trillions · 4 trillions december 2016 trillions is the official publication of the north america...

trillionsVol. 1 Issue 9 December 2016 www.Trillions.biz

The official publication of the North America Procurement Council

Rachel Chanel Adams

Donna Gallup

Debrena Jackson Gandy

PEOPLE WHO CARE TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE

2 Trillions December 2016

In this Issue

05 Blending Entrepreneurship with Human Rights Activism

09 Caravan of Mothers Search for their Children Missing in Mexico

10 Finding Hope Amidst Despair

13 Building New Homes for America's Homeless Veterans

17 Power From Poop

19 First Nations Take On a New Role in Renewable Energy

23 A Guide For Developing a Successful Leadership Development Program

30 CIA Director Warns Trump Against Using Torture

31 China Becomes First Country With Over 1 Million Patent Applications in One Year

32 Decoding Love's Lies and the Challenge of Modern Relationships

38 Air Pollution May Be a Major Factor In Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Transmission

40 FDA Stops Glyphosate Residue Testing

Trillions is published monthly by the North America Procurement Council, Inc. PBC, a public benefit corporationPO Box 40445, Grand Junction, CO 81504 * TEL 302-450-1923 * www.NAPC.pro

Copyright © 2016 All Rights Reserved

3Trillions December 2016

After the shocking results of the U.S. Presiden-tial election in November and the fact that some-one who was not elected by the people will soon rule (instead of serve) the country, we thought that it would be best to focus on something pos-itive for this issue. Many of us need to be remind-ed that the world is full of good, compassionate and intelligent people who are busy working to create positive change, so we interviewed some of them.

Coping with the emotional reactions to the cur-rent and probable future state of the world is something many struggle with and in this issue we explore some ways to not be overwhelmed by negative emotions and find hope.

Technological progress offers real promise for creating a more sustainable civilization, so we are also including some articles on promising new technology.

In our January issue we will profile Mr. Donald Trump in greater depth than in our previous is-sue and will explore how his administration might impact the U.S. and world.

While Mr. Trump may be a sociopath suffering from a severe case of Narcisstic Personality Dis-order (NPD) and may not be able to tell when he is lying, his emotional need for approval could possibly compel him to use his power to make some things better.

Trump is a unique individual with a complex his-tory and mentality and he will have more power than any President before him. Will he become America's Mussolini, Hitler or Putin? Should we try to stop him before he destroys the country, or give him a chance? Could Trump be the force that compels revolution, civil war or evolution?

Tim Loncarich, publisher

From the Publisher

Image: PHOTOCREO Michal Bednarek / shutterstock.com


Trillions is the official publication of the North America Procurement Council (NAPC), a Colorado Public Benefit Corporation whose primary mission is to make government procurement open-access and transparent in order to provide more opportunities to more companies, reduce costs to taxpayers, stimulate the North American economy and reduce corruption.

Each year we provide more than 700,000 business opportunities to more than 2 million businesses through more than 110 web sites. The estimated contract value of these business opportunities is more than $2 trillion.

Ownership of AmericasBiz.net, CanadasBiz.net and each of the state portals has been given to the people. For a list of portals visit www.napc.pro/portals

In addition to providing free business opportunities and a public procurement solution, we also publish business, political and environmental news and provide free classified business ads.

The NAPC is member supported. To explore the many benefits of membership please visit www.NAPC.pro or call us at 302-450-1923. Together, we can make a difference.

North America Procurement Council

NAPC

http://www.NAPC.pro


Rachel Chanel Adams is an unusual blend of brilliant entrepreneur and human-rights activist.

She is an executive with Complex Entertainment, a company that brings brands and customers together through carefully crafted experiences.

In parallel, she has also created a path of giving back to those she comes in contact with throughout the world. She began that formally while at the Universi-ty of Houston, doing work on behalf of the university to help students stay in school, volunteering with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and assisting with the Center for American Progress. She has also taken on an import-ant leadership role with a unique school in Peru that brings education and a true sense of inclusion to chil-dren with disabilities in rural areas. And she is also on the board of a successful nonprofit that is making a major difference in the rate of teenage pregnancies in the greater Los Angeles area.

We spoke with Ms. Adams on October 18, 2016.

Trillions: Before we get into some of your giving back to the community, it would help to understand a lit-tle about your company, Complex Entertainment: the business, what it is and how it works.

Rachel Chanel Adams: I’m an executive at Complex Entertainment. We’re focused on corporate events, sponsorships, concerts. We also do management.

The main objective of Complex Entertainment is to

be the connecting piece between businesses and their targeted consumers through events, particular-ly experiential events. So a client, being a brand, will contact us needing an event that will get a new cli-ent or new type of consumer. And we’ll put on these events around the world to ensure that they connect with their client in a way that’s memorable and spe-cial, so that the customer will be able to touch, taste, feel the memories connected with the brand that they wouldn’t have through purchasing the actual product.

Trillions: In terms of types of events, you cover things like the rather-involved South by Southwest confer-ence, and then you mentioned MTV Europe Music Awards. How do you work with those types of groups, and what do you do for them?

Rachel Chanel Adams: We produce the events for South by Southwest, and we also obtain sponsorship for those events. We deal with MTV Europe Music Awards [and] Halifax Pop Explosion in Nova Scotia, Canada, in which we procure sponsorship for the ac-tual festival and events.

Trillions: So it’s basically a coordinating approach, as well as I’m sure you suggest a lot of these connec-tions. And, of course, they build on each other over time. You begin to gain more contacts.

Rachel Chanel Adams: Exactly.

Trillions: And then Complex Entertainment becomes more complex.

Blending Entrepreneurship with Human Rights Activism

An Interview with Rachel Chanel Adams


Rachel Chanel Adams: It definitely does. We also work with product placement. Any way we can connect the brand to a consumer through entertainment, that’s what we do.

Trillions: At a relatively early part of your career, it sounds like you’ve made a big dent in this kind of busi-ness. How did you get involved in this?

Rachel Chanel Adams: I went to college [to study] con-sumer science and fashion merchandise. I did some interning in the fashion industry, and that wasn’t nec-essarily for me. My brother, Anthony “A” Cole, has been in the entertainment industry for about 15 years. He had been working with music, and so it came to the point he was asking me to do some of the things for his businesses. So I started working with him in the music industry, in smaller concerts throughout the southwest, and with the management that he was doing. From there, we went on to establish Complex Entertainment. That’s how that got started.

Complex Entertainment got started in Houston, Tex-as, and we expanded to open the second office in Los Angeles.

Trillions: Now, you also followed a parallel path, where you really became engaged and involved with the world in a very different way: one where you were try-ing to make a personal difference in people’s lives. How did that get started?

Rachel Chanel Adams: I’ve always been interested in helping others, even as a small child. I didn’t then know what that meant, what it looked like and how you can take that and be impactful throughout the world.

When I got to college, I was mentored by some great people. One was Dr. Elwyn C. Lee, Vice President of the University of Houston, which is my alma mater. He and another woman named Robbie Evans mentored students, at least hundreds that I saw as a student and as an employee of the university. Hundreds of students – hands-on, one-to-one types of mentorship. That was not required; it didn’t fill a quota for the uni-versity or anything like that. It was just a personal outreach that they did. That was remarkable to see, in the success and the impact that it had on different students’ lives.

That was a big part in my giving back to the commu-nity. I started off with the NAACP at the university and was the publicity chairperson. That was my first real role in being effective in change. From there I became [involved] in activism through the Center for American Progress. I traveled to D.C. to protest and rally against doubling the student loan interest rate, and that was successful.

Then I went on to work with President Obama’s initia-

tive called Organizing for Action. It used to be called Organizing for America. I worked with that in the Hous-ton chapter, working for women’s issues, voter rights and that type of thing.

It just kind of snowballed into a larger calling to get-ting involved with different organizations. I’m working with organizations with a business perspective. [I’m] making sure I can help them, making sure their busi-ness structure is updated, effective in the means they need.

Trillions: When you were at the University of Houston, it sounds like after graduation you went to work for them, working on some very specific things connect-ed with retention, keeping students engaged with the school. Tell us a little about how that worked and what you ended up being able to accomplish there.

Rachel Chanel Adams: I worked there under the lead-ership of Robbie Evans when she headed the pro-gram. The focus was to ensure the retention rate of students who received Federal Pell Grants. They were identified as students from low-income backgrounds. We provided a holistic approach of different services, to make sure that students got engaged and gradu-ated. We offered tutoring, we offered jobs, we offered mentorship [and] career counseling. We monitored students’ grades through a grade verification process.

These were things that parents would typically do with their students, but in a lot of cases students don’t have that guidance through college. Especially [with] first-generation college students in which parents haven’t experienced what college is. They don’t have that guidance from their family; they don’t have that support system. So we’re making sure that we’re that support system for those students and that we can give as much expertise in stability for them to pursue their academic goals.

The student retention rate in the U.S., especially around that time, in 2013 and before then, was about 50%. Our program had about a 98%, 99% retention rate. We were really proud.

Trillions: Over what period did it take to make that big a difference?

Rachel Chanel Adams: The program was around for about 20 years. I was involved for about eight. When I came in, she already had that retention rate. It’s not something that I established. She was available around 24 hours a day for those students’ needs.

I did the same thing. Just being there, being available, advocating for them when they had issues in other de-partments. Especially when it’s coming down to com-municating with federal financial aid, federal funding, communicating with them effectively. [That] was a


major issue, and students didn’t understand that sys-tem. We coached them. We helped them with their pe-titions and letters and things like that so they could understand how to communicate [their] needs in the right way that would get the attention of those who can actually help you.

Trillions: You make a very good point that, especially with people dealing with the Pell Grants, they’re not financially that well-off. And so it’s very likely that the parents have never been to college and they don’t know how to navigate the whole process. You can be their advocate and help the students make it happen where the parents may not have all the knowledge they need to do that. Which is tremendous.

