• Home
  • Personal
    • Personal Empowerment
    • Empowerment Workshop
    • Returning to My Mother's House
    • Rhythm of Compassion
    • The Open Road
    • Solace and Sanctuary
  • Professional
    • Professional Empowerment
    • Certification Program
      • Empowerment Life Coach
      • Empowerment Workshop Trainer
      • Empowerment Design and Facilitation
      • Practice of Empowerment in Organizations
      • Practice of Empowerment in Communities
      • Practice of Empowerment and Climate Change
    • Practice of Empowerment
    • Changing the Game
  • Organizational
    • Organizational Empowerment
  • Community
    • Community Empowerment
    • Low Carbon Diet
      • Cool Community Campaign
      • Cool Corporate Citizen
      • Cool Community Corps
      • Low Carbon Diet Coaching Program
      • Household CO2 Calculator
    • Green Living
      • Sustainable Lifestyle Campaign
      • Sustainable Lifestyle FAQs
      • Citizen Sustainability Assessment
    • Resilient Community
    • Livable Neighborhood
    • Water Stewardship
    • Children's Sustainable Lifestyle Program
    • Behavior Change Research
  • Societal
    • Societal Empowerment
    • Transformative Social Change
    • The Cool Block
    • IMAGINE Program
    • Peace on Earth
    • Reinventing the Planet
  • Books
    • Books
    • Audio Programs The Way of the Spritual Warrior
  • About
    • About Empowerment Institute
    • Global Action Plan
    • About David Gershon
    • About Gail Straub
    • Contact
  • 0

Master Class

Master Class in Behavior Change and Community Engagement

With David Gershon

The following 6-part audio program was recorded between September and December 2015 as part of the 100 Million Healthier Lives initiative. This link provides information on how to establish and facilitate a self led master class. community. Click here.

Here are links to the six master classes.

Program Description

The Master Class is based on David Gershon’s award-winning book Social Change 2.0: A Blueprint for Reinventing Our World which Fast Company magazine described as “a handbook every visionary must read…jam-packed with reality-tested tools and true life stories…rebuilding New York to make it disaster-resilient after 9/11 person-by-person and neighborhood-by-neighborhood, environmentally-friendly lifestyle change in cities across the US and around the world, the transformation of inner city neighborhoods from crime to safety—story after story, success after success—it blows preconceptions of what is possible right out of the water. David's decades of experience yield so many examples; the reader can’t help but see the efficacy of his approaches, which he documents for widespread application, warts and all…if you have a vision and want to know what it takes to turn it into reality, read this book.”

The Master Class provides you the opportunity to work with David as part of a community of change agents and learn how to apply the Social Change 2.0 methodology to an existing or new behavior change and community engagement initiative.

Who Should Attend?

  • People working in local government, community-based organizations and utilities responsible for behavior change and community engagement who wish to increase the efficacy of their current program or design a new one.
  • Local government policy-makers including mayors, city managers, city planners, city council members, county and special district chief executives and supervisors wishing to engage citizens in the development of a low carbon, disaster-resilient and sustainable community.
  • Social entrepreneurs, community foundation executives, corporate community outreach managers, high school and university educators, and faith leaders wishing to design or increase the efficacy of a community engagement program.

Expected Outcomes

  1. An upgrade of your existing education and outreach program or the creation of a new one.
  2. Competence in applying the Social Change 2.0 behavior change and community engagement methodology.
  3. Strategies and tools to enable transformative social change from the block to the neighborhood to the city level.

Class Format

This Master Class consists of (6) 2-hour online classes. Between classes you read two chapters from Social Change 2.0 and discuss questions based on these chapters with a partner. To help you deepen your learning and further your project you are invited to participate in an online discussion forum with other participants.

In each class David elucidates key ideas from the assigned chapters and then applies them in an in-depth coaching session with several course participants around their behavior change and community engagement projects. These coaching sessions serve as vicarious learning opportunities for other participants facing similar issues. Further, there is an experiential exercise where you have a chance to speak with other class members to exchange ideas about your project and provide one another support. Throughout the class there is plenty of time to ask questions. The online web forum provides yet another chance to ask David questions and benefit from the collective wisdom of this learning community. This is particularly helpful as you begin applying the strategies and tools learned in the class.

What to Expect

  1. This is an experiential learning journey, which means learning by doing. The learning comes from applying these hands-on strategies and tools to your unique community opportunities and constraints and getting support as you do this. It is an application of the 20/80 learning rule, which states 20% of learning comes from class time and 80% as you attempt to apply what you have learned. It also is about participation in a learning community in which everyone is encouraged to share their needs, challenges and best practices and serve as resources to one another.
  2. Over the past 30 years that David has been traversing this path he has learned many important lessons about what works and what doesn’t in designing and implementing behavior change and community engagement initiatives. He will be sharing those lessons learned, the templates to replicate this learning, the social learning process that enables this knowledge to continually be acquired (he started only with questions and not much else) and the current learning process he is embarked upon to take this knowledge to the next level of social impact and scale.
  3. The journey will also include an exploration of the next set of questions we need to be asking and capabilities we need to be developing to build communities that can thrive in the carbon-constrained and disaster-prone world of climate change. To answer these questions we will draw upon the collective experience and wisdom of everyone participating in the class to create together these “next practices” in carbon reduction and disaster-resiliency.

About David Gershon

David Gershon, co-founder and CEO of Empowerment Institute, is one of the world’s foremost authorities on behavior-change, community engagement and large-system transformation. He applies this expertise to issues requiring community, organizational, and societal change. His clients include cities, government agencies, large organizations, and social entrepreneurs.

