started using them (not least their Build a Conscious Relationship with Your Phone recipe). This is a fabulous resource for all kinds of settings. Do explore!
3. What I’m updating: My Decision-Making Framework – One of my greatest challenges is to say ‘no’, meaning I often end up taking on too many projects and later wonder what on earth was going through my head! To counter this impulse to the affirmative, last year, I developed my first-ever decision-making framework, a simple yet effective checklist of questions to ask myself before saying ‘yes’. A quick run-down the list, giving each one a score of 0 or 1 and totalling it up gives me a non-scientific yet useful reference as to what my response should realmente be. Do you use an equivalent?
4. What I’m crowdsourcing: Mentorship and training programmes of refugees and asylum seekers – I get contacted from time to time for leads in mentorship programmes for people with lived experience of forced migration. Many of the programmes I used to know of have sadly shut up shop. As such, I’m looking to crowdsource any networks or offers that may be out there within this community. Get in touch if you know of anything in this field!
5. A new habit I’m cultivating – Slow Reading The News – After waking, showering and brewing a cup of tea, one of the first things I usually do is open up The Guardian‘s website. But like all such media platforms, they develop ever-more-ingenious ways to grab our attention: rolling news feeds, breaking news banners, tailored content etc. This year, I am practising a new habit: a Friday evening stroll to one of Barcelona’s magazine stores to pick up a weekly (I’ve been enjoying The Economist this month). I find the global spread, slower more reflective pace, non-digital format and depth of writing so very refreshing. And I find that it sates my urge to check for hour-by-hour updates on unfolding news stories. It’s lovely to be informed, but very few of us need to be constantly plugged in to world affairs: it’s so much nicer to leaf through all this Trumpian madness sat in the Saturday morning sun with a coffee and tostada!
📣 Opportunities from me and my network
🧡 Apply to join RBB Charity as a Treasurer (taking over from me!)
🤲 Help find a funder to fill a €34,000 funding gap for an amazing Samos human rights non-profit
🔥 Consulte este nuevo fondo de ayuda liderazgo en la sección de migración
📖 No olvide pedir su ejemplar de Restos de guerra, migración y amore por Taha Salim.
🎨 ¿Buscas arte fabuloso para regalar? Apoya a mi brillante amiga y artista Nadine aquí.
⭐️ ¿Conoces a alguien con espíritu crítico? Me encantaría nominarle para Aspen Rising Leaders.
💻 ¿Es hora de cambiar de página web? Elíjanos, el agencia sin ánimo de lucro por un mundo más sostenible y justo.
That’s it for this fortnight! As ever, please let me know your thoughts and feedback – and send anything you’d like me to include in upcoming editions this way.