Rachel Chanel Adams: I’m still actively involved in a lot of those students’ lives and helping them, guiding them with their career. A lot of them still reach out to me for career advice and advice about many other ar-eas of their life and in higher education as they’re pur-suing their master’s and doctoral degrees. I still speak to about 20 different students on a consistent basis in guiding them through their careers – and the rest of their lives.

Trillions: That’s also part of the giving part of you that continues. You can see those people being successful and then passing on what they’ve been doing. It is one of those things people forget, that you’re not just help-ing the people that you touch directly. You’re helping the people that they touch.

Rachel Chanel Adams: Exactly.

Trillions: Another thing that you’re involved with is Asociación Sol y Luna, in Peru. Please tell us about that.

Rachel Chanel Adams: I’m the senior advisor for their association.

The association was just a hotel, Sol y Luna, at first. It was just a lodging area. The administrators of the hotel – and Petit Miribel in particular – saw the need in the area to expand resources out, because the area was really rural. The hotel and resort is really lavish and nice. She saw the disconnect between the tour-ists and the people who lived there. And she wanted to build that bridge, to funnel the guests of the hotel to get more involved in the community and give back to the area.

So she started the Asociación. It gave back to the schools and the community centers, group homes and other entities. Through that Asociación, it led her to start the school. The school is the only school in the province that accepts students with disabilities.

The tone with students with disabilities in the area was one that was disturbing. I think it’s [more] from a lack of education than a social perspective or a social comment, because when we go into the community and we go in with the students, [things turn out very different]. For instance, they had an annual event for the entire community. And we were the only group, the only school that had students with disabilities in the annual parade. Everyone was receptive and excited about that, but I think it’s something they just hadn’t seen before. So, a big mission for the school is to ed-ucate the community well, in making sure that they integrate students with disabilities into the schools in the area. It’s more about inclusion. And I think they have to be educated about inclusion.

Trillions: I understand. Many places that are dealing with persons with disabilities treat them like the spe-cial case, the case that’s separate and unequal as op-


posed to integrated. And you’re having them be just part of everything.

Rachel Chanel Adams: Exactly. They’re a part of every aspect of the school – and now the entire community.

Trillions: And in some ways somewhat like an earlier time, when racial integration was dealing with issues like this. Where both races were there but one race was in one area and a different race was in anoth-er area. Or even if you were in the same school, you weren’t exactly hanging out together, participating to-gether, being part of things together. And the persons with disabilities are in some ways like the forgotten additional group to include, which we don’t do very well with even in the developed countries. And this is a third world country that you’ve been talking about.

Rachel Chanel Adams: Yes. That’s very true.

Trillions: And this was arranged through the hotel, which set up some of the initial leadership and orga-nizing for it?

Rachel Chanel Adams: Yes. The hotel and the Asoci-ación are separate entities. The Asociación grew out of the hotel, and from the Asociación grew the school. So, it’s really the hotel that saw the opportunity to have an outreach initiative for the surrounding area. And it just massively grew. The school now takes about 200 students.

This is a high-class education that would be consid-ered like private school here [in the United States]. They provide 100% scholarships to the students with disabilities, to make sure that they are able to be fed, and even assist with getting them clothing, diapers – any type of resources they may need to be successful at the school – so they won’t feel separate or segre-gated from the other students.

Trillions: And another thing that you’re involved with more locally is Girls PACT, in the Los Angeles area. Can you share some of what that important organization is about and how you’re involved there?

Rachel Chanel Adams: I’m on the board of Girls PACT, which is a nonprofit that aims to combat teenage pregnancies through the power of self-values and self-worth. The target ages for the girls that are part of Girls PACT is from 16 to 24.

We’re doing a new initiative [right now]. We’re training the girls to be able to administrate their own version of Girls PACT. So, when they graduate from high school and go on to college, they can start a Girls PACT group there or even start it at their high school as well. So we want to give them the tools so they know how to lead in business [and run the organization successfully].

We have other initiatives as well, such as mini-schol-arships that we give out on a rotating annual basis. We do mentorship. We have social events. The main thing is to keep the girls engaged – engaged in the community and actively engaged and aware in their life choices.

One of the number one things that are attributed to unplanned teenage pregnancies is low self-esteem. We’re just making sure we’re there for the girls, a sounding board for them, [with] a home away from home in which we can be their support system.

Trillions: How much has changed because of all Girls PACT has done?

Rachel Chanel Adams: On a national scale, one out of four girls will get pregnant by the age of 20. And out of that, one out of four girls, one out of five, will have a second child while they’re still in high school. We haven’t had any cases. Girls PACT has been 100% suc-cessful with its girls.

Other similar types of programs [and Girls PACT] work to this goal of decreasing the teenage pregnancy rate here in America. And within the last decade particu-larly, young girls of color have seen a significant de-crease. I think 41% among black Americans was the decrease among teen births [nationwide].

The program was needed. It’s essentially to that sta-tistic. There’s still a lot more that we need to do, but that’s why Girls PACT is here in L.A.

Trillions: If people are interested in getting involved in some of the things that you’re talking about, either with funding or volunteering themselves, how would people connect with those opportunities?

Rachel Chanel Adams: For Girls PACT, go to http://www.girlspact.org. You can [also] communicate with the founder, Michelle Shegda. Her email is [email protected]. It’s very simple. You can contact her about volunteering, how to get the program in your school. You can ask about how to get your guy or girl – it’s called Girls PACT, but we also take guys – in-volved in the organization. There are so many ways to get involved in Girls PACT in L.A.

In the Asociación as well, you can go to their Face-book page. I know they’re doing a lot of crowdfunding right now, to continue to provide the scholarships that are provided to the children. So that’s a major initiative for them. I’ve seen it firsthand. It’s such an amazing thing to see, where those students have come from and how much they’ve grown, in their academics and even in their physical and mental capabilities. It’s re-markable. It’s really worth looking into.

http://www.girlspact.org/

http://www.girlspact.org/

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]


The 12th Caravan of Mothers of Missing Migrants ar-rived in Mexico City recently to lobby the Mexican fed-eral government for help in finding the missing mem-bers of their families.

Tens of thousands of Central American migrants have vanished while attempting to cross Mexico to reach the United States. Many are the victims of Mexico's notoriously corrupt police and the vile drug lords they work for.

After more than a century of predatory American for-eign policies have rendered Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador essentially failed states mired in violence and corruption, many Central Americans feel that they have no choice but to become refugees and seek a life in the North. An estimated 400,000 Central American migrants have taken the trek north from their home countries to avoid the hopelessness, grinding poverty and extreme violence.

The fact that this march has reached the stage of be-ing the 12th of its kind is a measure of how sad the truth of the case is. As the refugees travel through Mexico, many are kidnapped, raped, killed, or thrown in jail with no due process. The bodies of many of them continue to be discovered in mass graves.

The abuses are encouraged by the U.S. government to reduce the flow of illegal migrants reaching the U.S. border. A better method to stem the flow would be to stop suppressing democracy in Central America.

This year’s Caravan started on November 10 in Guate-mala, with a march growing stronger as they headed north. Together, the group has been “looking for life on the roads of death”, traveling thousands of miles as they hope to find missing family members.

The Caravan this year is also dedicated to the mem-ory of Honduran environmentalist Berta Cáceres, an activist who was murdered in March 2016 by the U.S. backed Honduran narco-government.

During the visit to Mexico City, the members of the Caravan will be appealing to the federal government to stop the forced disappearances and find and re-lease those still alive in Mexican prisons. The group also will be meeting with like-minded migrant solidari-ty and community groups at the same time.

To better communicate the issue and raise aware-ness they has been showing their new documentary describing their cause, “A Mi No Va A Pasar” (“It’s Not Going to Happen to Me”).

The success rate they have achieved so far has been better than many might have expected, with the group already having located some 265 missing family members. But more help is needed and more action by government and police agencies must be taken.

The 12th Caravan of Mothers of Missing Migrants will soon continue its march northwards, eventually reach-ing the U.S.-Mexico border. The Caravan concludes this year’s march on December 3.

Caravan of Mothers Search for Their Children Missing in Mexico

Central American refugees headed north to escape the consequences of U.S. foreign policy. Image: © Peter Haden

https://www.flickr.com/photos/peterhaden/


By Tim Loncarich

In case you hadn't noticed, the future for life on our planet is seriously bleak. We have already lost more than half of our planet's wildlife and very soon two thirds will be gone. Earth is currently experiencing its sixth and most rapid mass extinction ever.

Even if you listen to right-wing talk radio and Exxon-Mobil's propaganda, runaway climate change really is upon us and there is nothing we can do to stop it. While human emissions of greenhouse gases have peaked and may decline soon, the levels of C02 contin-ue to climb because we have compromised the Earth's ability to absorb carbon and the feedback loops have pushed it into a self-destruct mode. The Arctic is al-ready spewing out massive amounts of CO2 and methane that will dwarf all human emissions.

In the U.S., a con-artist named Donald Trump has seized power with our help and he has promised to end any efforts to reduce carbon emissions and take the money intended for climate adaptation and miti-gation in poor countries and give it to rich and power-ful fossil fuel companies to "make the oil and coal in-dustries great again". He promises also to end funding for the American climate science the rest of the world depends on and to end environmental protections.

At a time when we most need wise and bold leaders to challenge the Oligarchs and restore power to the people, we are getting the opposite.

The prospect that most life on Earth, including us, will be gone in the not too distant future is becoming more real as each day passes.

Biologist and Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University, Guy McPherson, claims that humanity has less than 10 years left and that instead of con-templating suicide or fighting the fate we have creat-ed for ourselves, we should try to make the time we have left matter. “It’s locked down, it’s been locked in for a long time – we’re in the midst of our sixth mass extinction,” McPherson says. His perspective is being echoed by increasing numbers of scientists, although most won't say so publicly.

The logical emotional response to these circumstanc-es is to feel rage, grief, sorrow and despair.

How do we cope with the emotional reality that we have caused such mass destruction? How do we feel about condemning our children to a hellish future?