He has addressed a wide diversity of issues facing cities ranging from empowering citizens to adopt low carbon and resource-efficient lifestyles, to helping a wide diversity of neighborhoods become more resilient and livable, to designing whole system solutions that align the interests of the private, public and civic sectors with the creation of an environmentally, economically and socially sustainable community. Over the past thirty years the empowerment programs David has designed have won many awards, and a major research study described them as “unsurpassed in changing behavior.”

David used this empowerment proficiency to organize at the height of the cold war, in partnership with the United Nations Children’s Fund and ABC Television, one of the planet’s first major global consciousness-raising initiatives—the First Earth Run. Building on his background as the Director of the Lake Placid Olympic Torch Relay, he used the mythic power of relaying a torch of peace around the world to engage the participation of twenty-five million people in sixty-two countries, the world’s political leadership and, through the media, an estimated 20 percent of the planet’s population in an act of global unity. Millions of dollars were also raised as part of this event to help UNICEF provide care for the neediest children of the world.

David is the author of eleven books, including the award-winningSocial Change 2.0: A Blueprint for Reinventing Our World, and the best-sellingLow Carbon Diet: A 30 Day Program to Lose 5,000 Poundsthat is being used by over 300 cities in six countries. He co-directs Empowerment Institute’s School for Transformative Social Change which empowers change agents from around the world to design and implement cutting edge social innovations. He has lectured at Harvard, MIT, and Johns Hopkins and served as an advisor to the Clinton White House and the United Nations on behavior change and sustainability.

Praise for Social Change 2.0 and David Gershon

“David Gershon, a daring social architect, is what an engineer is to a bridge builder. In Social Change 2.0, David puts forth with clarity, brilliance, innovation, and passion a blueprint for sustainable societal transformation. It is a practical, inspirational, and ethical guide to initiate, maintain, and/or reignite the soul of any social movement. This book is an outstanding addition to the world.” – Brian K. Gibbs, Ph.D., Associate Dean for Diversity and Cultural Competence, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

“Social Change 2.0is a practical and inspiring roadmap to the future we all know is possible. I know of no one more experienced to create such a roadmap than David Gershon, who has spent the past three decades empowering individuals and communities, as well as business and government leaders. I have looked forward to this book for some time to gain a deeper understanding of how David has initiated so much positive change and created so many innovative strategies to help people achieve their visions for a better world.”– Hazel Henderson, author of "Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy and Building a Win-Win World"

“Social Change 2.0 exhilarates. David Gershon has not just laid out a compelling and coherent blueprint for social change, but the vividly written stories he shares make us realize that what we thought was impossible can actually be achieved. Having been a political leader in Portland for twenty years, where I worked closely with David, I saw firsthand the power of his work to change the lives of thousands of people. He may well be the number one expert on social change in our country.”– Mike Lindberg, former Commissioner of Public Utilities and city council member, City of Portland, Oregon

“As humanity faces one of the greatest transitions on which it has ever embarked, David’s book brings the wisdom, inspiration, and tools to enable every one of us to become effective agents of change. Social Change 2.0 is a great book!”– Sarah Severn, Director of Horizons and Mobilization, Nike, Inc.

“Take a deep dive into the future with David Gershon—but, public health warning, you’re likely to emerge transformed. Social Change 2.0 is for those (including the world’s growing number of social and environmental entrepreneurs) intent on rewriting the current rules on our planet in favor of win-win-win outcomes for all.”– John Elkington, co-author of "The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World," and Co-Founder, SustainAbility

“David is a brilliant social architect who is able to see key patterns and principles between levels of change—from the individual, to the household, to the neighborhood, to the community, to cities, to states and nations, and to the entire planet. His knowledge about the process of social innovation and diffusion and his discoveries over decades of experimentation and research in large system change efforts merit serious consideration by all of us who seek a more hopeful future for our human community. His work illuminates our common yearning for connection with others, and provides the practical tools needed to achieve it at every level necessary to invent our world anew. I loved the way this book stimulated my thinking and spirit.”– Juanita Brown, Co-Founder, The World Café

“I met David twenty years ago when he was the inspiration behind the Global Action Plan sustainable lifestyle movement. With Social Change 2.0 he demonstrates that he has lost none of his brilliance in the intervening years. I predict that this book will become the defining resource for those wishing to create sustainable, low carbon communities, and social change in general. It is a must-read for helping us traverse the challenging times ahead.”– Lawrence C. Bloom, Chairman, World Economic Forum, Global Agenda Council on Urban Management

“Governments have limitations in leading complex social change, and increasingly progressive leaders are recognizing that such challenges can only be effectively addressed through the innovation and passion of grassroots people power. In Social Change 2.0, David Gershon offers us a way to draw on this power to make a difference in the saving of our planet. In doing so he argues for nothing less than a reinvention of the way we think, value, and do things. It’s a big ask and it’s not going to happen overnight—but Gershon offers us a compelling blueprint and a doer’s toolbox of social marketing strategies and empowerment tools, which, if used by enough communities, might just get us there. Simply, he helps make our global future something we can act on.”– John Cole PH.D, Professor and Director, Centre for Sustainable Business and Development, the University of Southern Queensland, Australia, and formerly Chief Officer, Office of Clean Energy, Queensland Government

"I have no doubt that when earnestly applied, the lessons learned from David's inspiring book,Social Change 2.0, will prove at least as effective in today's complex and interdependent world as Saul Alinsky's social change version 1.0--Rules for Radicals--did half a century ago in much different circumstances. Social Change 2.0, because it carries us beyond today's gridlock and dominance by special interests toward a co-creative new era of operationalized hope could justifiably be re-titled Democracy 2.0.”

– Gordon Dveirin, Ed.D, co-author of Saying Yes to Change

copyright © 2015 Empowerment Institute Scroll to Top