Some of us may contemplate suicide while others are buying survival condos. A few others want to fight and are considering revolution but don't know who to shoot or what to blow up.

Finding Hope

Amidst Despair

Image: pimchawee / shutterstock.com


However, most Americans are too busy texting, updat-ing their Facebook page and paying bills to even notice that much is wrong. They have faith that things will continue just as they have in recent memory. As long as Wal-Mart is open 24 hours, everything must be OK, right?

And there are many of us who know what is going on and what is coming yet choose to remain delusional and pretend that everything will turn out OK. After all, if you can't do anything about it, why even think about it?

If enough of us woke up to reality and took action, per-haps we could turn it around in time. We could plant billions of trees and instead of spending a trillion dol-lars a year on the war industry we could develop the technology to save our planet. But, we won't. We were all told about climate change almost 30 years ago and haven't done much since to stop manufacturing our own demise. Carbon emissions may have peaked but deforestation continues.

Homo sapiens is not a very intelligent species. We are collectively clever but too many of us are really stupid as individuals and are more than willing to remain ig-norant, believe things we know deep down aren't true and obey the rabid authority figures we put in power.

The evil elite (Sinisteri), who are partially responsible for creating the destruction of our planet, already have their underground cities, highly advanced technology and secret space program. They aren't worried, they will survive. The rest of us aren't meant to.

Some of the more powerful Sinisteri call us "grasshop-pers before winter". But are we really so doomed?

Life has evolved on Earth for billions of years, yet it is only in the last 200,000 that humans have existed and it is only in the last 100 years that we have evolved so rapidly. We have come so far in such a short time that surely many of us can and should survive.

I have faith in humanity and am not willing to give up. Our planet has experienced numerous mass extinc-tions in the past and life has always bounced back, given enough time.

This time we have the means to survive and someday restore the Earth. We can build seed banks and DNA repositories and knowledge libraries. We can live for awhile underground in ways that can become a mod-el for a sustainable civilization. Our children will learn how to live without killing their planet.

About 9,200 years ago a series of large meteors wiped out much of the life on Earth, ended the last Ice Age and caused the great floods that affected most parts of the planet. The people who survived had to live for awhile in places like the underground city at Derinkuyu, Turkey, which is believed to have housed up to 20,000 people.

So, great news! You don't have to save up the money for a one-way ticket to possibly live in a small pod on inhospitable Mars. You can stay on Earth and have a vastly greater chance of survival.

Humanity has the technology to survive for extended periods underground or in super-insulated habitats on the surface, right here on Earth. We can grow food, pro-duce oxygen, recycle our CO2 and waste and produce energy in various non-carbon and sustainable ways.

We can all work together to ensure our survival and the survival of key plants and animals. Not all will be lost. So there is reason for hope. There is something to look forward to.

Classroom in Turkey's Derinkuyu underground city, circa 7,000-8,000 BC. (credit: Martijn Munneke)


The first step to our future survival is to not give in to despair. You can easily learn EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) to help manage those pesky negative emo-tions and empower your focus on surviving the future. To start managing your emotions check out the docu-mentary "The Tapping Solution", or visit the founder of EFT's web site at http://www.emofree.com. There are numerous EFT videos on YouTube.

Another important step is to shift your focus from what you don't want to what you do want. Visualize the world the way you would like it to be and let your-self feel good about it and let that be your emotion-al anchor. Our thoughts really do have power and the more we think about what we want the closer we will move toward it and the easier it is for others to share that vision and manifest that reality.

I find that it also helps me to realize that this reality is just one part of our existence. I know that I have a soul and that it survives beyond this experience. What we take from this world is our experiences, relation-ships, what we have learned and the compassion and strength we have gained. Make your time here count.

It is important to find other aware people who want to survive and work together with them to develop a plan to create a new sustainable culture right here on Earth right now. Maybe we can't fix what is wrong but we can certainly build what is right.

If you can't find such people then join us as we work to develop sustainable survivable habitats in various parts of the world.

We recently caught up with musician Lia Rose and discussed this issue with her. Following is the conver-sation:

Trillions: With the expansion of consciousness comes greater awareness of reality and the dire future that life on Earth faces, and then comes the emotional re-sponse to that reality. How do you cope with the emo-tional response and continue to produce such beau-tiful music from the heart when that heart must be hurting?

Lia Rose: I let all the emotions in and then I let them all out. I constantly find and maintain balance. I choose balance. Yes, there is plenty to fight against right now. Sometimes I just want to kick and scream and cry. Sometimes I do. And at the same time, there is so much to fight *for* right now. And there are so many incredible humans standing up for justice right now. More people than I’ve ever seen in my lifetime who are

willing to take a stand for human rights, racial justice, environmental justice…

When my heart hurts, I allow that to connect me to all the other humans out there who are suffering. I feel the pain and I become more compassionate, more connected to what being a human really is. It helps me to find an even stronger resolve deep within. To. Never. Give. Up.

We are all in this together.

Trillions: You recently had a few gigs in Argentina. What was that trip like?

Lia Rose: Ah yes! I loved the Argentina trip so much! It was my first time in South America and I made so many new friends. I was very lucky to be invited to perform at the Open Folk Music Festival where I was surrounded by wonderful humans who all have a common love of folk music. I felt right at home, even though I was thousands of miles away.

In my opinion, people are overwhelmingly *good*. And people want to connect with each other, share experiences, share the love. That’s what I see when I go out into the world. There’s a longing for connection and meaningful exchange. Music is one way to bring people together - I have witnessed some of the most beautiful connections of my life at music events.

Trillions: Any advice for people who are having a hard time connecting with hope at the moment?

This is a tough one. It really is. I can’t and I won’t try to diminish the very real feelings of despair that so many people are going through right now. What I can say is that I believe the hope is there inside each of us - even if it is difficult to connect to sometimes. I believe it is there, shining - even if dimly - and that we each have the power to feed it with the fuel that will allow it to grow ever stronger.

I love what Mr. Rogers’ mother always told him in tough times, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping”. I would add to that -- *be* the helper. Whenever and wherever you can. Be the helper.

Be the change.

http://www.trillions.biz/articles/128213-Welcome-to-the-Next-Generation-of-Business-Psychology.html

http://www.trillions.biz/articles/128213-Welcome-to-the-Next-Generation-of-Business-Psychology.html

http://www.thetappingsolution.com/

http://www.emofree.com

http://www.liarose.com/


BUILDING NEW HOMES FOR AMERICA'S HOMELESS VETERANS

An Interview with Donna Gallup, CEOAmerican Family Housing


Imagine that up until only a year ago you were a home-less veteran, ignored, abandoned and huddled together with others just trying to survive living on the street. It is an existence no human being should ever have to experience, least of all those who have already given so much in the service of their country.

Now imagine it is early December 2016. You are that same homeless veteran, but this time you are in what is known as bridge housing, a cramped and crowded place where they put you before you are on your way to your next place to live. This time, however, your next place is a housing development like no other in all of the United States. It is a modern development with homes built over a hundred times stronger than building codes, energy efficient and with externals that will survive whatever weather comes their way for 100 years to come. And it is a community where you can once again begin to put your life back together. This community is not a fairy tale. It is Potter’s Lane in Orange County’s Midway City. And it’s there because of the imagination and drive of one individual and the support of countless others. Who is that one individual? Donna Gallup, the Chief Ex-ecutive Officer of American Family Housing, a nonprof-it organization that provides emergency, transitional and permanent housing for those in need. The com-pany has been helping out in this way for decades, but this latest innovation – which involves recycling ship-ping containers from local ports and converting them into beautiful and cost-effective low-income housing – looks to be one of those breakthroughs that could change the way such housing needs are met in many areas around the world.

To learn more about this initiative, we spoke with Donna Gallup on November 2 for this special issue of Trillions. Trillions: Let’s jump right into what American Family Housing is about – and Potter’s Lane. Could you tell us a little bit of an overview of your creation?

Donna Gallup: American Family Housing has been a nonprofit for over 30 years. We have been a boutique housing developer serving southern California. We also offer services to ensure that those that attain housing maintain housing, with a focus on low-in-come individuals and families and [a] particular inter-est in ending homelessness. [We also serve] individ-uals from vulnerable populations, such as those with mental illness, physical disabilities and all that.

The project Potter’s Lane started, when I assumed my position two years ago, with a lot that the agency owned and needed to be developed and converted into housing. I had an opportunity at that time, based on the design of the lot, the shape of the lot. The lot was unique, and we partnered with a manufacturer that for the past five to six years was doing schools and us-ing recycled shipping containers from the Los Angeles port. We partnered with them to design and to build – which is almost complete – a multi-family housing project that will be served entirely with chronically homeless adults and will have a focus on chronically homeless veterans.

The project is an innovation. There are a lot of con-tainer projects and manufactured products. But this was the first time the state of California approved a multi-family structure that is built with modified steel structures, or recycled shipping containers.

Trillions: This must have been something to get this all approved. I believe your fund-raising started [only] about a year ago. Is that correct?

Donna Gallup: Yes. When you’re the first project in the nation of its kind, it does take a little bit more effort and a little bit more funding. Especially when you’re innovating, there are lessons to be learned. So we are still trying to complete our capital campaign – we have about $75,000 left, for any of the readers that are interested in helping us finish this project for our vet-erans.


The project itself is unique in that the time frame – and that’s really been my focus – is not going to result in a tremendous amount of savings for this project, being the first. The amount of time that it took us to get the project complete is remarkable for a multi-fam-ily structure and construction: The project went into manufacturing in May, we had our building permits in August and the certificate of occupancy and move-in is expected in January. Those are amazing times.

We also have a structure here for a nonprofit that is making sure that we are looking into the future and the sustainability of these projects. These units will be here through earthquakes, through any type of heat. They’re very energy-efficient, so operating them will be low cost. They are 106 times stronger than [re-quired by the] building code. And the outside, the exte-rior, will resist weathering [for] over 100 years. That’s something that I think is a reason for replicating this model in the future.

Trillions: You talk about replicating the model. I’m sure that you could take what you’ve already done and developed and put the same construction on another site with a lot less work – now that you’ve learned how to do all this, between you and your contractors and getting the rules passed and all by the state of Califor-nia to proceed.

What kind of hurdles did you have? Besides all the raised eyebrows that you had that started with the phrase “You’re going to do what?”

Donna Gallup: The interesting part is [that] the ap-proval of the manufactured product was probably the easiest building approval I have ever obtained in my entire housing development career because Growth-Point, our manufacturer, has a relationship with the state [agencies] who oversee manufactured housing. Manufactured housing is under housing community development for the state of California’s factory-built housing department. Because they’ve been getting approvals for their schools, they were able to get the approvals quite rapidly.

The challenges and the obstacles that we faced taking that then [at the local level therefore did not involve actual approval of the housing itself.] They’re not look-ing at buildings, because buildings are approved at the state level. They’re looking at site plans, connections, utilities, anything on the exterior of the landscaping, park scapes. There’s a learning curve that had to hap-pen because it was new for everybody.

In addition, I think that – for those that are your listen-ers, I think they would be interested in knowing – it’s taken some real breaking [of] the mold, in terms of the funding. And we are not getting everything lined up on this project. Hopefully we will on the next project. For

example, the lenders are used to paying as a percent-age of construction completion.

The project is almost complete in the factory, but there’s nothing here on site until they’re craned onto the foundations. So that was a learning curve when [it] comes to the fact that the funding sources for tradi-tional affordable housing are used to “stick builds” for new construction. And that traditionally takes around two years. So their processes are slow. They’re not used to multi-family structures being completed in six months.

These are the areas that I’m sure we can improve upon greatly. I look forward to finishing the project and re-ally sitting down with all our partners and coming up with the best practices and how it is that we can im-prove this model going forward.

Trillions: In terms of the people who will be living there, how has that been proceeding? I’m sure that there has been a line of people who have been extremely inter-ested in being able to be a part of it. And veterans cer-tainly are quite a deserving group to be able to get a shot at this. The homeless in general of course have their own challenges. And the Los Angeles area has a significant problem there, and they’re not even sure what to do.

So how do you go about working with those who might become the new home owners in that community?

Donna Gallup: I’m super-excited. The Long Beach Vet-erans’ Administration has a referral entity, and they will be providing services to about half of the units. And one of our social services partners in Orange County will provide the services to the remaining units.

We have what they call a take-down list, or a list that prioritizes those who are most vulnerable, and make sure that we’re getting the referrals for those who would be most appropriate for this housing. A lot of individuals that may not work well in the community in a private landlord relationship – this might be a per-fect spot for them.

We’ve already had inquiries about pets, and we’re go-ing to accept pets. We’re really excited about making this a project where we’re not only giving individuals a home but we’re helping them build a community. So that part of it – I’m really glad you asked – is a piece that makes me feel good. Because veterans do have that experience, having served in the military, of watching each other’s backs and making sure that they’re taking care of each other. We were hoping to be able to create that in this model. It’s in a U shape, with a community room [and] a center courtyard that has a place where people can gather and feel safe.


Trillions: That’s wonderful. In this case, veterans, like you said, are used to watching their backs, taking care of each other and building a community that from the beginning isn’t just a place with houses. It is intended to be a place where people connect with each other.

Donna Gallup: I think that’s really key. I’m hoping that’s part of what’s going to make this such a huge success. Because those that have served in our armed forces…they’re always together. And if you try to put all those individuals, when they go back into civilian life, just back into the community without that support, some of those individuals really struggle with that. This is an opportunity for us to make sure that they have the opportunity to be together, not feel alone, feel as though the community that they’ve come back to has welcomed them back and not rejected them for all that they’ve gone through.

Trillions: Where did the idea come from about the re-claimed shipping containers? That’s certainly quite novel.

Donna Gallup: The interesting part is that at the time that we started this partnership with the manufactur-er GrowthPoint, I don’t think anybody was aware that it was going to be the first of its kind in the nation. But we had a site that lends itself, and somebody intro-duced me to the manufacturer. And at the time, the manufacturer had enough experience in schools that they felt that they were ready to take on a residential multi-family project. I think I was the first to step up.

I think the interesting part is that I can’t tell you in the last six months how many times people have said “I thought about doing that,” “I wanted to do that,” “I told so-and-so to do that” and “I contacted the city to do that.” I like to say that I’m more actions than words, so to me we just took advantage of this opportunity and did it. I’m glad I am doing it, because I think that it will get housing on the ground quickly. And it can be repli-cated. It just will mean it will be that many less people that will be sleeping on the streets.

Trillions: Now getting back to you in particular. The company’s been around for a long time. At the risk of asking for a very long story, what is your background and where did Donna Gallup come from?

Donna Gallup: I’m a complex mix of a social worker who’s working on her doctorate at USC with a real es-tate and a housing development background. I guess I have the best of both worlds. I get to see the service side and make sure people who need the housing get into the housing and whatever support they need to stay there [and to] see the housing and real estate de-velopment side at the same time. It is a unique com-bination for this organization, where we have services and a lot of housing that we manage. It’s a perfect fit.

Trillions: You’ve asked before about possible help. What kind of help do you need? You mentioned fund-ing, things like that.

Donna Gallup: Thank you very much for that. Our web-site is www.afhusa.org, and our phone number is 714-897-3221. American Family Housing took the lead, and for the rest we put a lot of our own money into this project. But we did identify a capital campaign and we are $75,000 [away from] completing that campaign. We would appreciate the support of the community.

We also appreciate the support of the community when it comes to volunteer groups and people that want to help make this project complete. We have op-portunities for the community to get involved in that regard as well.

I will say that I’m glad these are national listeners [for the audio version of this] and a national magazine, be-cause we have received support from as far away as a teenage boy who sent us a $60 check from Ohio be-cause he heard about the project. It’s really refreshing for me to see that people care about people, not just for those who might be in their local community, be-cause we’re all human. And wherever we can support doing better for our country and those that served, I think it’s really a good feeling.

Trillions: What’s next for you, going forward on this? Maybe I should start with, when is the grand opening?

Donna Gallup: We will be scheduling the ribbon cut-ting in January. The first individuals are being referred and are getting ready to go into bridge housing so that when we get our certificate of occupancy they can move as quickly as possible into their new homes.

We are [also] looking at how we can replicate the model and get another project completed in 2017 Trillions: Is that next project in the same area, in south-ern California, like you’ve been doing now?

Donna Gallup: It is in Orange County. But I will say that we have met with people who are interested in the model, [from] Chicago to central projects in Arizona. I’ve spoken to people in Alaska and Florida. So there’s really widespread interest in this model. I’m hoping that after we’ve gathered our “lessons learned,” we’ll be able to share those lessons with others so that they can also replicate it in their own communities.

http://www.afhusa.org/


Power from PoopNew Tech Could Convert

Sewage to Electricity

Image: Pattanapol Soodto / shutterstock.com


Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) may have just found a way to turn sewage into an efficient and wide-spread source of energy.

The approach the group is using is deceptively sim-ple at first. It is like similar processes that Mother Na-ture (plus a lot of chemistry and physics) has used to produce crude oil for the entire life of the planet. Take the sewage, expose it to high temperatures and high pressure and mix in a bit of water and oxygen and the result is a crude-oil-like substance.

Then, just as with crude oil, refinery techniques simi-lar to those for conventional crude-oil sources can be used to turn this all into burnable fuel.

The technology is known as hydrothermal liquefac-tion, or HTL for short.

The temperatures are high, running at 660 degrees Fahrenheit, and the pressure the mix is exposed to is also high, some 3,000 pounds per square inch. What those extremes offer, though, is the ability to help break down the sludge into a liquid and a separable biocrude.

This is not the first time investigations of this kind have taken place. In the past, however, sewage sludge was seen as too wet as a starting point, which in turn required drying processes that either took a long time or were energy-intensive themselves. But the high heat and extreme pressure appear to make all the dif-ference in getting the watery part out of the system.

The result is quite efficient too. An outside organiza-tion, Water Environment & Reuse Foundation, took an independent look at the work. They calculated that the current process is able to reach a 60% carbon conver-sion rate, a number considered beyond belief only a few years ago.

Add to this that every day U.S. wastewater facilities treat around 34 billion gallons of sewage. Multiply that amount over a year and process it using PNNL’s technology and that could replace 30 million barrels of oil extracted from the ground and the oceans.

With these results already proven, developed up to a point and subjected to independent testing, PNNL has now been able to license its HTL technology to Geni-fuel Corporation of Utah. Genifuel in turn has now con-nected up with Metro Vancouver of British Columbia, Canada, with the goal of building what will likely be the first wastewater treatment facility that produces economically viable biocrude as a by-product of its activities.

Funding for the Genifuel/Metro Vancouver project is currently being lined up. Assuming it comes soon, project plans will have plant design work starting in early 2017 and the plant itself coming online by some-time in 2018.

It all looks to be a major breakthrough with payoffs both for the economy as well as the environment. Wastewater plants using this technology will deliver less toxic waste as their final end product. And the plants could operate with zero net energy consump-tion and high financial payoffs for their investors.

Aerial view of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (Courtesty of PNNL)


The First NationsTake On A New Leadership Role in Renewable Energy

An Interview with Dokis First Nations

Chief Gerry Duquette

The Okikendawt Hydro Project Begins


Even while renewable energy facilities have been pop-ping up throughout Canada, there is a promising cat-egory of such development that had until recently not been touched. That category is the lands of the indig-enous peoples of Canada, known as the First Nations.

No more. The University of Calgary’s Indigenous Re-newable Energy research project recently disclosed that there are as many as 190 First Nations groups with over 300 total clean energy projects in one stage or another of development.

What stopped these in the past used to be cost. But now that this has lowered, the next barrier was, ac-cording to many outside of the First Nations commu-nities, getting them to cooperate in the undertaking. Many reported that it seemed like the indigenous peoples were unwilling to consider integrating these clean energy sources with their local lands, either be-cause of often-justifiable concerns about the damage construction might do or because of just not wanting to deal with outside agencies in getting the project moving.

All of that has not been 100% worked out for all, but for one group, Dokis First Nation, located about 100 kilometers southeast of Sudbury, Ontario, all has been resolved. And after over 10 years of development, the Okikendawt Hydro Project has now been up and run-ning for over a year.

This project produces 10 megawatts of power and is enough to power about 3,000 homes. The project also produces around $4 million in revenue, in part support-ed by sales of excess power back to the Canadian gov-ernment. And some of that revenue (more later, after the debts of the project have been fully paid) is going into a special trust established by Dokis First Nation. That trust is there to support infrastructure, education and other expenses for generations to come.

The story of how all this came to pass is an involved one. But it shows what can happen when leadership on all sides work together, when values are agreed upon and honored by all and when the full communi-ties touched by the project are involved at every step. It also teaches a valuable lesson of how what seemed like a simple concept, perhaps – the idea of home – turned out to be a pivotal one in making this a suc-cess.

To learn the story, we spoke with Dokis First Na-tion Chief Gerry Duquette on November 17, 2016.

Trillions: The Okikendawt Hydro development turned out to be a much bigger project than you expected, and it also looks like it’s turning out to be a much big-ger success now that [the construction] is over. At a high level, what was the journey like to you to make that possible? And what kind of things did it cause in

terms of challenges, questions and concerns within Dokis First Nation?

Chief Gerry Duquette: [Among] the challenges that we encountered [first] was the jurisdiction. Before we went into the project, we weren’t under our own land management. We had a third party, which is Indige-nous Affairs, Aboriginal Affairs or … It was the govern-ment. Sometimes they change their name at different times, but I think it’s Indigenous Affairs. They were at the table also, so we were working with not only our community but Public Works Canada, so we had to comply with some of their regulations and their per-mitting process.

Mind you, we do agree with the safeguarding and mak-ing sure the land base is protected and the species at risk are protected, or any other species for that mat-ter, whether it’s fish or birds. [Those] were none of our issues. The challenging part is sometimes the trans-mission line, which is mostly on our territory, on Dokis First Nations territory. They were telling us how to do it. That rubs you wrong, if you own property in town and they tell you “Don’t cut the lawn that way; you’ve got to cut it that way.” It’s yours, it’s always been yours and it should be your responsibility.

But now we are under our [own] land management, which is a lot easier. We make our own laws. We make our own environmental practices for safety-wise, whether it’s roads or trees or animals. That was chal-lenging.

It was also challenging for community members [be-cause] it was the biggest project we ever did here. It was a project that was not new to us. It was brought to us in the late ’80s by former Chief Marty Restoule, who actually went out to see his brother in Seattle; he looked at hydro projects and brought that idea back home.

The channel was man-made. It was blasted in the late ’40s to let water flow. We do have some dams that regulate the upper French River and Lake Nipissing. It was something that occurred without consultation or true participation within the community. It was just easier to blast a channel in our traditional territory.

We saw this as “It’s done; let’s do something with it


now and let’s do something positive for our commu-nity.”

Many times prior, there were many different compa-nies, different ventures that wanted to do a hydro project run at the river, in different locations. The com-munity at the time said no because there were areas that would have too much disruption or flooding in the area. So they said no.

Around 2010, Council brought it up to [the] commu-nity again to say “Do you want to do this again? Do you want to look at areas [where] we could generate power, hopefully some wealth to the community, some jobs?” We went to a vote to say “Yes, go ahead and explore this.”

That in itself was a success, that people said, “Yes, go ahead.” And I think that [part of that] success was choosing a great partner that understood us. Hy-dromega was one of the partners that listened to the community’s concerns and the Council. There [were] different companies who had wanted to come and do projects, but some of the challenges [were] “We don’t get nothing out of it” or “They wouldn’t see our views as valid. They didn’t look at protection of land or the fish or taking care of extra spawning beds placed.” [With Hydromega], I guess we found each other. We could work together, and we worked well.

But there [were] some community members – and rightfully so – that don’t like the idea. There was a small change in landscape but minimal. But we went to the community, and the community at large, not only on the First Nation but off the First Nation, to meet with them, to make sure they were consult-ed, they were informed. We did also the surrounding towns and the surrounding First Nations. Even though it was a project within our territory, in our First Nations land base, we always want to be transparent and show everyone else [that] if the First Nation demands and requires consultation from government, we should do the same thing. I think we were successful in that, because we had a great response from surrounding communities and it went ahead.

Even before the project started, we had another vote to say “Okay, we’re going to do a project, but what are we going to do with the revenue?” The community de-cided to do a trust, to give us the authority to look into a trust. So we [did] that also.

Construction-wise, some of the challenges [were] to get the construction companies on board, to make them realize that “You’re coming through our commu-nity, and you’ll be coming here for two to three years. We’re still going to be here. It’s good that you’re com-ing in and you’re making money.”

We didn’t demand them to give us jobs, but we asked them to respectfully look at the qualified members.

We asked for our members to get training, have their résumés ready. Some were successful on the employ-ment. Some moved on with the companies; they’re still working with them, so that was a perfect fit.

There were some challenges in making sure that com-munity members could live with the outsiders also. Because it’s a different concept. But I think it went very well in that manner, because they became part of our community. And we saw that they participated in our community events, participated in different meals.

And then they complied to our demands if there were snakes or turtles or animals. So I think in the end it was a win, it was a good learning curve for us having such a learning curve for construction – and for con-struction workers also, to show that it’s not just mov-ing rocks. There [are] communities, there [are] lives, there’s a respect for both realms and realities.

Trillions: It sounds like you had a much more success-ful relationship than, say, the Native Americans have with the Dakota Access Pipeline project south of you, which has raised such a fuss, with the pipeline pro-viders seeming to run all over the indigenous commu-nities. The Native American tribes that are there are understandably very upset.

You instead really built a partnership, it sounds like, with all parties, and that’s really a model [that] things like this can be done.

Chief Gerry Duquette: I do feel for them. We did have members that went, and I did send a letter of support.

I think it came [down] to the fact that the location is dif-ferent. We already have dams in place, not hydro-pro-ducing dams but just regulation dams. The waterways are part of our life. We always believe that [these] are the veins of our Mother. You know, we always talk about Mother Earth; we don’t want anything to be dis-ruptive. If you go where there’s high water, there’s no big difference; they just clean up the channel. [In the] surrounding areas, we didn’t destroy anything; we just went deeper in the channel. So the landscape did not change.

But most importantly, the elders were there, to have ceremony, to lay the tobacco down before construc-tion. We had site visits with the kids. Even right to the end, when we had the cutting of the ribbon, it was the children that sang in our Ojibway language a water song to make sure it was done properly. Because ul-timately it was those young kids that came from kin-dergarten to grade 8; it’s for them. It’s not really for us; it’s for them. They might not realize it right now, but in 20, 30, 40 years, when they look back and say “Hey, I was a part of that – I sang that song, I was part of that Grand Opening.”

I think the buy-in of the community was that yes, we have some jobs. Some minimal, some great, for the


next couple of years. But the long-term effect of build-ing equity in our trust [was even more important]. The trust goes into infrastructure in our community. The trust goes into education. And the trust goes into our social and cultural concepts of the community. No in-dividual member gets money. It’s there to make sure that it’s safeguarded for fairness. And I think that’s why the community backed it. It was a 96% “Yes” vote, so it’s very high numbers.

I truly believe that it separates the administration and the Council – as politicians. We’re still Band Members, but sometimes we have a different role [and] the trust separates that. It’s not Council that decides where the money goes; it’s not the Council to decide who gets the money. There is going to be a board of directors that will be there to safeguard the funds for genera-tions to come. I think that was the true buy-in. It was nice to see that separation.

Also, as Chief – I was Councilor Deputy Chief at the time – it’s nice to have that separation also, so that you know it’s going to be safeguarded. Because yes, we’re here now, but we don’t know who’s going to be here in the next couple of years. Or I might not be here next year. So it’s nice to have that safeguard there. Even that pressure off you as a Council member, to say no, that I trust that when the board of directors will be put in place, it will do a fantastic job, because our trust agreement is strong.

Trillions: I also support what was said, at least in other areas, where there’s that phrase about having “a gov-ernment of laws, not of men.” Then when you have the trust, you have a structure, a set of rules for how you work on it so as individuals may come and go, it pro-tects the integrity of what you’re trying to do. Because people have different opinions, people have different ideas. And this keeps it going.

So both in what you’ve built as a project, as well as what you’ve built as a trust and also what you’ve built as an extended community of all these different peo-ple, it really sounds like it was a great model. I don’t know how you did it all, but even the buy-in with the construction people was great.

I [even] read about a truck driver [who] was connect-ed with the project, recognized a species under threat and basically said, “Wait, we need to stop and figure out what we’re going to do about this.”

Chief Gerry Duquette: I know. It is amazing. That’s why I love to repeat it, to show “It’s okay.” That even a construction worker, it doesn’t matter what your back-ground or profession, it’s something that you know morally – or something that when you’re in the com-munity, whether it’s an animal or a plant, a person’s race or color or religion, it shouldn’t matter. When you know something isn’t right, you don’t turn a blind eye and you step up and say “Hey.”

I imagine this worker, he might forget about it, but I’m sure he’ll remember [it as] something that he took away from the project. That it’s not just a job. And I hope that they got the sense of that – “We did a proj-ect at Dokis, and we worked in the First Nation com-munity, and it was great and I’d go back.” We do have some construction workers that came back, rented some of our cottages, that made friends, that went fishing, actually went hunting with our members.

Maybe it’s our location. Maybe it’s the way we were raised. I hope we never lose that sense of home. Be-cause when we talk about home, I always say, “I lived off Reserve, I went to school, I played hockey, I lived different places. And my grandparents or my mom would [ask] me, “Are you coming home?” No matter where your house is, when they say home, that means “Are you coming back to Dokis?” I hope our future gen-erations don’t lose that, that they still have that – that “This is your home.”

And we better make sure that it’s well taken care of. Because that’s our duty in life. It’s our duty that when our time is gone, we took care of our home.

Not everyone, and that’s understandable; some may-be don’t have that understanding. Or maybe they were brought up in a different way. [But] whether you’re First Nation or not, I don’t think it has a bearing to it. You might have a place when you say “I’m going home. I’ve got a special place in life.” Whether you went for a camping trip or you went for a vacation, you have that sense of “Wow. I feel at peace, I feel comfortable, I never want that to change.”

I hope some of the construction workers did receive that feeling or that view that it’s okay. Because some-times in media there are products out there … We were raised in a world where “this is the truth,” to look other places. And sometimes First Nation and reservations in the U.S., we get a bad name or different point of view put across, but it’s not ours.

I’m always one who’s happy to say “Come and visit us! Come and say ‘hi.’ Come and have a coffee. Wheth-er you’re a doctor or lawyer or a politician, my door is open.” We always want to make people feel welcome. I think that’s a sense here at home that we always did; it’s how we were brought up. Maybe because a big part of our life is the tourism, and we relied on many outside people from across the world to have our live-lihood.

I grew up in the tourism business, so maybe it’s a way of life. Maybe I would have been different if I had a different upbringing. I was fortunate in having good teachings and listening. I think sometimes we don’t do enough listening or making sure the other person is okay. I hope we can accomplish that still in the fu-ture.


Just when you feel like your organization is experiencing stability, a tenured employee announces that they will be retiring within the next few months. As a result, panic sets in. A hiring announcement goes out in the hopes of having the new hire available to shadow and/or be on board with the retiree. But it rarely happens that there is enough meaningful time for knowledge transfer, or, even worse, the hiring process gets rushed and the wrong candidate is hired. Even in situations where an internal employee is awarded the position of an outgoing ten-ured employee, there is rarely enough substantive time for knowledge transfer. With the rapid pace of retiring baby boomers, succession planning and management needs to become a strategic priority for every business.

Succession planning and management is a structured business process that identifies and develops internal employees for potential company positions and helps to “ensure the stability of the tenure of personnel.” (Roth-well, 2005, p. 10) With the focus ultimately on an empowered workforce, effective succession management develops employees to move from trainee positions to intermediate positions and ultimately into leadership positions. Effective succession planning focuses on developing the right number and right types of employees to meet the organizational needs. (Rothwell, 2005)

I personally manage a variety of programs, ranging from position-specific trainee programs to executive devel-opment programs. They are all designed and run differently to fit the needs of the business. In the following guide, I give an overview of how to set up an internal leadership development program (LDP) as part of a larger succession planning strategy. Keep in mind that there are a multitude of ways to build such a program; this is just one example.

Image: cstockphotos.com / shutterstock.com

A Guide for Developing a Successful Leadership Development Program


For leadership succession in particular, I prefer a program that runs for at least two years and includes multiple employees per cohort. The program I use adds around 250 hours per year of additional time to their current workload. Some of this time can be incorporated into the workday activity, but occasionally it spills into ad-ditional work hours, so supervisors need to have realistic conversations about how they can incorporate the hours into their workload and if they can manage the additional educational expectations.

Step 1: Leadership Development Program Mission and Vision

Mission and vision work, commonly referred to as being part of a foundational document, are essential before beginning an LDP or any major work group activity. This helps to clearly identify why the program exists, what the program is, who the program is intended for and where it is intending to take the company. A proper mission and vision help establish a foundation and create language that can be shared throughout the company. As with all foundational documents, language can be added for guiding principles, value statements, philosophy statements, etc. The following are simple starters for mission and vision statements:

Mission Statement

The company’s leadership development program is designed to identify and develop a high potential leadership talent pool and prepare them for leadership responsibilities.

Vision Statement

The leadership development program’s participants and alumni represent the next generation of your compa-ny’s leaders.

Step 2: Identifying and Selecting High-Potential Leaders

Functionally, the succession process begins with identifying and selecting employees that show high potential for leadership responsibilities. Organizational need and leadership turnover risk should help determine how many people would be selected for an LDP at any point in time. To assess for high-potential leaders, we tra-ditionally use a 9-box framework for visualizing and ranking where employees fall. The framework includes a Y-axis, which measures leadership potential, and an X-axis, which measures past performance ratings.

In order to actually measure potential, you should anchor to a leadership competency model. A competency model includes knowledge, skills, personality traits and values that give rise to job behaviors that align with overall organizational success. Competencies can be acquired through talent, work experience and training. For example, you could use Kouzes & Posner Leadership Practices Inventory, which identifies five leadership practices: Model the Way, Inspire a Shared Vision, Challenge the Process, Enable Others to Act, and Encourage the Heart. Within each practice are sets of actions and behavioral indicators. I have also used relevant home-made models that assess for Knowing & Managing Self, Knowing & Managing Others, Knowing & Managing the Business, and Influence. Within each category are sets of behavioral indicators. Regardless of what leadership competency model you use, you want to make sure it is meaningful and able to assess for real leadership po-tential.

Next you can attach to your leadership competency model a simple rating scale for each LDP employee you are considering. For example, here is a 10-point Likert scale (figure 1) used to score each individual based on the observed frequency of leadership competencies. You would score each person of interest using the leadership competency model. The higher the score, the greater the frequency in observable leadership competencies and assumed potential for effective leadership practices. The lower the score, the lower the frequency in observ-able leadership competencies and assumed potential for effective leadership practices.


As a result, you now have a score for each employee for the Y-axis leadership potential. Next we turn to the X-axis’s performance rating. Provided you have a performance management evaluation each year, you can use an average score of recent performance scores. As a result, you now have a score for each employee for the X-axis for performance. Now you plot the employee on the 9-Box leadership grid (figure 2).

As you plot and calibrate employees on the 9-Box leadership grid, you will want to focus your attention on the top right-hand corner sections. These are the employees that theoretically will make for the best LDP candi-dates.

Step 3: Identifying Learning Modes Next you want to identify a learning framework that will work for your company and its resources. There are a variety of ways to go about this; the following format has served me well because it approaches learning from multiple perspectives. The following are the learning modes I like to anchor to: (1) Self-Development, (2) Aca-demic, (3) Observational, (4) Developmental Relationships and (5) Experiential. Within each mode are actual learning activities. The following is a description for each of the modes:

Five Learning Modes

Self-Development. Participants take a proactive approach to their growth by identifying and following through with important resources and developmental opportunities. This mode of learning allows for each participant to self-explore and independently build on their developmental needs. Self-development learning may include assessment of strengths, developmental needs, behavioral and peer observation and an individualized plan of study.

Academic. Participants acquire fundamental theory and knowledge delivered in classroom and self-study for-mat. This mode of learning establishes the foundation for all other forms of learning to build upon. Academic education may include course work from qualified professional development training companies.Observational. Participants add to their knowledge base with the inclusion of observing and evaluating other professionals and processes within the business or outside. This mode of learning bridges the divide between theory and application. Observational learning may include job shadowing, interviews and attendance at key meetings and business processes.


Developmental Relationships. Participants will gain valuable knowledge from developing strong relationships with colleagues and developmental professionals. This mode of learning provides participants with the opportunity to gain support, advice, guidance and expertise from subject-matter experts and developmen-tal professionals. Specific developmental relationship learning may include mentoring, coaching, networking, peer-to-peer learning and supervisor support.

Experiential. Participants practice what they have learned through real-world application. This mode of learn-ing allows participants to gain knowledge and practice of new business processes and relationship building, which can only be understood from immersion and direct application. Experiential learning may include unique project management assignments, simulations and job rotation with other MSF professionals or partner com-panies.

Step 4: Leadership Development Program Activities

Drilling down into the program details, each mode will contain a variety of actual learning activities that serve to develop high-potential leaders. Effective development occurs from a combination of developmental experi-ences. Time is a highly valuable resource at most companies, and by combining these approaches, you best prepare the LDP participants to fulfill learning potential in a time-efficient manner.

The following are examples of LDP program activities I like to use in conjunction with one another:

• Subject Matter Expert Roundtables • Leadership Lunches • Mentoring Sessions • Training • Assessments • Action Learning Assignments and Presentations • Facilitated Review Sessions

Subject Matter Expert Roundtables – Observational & Developmental Relationships Learning

Roundtable discussions provide an opportunity for the LDP participants to gain a broader understanding of the specialty areas within your organization. Each roundtable session includes the LDP cohorts and a leader from a company department. The leader provides a general overview of what their department does on a daily basis, describes how their department fits into the company’s operations as a whole and identifies current business challenges and future opportunities for greater success. For example, in a mental health company, roundtables may include learning from physicians, therapists, case-workers, rehabilitation counselors, finance, maintenance, human resources and legal. The discussions are in-tended to provide exposure that will help the participants understand the functions, processes and specific business details necessary to develop the skills needed to help make the transition into a leadership position. Ample time should be provided for in-depth discussions.

Leadership Lunches – Observational & Developmental Relationships Learning

Leadership lunches are opportunities for the LDP participants, as a group, to spend quality time with individual executives over lunch. The agenda typically consists of the executive sharing their leadership stories and ex-periences, the LDP participants sharing the status of their own personal leadership development, and general leadership development questions and answers. Leaders may also like to provide a light case study or conver-sation piece that pertains to leadership development.

Mentoring Sessions – Developmental Relationships Learning

One of the most effective ways to grow and develop new leaders is through mentoring. Mentoring is a common developmental activity where an experienced and seasoned industry veteran (mentor) works with a protégé


(mentee) to provide advice, guidance and career development. Effective mentors build from their own experience and initiate knowledge transfer. They have taken the time to think about what they wish they would have known as a young professional and are willing to share what they know now. This may include translating unwritten rules and sharing successes and failures. Mentors provide perspective and a reality check as mentees face de-velopmental challenges. My recommendation is that participants are each paired with one leader mentor at a time. Beginning in the sec-ond year, the LDP participant is paired with a new leader mentor. By changing mentors, the participants get the opportunity to observe different leadership styles. Participants are expected to meet with their mentors at least once a month for a one-hour session.

Training – Academic & Self-Development Learning

Training allows for the LDP participants to gain fundamental theory and knowledge delivered in classroom, online and self-study formats. With a solid theoretical background, participants gain a framework for effective practice. There are a variety of courses that LDP participants can learn from – my suggestion, though, is that the topics revolve mostly around the leadership construct and less on management or executive topics. The following are topics I find relevant for an LDP:

• Strategic Personal Foundation & Development Planning• Leadership Theory & History • Supervision Basics • Effective Development of Employee Engagement • Managing Conflict• Personality & Effective Communication • Introduction of HR Topics (Hiring, Progressive Discipline, ADA, FMLA, FLSA, EEO)• Performance Management• Clear & Concise Writing (Including Writing Executive Summaries) and PowerPoint • Presentation Skills• Effective Group Facilitation• Performance Coaching • Transformational Leadership • Creating a Motivating Environment• Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People • Emotional Intelligence

Assessments – Academic & Self-Development Learning

Intermingled with the classroom training and action learning assignments could be a variety of assessments. Each assessment is scientifically based and meets standard psychometric criteria for validity and reliability. Fur-ther, the selected assessments each have a very unique perspective on either traits or behavior. Recommended assessments include the following:

• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (by CPP) – Personality Type • Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode (by CPP) – Conflict Behaviors• Leadership Practices Inventory Self/360 (by Wiley) – Leadership Behavior • Gallup Q12 (by Gallup) – Supervision and Engagement Behavior • Clifton StrengthsFinder (by Gallup) – Personality/Talent Finding• Other potential assessments available based on need: Emotional Intelligence (TalentSmart), Caliper Pro-

file or Caliper 360 (by Caliper), DiSC (by Wiley), California Psychological Inventory 260 (by CPP)

Regarding assessments, it is highly recommended to have strong pre- and post-behavioral assessments to show potential growth during the two-year leadership journey. A very easy approach would be to administer something like Kouzes and Posner’s Leadership Practices Inventory 360 instrument before (or within the first nine months) and again at the end of the two-year period. This type of feedback will help clarify where participants are strong and need additional attention and highlight growth areas.


Action Learning Assignments and Presentations – Self-Development, Observational, Developmental Relation-ships & Experiential Learning

An important component of the LDP includes experiential learning assignments, often referred to as action learning assignments (ALAs). Participants practice what they have learned through active involvement and performance of the learning activity in a real-world application. Through experiential learning, participants gain additional awareness of the nuances that can only be more fully understood from the direct application. Fur-ther, they build new business knowledge and insight and gain the opportunity to test what they have learned through the other learning formats. Upon completion of each ALA, the participants would submit an executive summary highlighting assignment solutions, followed by a leadership presentation. Each participant delivers a 20-minute presentation to the leadership team, followed by 10 minutes for clarifying questions. The leader-ship team follows with a one-hour closed-door discussion on the presentations, followed by a 20-minute feed-back session for each individual LDP participant. The presentations give the LDP participant the opportunity to share key findings from their ALA experiences, highlight challenges/opportunities and demonstrate their growth in leadership acumen.

The following are sample ALA frameworks. I don’t provide a lot of assignment detail, but it does help give a sense of what they can generally look like:

Strategic Personal Foundation & Development Plan – Part 1. Goal is to prepare LDP participants to develop a personal plan, including the creation of personal mission and vision statements and career-goal work. In addition, participants define what leadership means to them. Expected to cover three months.

Group Project. Goal is to prepare LDP participants to navigate, prepare, organize and facilitate group tasks important to work processes. This may include participating/shadowing in the hiring process (job-descrip-tion writing, promotion, interviews, salary calculation, selection), exploring team meeting practices and rec-ommended solutions for running meetings, researching and performing employee or customer feedback information. Expected to cover three months.

Employee Development Coaching. Goal is to provide LDP participants with firsthand experience in the lead-ership function of one-on-one coaching and identification of effective coaching strategies and techniques. This would include identifying company volunteers to participate as coaches for the coaches to work with. Expected to cover four months.

Individualized Project. Goal is to prepare LDP participants with ownership and accountability in an informal leadership role and to provide participants with firsthand experience in managing a real-life company proj-ect. In addition, project teams assess the LDP participant on leadership practices before the project begins and once it is complete. Expected to cover four months.

Strategic Personal Foundation & Development Plan – Part 2. Goal is to review and demonstrate leadership development and growth over the two-year developmental time frame. This includes revisiting and rewriting, if necessary, the mission, vision and goals. Finally, participants define what leadership means to them, hav-ing gone through the two-year program.

Facilitated Review Sessions – Academic & Self-Development Learning

Learning is a complex process, and effective learning and behavioral change highlights the need for assimilat-ed education. To aid in the learning process, the LDP participants participate in nine monthly two-hour review sessions. The facilitated review sessions will help the LDP participants assimilate prior academic, observa-tional and experiential learning to achieve behavioral change and organizational success. Further, the review sessions will set the participants up for a successful final ALA as they review and reflect on their leadership growth and development. The review sessions are designed to take place in the second year of the two-year LDP timeline.


Leadership Development Feedback

For the effective development of a leadership talent pool, timely and meaningful feedback is critical. The LDP program may contain a variety of forms of relevant feedback, including one-on-one mentor feedback, ALA exec-utive presentation feedback, traditional performance appraisals and pre- and post-assessment on leadership competencies.

The first of the LDP feedback functions derives from the mentoring process. Since mentors in the LDP program already work in a leadership capacity, they have the skill sets to provide timely and meaningful feedback on LDP participants’ knowledge, skills and behaviors. Second, the LDP participants receive valuable feedback from the leadership presentations after each ALA. Third, LDP participants receive feedback from their super-visors’ ongoing performance reviews, including appraisal for leadership competencies. Fourth, to determine growth or change, the standard is to administer a valid and reliable assessment prior to developmental activi-ties, followed by a second assessment after the completion of the activities. This provides powerful feedback on their leadership competency growth from peers that work closely with the participants.

Summary

A quality LDP is grounded in leadership theory, research and practice. Though the described LDP program is de-signed to be rigorous, the benefits are many. From my personal experience, programs like this one have helped numerous employees further enhance their leadership skills, helped them easily move into formal managerial roles and added value to their community due to their increased knowledge in leadership studies. As we revisit the original vision, effective programs like this one can help your company develop next generation leaders.

Reference:

Rothwell, W. J. (2005). Effective Succession Planning: Ensuring Leadership Continuity and Building Talent from Within (3rd ed.). New York: American Management Association.

Dr. Chance Eaton has over a decade’s worth of experience working in the field of education and organizational development. Due to his unique educational and work experiences in finance, psychology, leadership and manage-ment, education, noetic sciences and agriculture, Dr. Eaton provides his clients with relevant business solutions grounded in theory and research. To learn more about Dr. Eaton’s services, please visit www.HRSolutionsInterna-tional.com.

http://www.HRSolutionsInternational.com

http://www.HRSolutionsInternational.com


Ironically, the current director of the CIA, John Bren-nan, has warned President--not-elected Donald Trump against resuming the use of torture.

Brennan recently told the BBC, that "the overwhelm-ing majority of CIA officers would not want to get back into" the use of torture such as water-boarding. He added: "Without a doubt, the CIA really took some body blows as a result of its experiences."

Trump has repeatedly said he would “bring back wa-ter-boarding” and “a hell of a lot worse.” He also said that he would kill the families of suspected terrorists. Last week, he confirmed his campaign rhetoric when he told the New York Times that “if [torture] is so im-portant to the American people, I would go for it.”

While some people may deserve to be tortured, most Americans don't think it is important and certainly wouldn't trust the government to decide when tor-ture is warranted. Torture is criminal and committing crimes to fight crime doesn't work and should not be allowed. A civil society does not torture. If we start openly supporting torture then we make ourselves tar-gets.

Trump’s choice to succeed John Brennan as CIA chief is mad-dog Mike Pompeo, who has incorrectly sug-gested that torture is legal. Torture is certainly illegal under U.S. and International law.

In 2014, a detailed report by the U.S. Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence rightly concluded that the torture program "was not an effective means of ac-quiring intelligence", that its use "impeded" the US Government's national security, and that the program "damaged the United States' standing in the world."

The U.S. military and intelligence agencies have long known that torture is not an effective technique to extract information and it is not actually used in cas-es where vital information must be obtained. Torture is instead used to incite hatred against the United States, to encourage retaliation by the victims, their families and friends and to satisfy the sick urges of sadistic government employees or contractors.

In a real interrogation session, psychology is used to extract information from most people. Those who are resistant to the standard techniques have their minds pried open with drugs and electro-magnetic brain stimulation.

Pinpoint microwave and magnetic probes can stim-ulate individual neurons to release their memories. The same technology can be used to erase memories and implant false memories. No amount of training or will-power can prevent someone from telling all during a real interrogation, therefore, torture has not been useful for information extraction in many decades.

Remote viewing can also used to remotely acquire information. During George Bush's war against the people of Iraq, key government officials were probed daily by remote viewers at Fort Meade, Maryland, to determine Iraq's plans and intentions. Even during WW II, Germans used psychics to identify the location of Atlantic convoys and the Brits used psychics to re-motely sit-in on German strategy sessions.

The international war industry doesn't just need infor-mation, they need an enemy and torturing people cre-ates enemies where none might have existed or the enemy was losing motivation.

Drone strikes serve the same purpose. Wiping out a family of poor tribesman in Afghanistan or Pakistan because one of them might have said something negative about the U.S. ensures that the survivors will seek revenge. It creates the very conflict that the drone strikes are supposed to end.

While torture is not useful for extracting information, it is used effectively in conjunction with mind control for behavior modification.

Associating certain paradigms or actions with in-tense pain can prevent those thoughts or behavior. Aspiring domestic whistle-blowers can be targets for abduction, torture and mind control and the memory of the experience erased. The threat from the whistle blower is effectively neutralized when they suddenly lose all desire to leak information.

Using highly advanced technology, U.S. Special Forc-es conduct hundreds of missions each year to covertly abduct, torture and mind control key people in order to support the profits or agenda of certain corporations. The victims may notice a change in their thoughts or feelings but don't remember anything happening to them.

Donald Trump is power hungry and willing to bend the rules. With the people he is surrounding himself with, torture will likely become more widespread and we the people will suffer the blow-back.

CIA Director Warns Trump Against Using Torture


Filing for and having patents issued is one way of measuring how competitive a company, state or coun-try is in the world stage. By that measure, China just surprised everyone by becoming the first country ever in the world to file 1 million patent applications – in 2015.

The actual number of patent applications filed, 1,010,406, represents a whopping 35% of the total 2.9 million patents filed for worldwide last year. And if that were not impressive enough, this percentage com-pares to China only having filed 7.8% of the world’s patent filings in 2014.

The applications do include all Chinese filings, so this is a mix of those filed by Chinese residents and those from foreign entities looking for patent protection in China. But the World Intellectual Property Organiza-tion, WIPO, analyzed the data and showed that almost two-thirds of the 1M+ filings were from within China and not overseas. The U.S. and companies within it was a substantial number two in Chinese filings, with close to 238,000 filed.

The significance of the patent filings cannot be over-stated, especially as China makes its play both tech-nology and economically to command lead market positions where Western companies had previously been dominant. When the patents issue, they provide a protective wall for domestic organizations that com-petitors must wade through to avoid lawsuits or the need for costly licensing. And even before issuance competitors who see the patents “laid open”, a legal term meaning the contents of the patent filings are made public in advance of issuance, so public com-ment is encouraged, are already having to design around them.

China clearly is innovating more and with more adept companies involved in advanced research and devel-

opment of all kinds. So that is one reason for the in-crease. A second is the Chinese government now pro-viding patent subsidies, making it less expensive to file. Other streamlining processes to make it easier to file are also in place.

A third reason for the increase is on the foreign side, where companies are filing for patent coverage now within China far more than ever before. For the for-eign companies, having their patents granted in China could conceivably block locals from copying, as long as the Chinese courts agree, which they seldom do. And, as the U.S. in particular learned some years ago in Japan when it was more preeminent in the world economy, sometimes having a patent granted in the country can at least allow one to operate one’s busi-ness there, even if it may not block a local company from copying some or all of it.

What many may not be considering is that China could be planning to weaponize patents and may use them to stifle foreign competition and besiege key compa-nies with patent litigation to make them more amena-ble to hostile takeovers.

In 2015, after China, the next four highest totals of pat-ent filings were the U.S. as a strong second, followed by Japan, South Korea, and Europe.

And not surprisingly, the top filings by areas of inno-vation were in Computer Technology (with 7.9% of the total), Electrical Machinery (with 7.3%), and Digital Communication (with 4.9%).

At current rates, the total numbers and percentages of all world filings is likely to increase by another gi-ant leap again in 2016. What this means on the world market is that, yet again, China is moving rapidly to dominate the world while America lags behind.

ChinaBecomes 1st Country

With Over 1 Million

Patent Applications

In One YearImage: Alexander Supertramp / shutterstock.com


Decoding Love's Lies and The Challenge Of Modern

Relationships

An Interview with Debrena Jackson Gandy


Debrena Jackson Gandy is living – in her own words – avery “juicy” life. She is a business consultant, a men-tor to millions through her books and online seminars, a personal- and spiritual-growth consultant and an in-ternationally renowned relationship coach.

She is the author of the bestselling books Sacred Pam-pering Principles: An African-American Woman’s Guide to Self-Care and Inner Renewal, All the Joy You Can Stand: 101 Sacred Power Principles for Making Joy Real in Your Life and her most recent major publishing success, The Love Lies: 10 Revelations That Will Transform Your Relationships and Enrich Your Love Life.

Ms. Gandy seems to appear almost everywhere these days, having been featured in publications such as Oprah’s O, Essence, Black Enterprise, Empowering Wom-en, Today’s Black Woman, Emerge, Heart & Soul, Wom-an’s Day, Family Digest, The Seattle Times, The Olympi-an, New York Daily News and Atlanta Metro. She runs online and in-person seminars on relationships and more throughout the United States and even as far away as Africa, England and the Caribbean. She also has her own TV show, Public Report, which she pro-duces and stars in out of the Seattle-Tacoma area on the Trinity Broadcasting Network.

She is highly sought-after as a guest on numerous television and radio shows as well.

And throughout all of this, she has touched and trans-formed lives all around the planet, helping tens of thousands find more enriching and satisfying rela-tionships and full lives.

We spoke with Ms. Gandy on November 11, 2016.

Trillions: Could you start by telling our readers and lis-teners all about the many things that you do?

Debrena Jackson Gandy: I’ll start with the short an-swer, which is that I do only what I love, nothing more and nothing less. So, before I share the many things I do, [know that they are] all things I have high passion about and allow me to contribute my gifts, talents, skills and abilities to the world.

So with that said, on the business side of things I’m an organizational development consultant and train-er. So I do a lot of work with companies and organi-zations around leadership and team building and communications. And then with smaller businesses and solopreneurs, I do a lot of work around entrepre-neurship, strategic marketing, visioning and planning, increasing profit margins, that kind of thing.

Then, on the personal growth and spiritual develop-ment side, I do a lot of work with women. So I am a women’s empowerment and personal transformation coach. And in the area of relationships, where I work with both men and women, where I have my Love

Academy full-day intensive for women, my Mentality relationships seminar for men only that I do, my Cov-enant Academy, which is for married couples. I also do live retreats, many many many telecourses and teleclasses and teleseminars on personal growth and spiritual development, effectiveness in life, excellence leadership, standing in your power, living in your pow-er, being a joyful human.

I’m also a national speaker. So I have a chance to travel around the country, and other countries as well, keynote-speaking to associations, organizations and conferences.

And then I’m also a juicily married woman, and we have three fabulous daughters.

So I have a very deliciously full life. [Laughs] I think I kind of covered it.

I also host a TV show for TBN at their KBTW station here in Seattle-Tacoma, a show called Public Report that’s a public-affairs show.

So I think I covered most everything.

Trillions: A very busy person, I can tell that. That is probably a good place to spin off to my next question. About relationships of all kinds, including the love re-lationships that are a significant part of what you have talked about. In this modern age, which is very differ-ent from when I was growing up, where with parents usually only one of the two worked and you tended to work less hours. It seemed a lot less complicated [then]. Now everybody’s very busy, working 110% just to keep going. So with respect to relationships [now], what does it take, in your opinion, to make relation-ships work from the very beginning as well as ongo-ing, in this modern age?

Debrena Jackson Gandy: Well, my third book is called The Love Lies, and it is directed to women. It really re-veals the false, undermining faulty beliefs that we op-erate from unknowingly and that are an invisible part of our socialization and upbringing. And these love lies, these faulty relationship beliefs, end up sabotag-ing us.

Men have their own separate set of love lies.

That’s really what we’re operating from, giving us these horrific outcomes. America has the highest di-vorce rate of any country on the face of the planet, which is a huge indictment of us in the arena of rela-tionships. We fail the worst of any other country, and then the level of satisfaction, fulfillment, is scarily low for those who stay married.

Then the satisfaction rate drops with successive mar-riages. We think “Marriage 1 didn’t work, so let me try again.” And the joy-rate factor does not usually go up, the more marriages we have. So, clearly, this is a huge weak spot, an underdeveloped area for us as a nation.


One of the female love lies talks about self-love. Be-cause if you look at the 35,000 books on the market about love and relationships, and the ones directed toward women, 95% of them are focused on the man as the object. And how to get him and keep him and attract him, light his fire and keep him excited, keep him coming home. Just all of this frenetic energy put forth to try to get and keep a man. And there’s very little conversation about “let’s start with the primary human relationship you’re already in,” which is the one with self. Let’s really take a look at that with the magnifying glass and a spotlight. Because that is the basis of your relationship with other beings – male, female, family, whatever. So that’s one of the love lies I talk about, that self-love is optional. That’s an untruth. That’s a lie. But most of us are operating, as women, from that lie. That self-love is disposable – it’s option-al. It focuses the relationship on the man.

Many men have no clue how to discern what kind of relationship a woman has with herself. And [yet] that is the biggest determinant of the experience he is go-ing to have with her.

So that’s one of the female love lies, this whole ignor-ing the relationship with self. We can be unhealed. We can be self-neglecting, self-abusing in our inner self-talk, not treating our body as a temple. And yet we can have deep satisfaction and fulfillment with a man. We keep trying to do it that way, and it does not work. It’s an epic fail.

Another one of the love lies that especially married people fall subject to, and especially women come into marriages with, is the “he should already know” love lie. If men knew all of the “shoulds” and “ought tos” and “supposed tos” that we come into marriage with, [they] would never marry us. And it is debilitating; it sabotages marriage. Again, I’m talking about the fe-male love lies at the moment, a few of them, because that’s what my current book is on. I have a whole set for men – so men are not off the hook. But I’m just focusing on the female love lies at the moment.

We have a belief in our culture that love relationships are about getting our needs met. Absolutely not! Love is not about need. We even are confused about the nature of love. Need comes from a deficiency model; it means “I’m incomplete, I’m not whole and I’m looking to be made whole. I’m looking for you to do certain things so I can feel happy or complete.” So even our fundamental premise is flawed and faulty.

So those are some of the core and root causes of our relationship failure. It is not communication. Commu-nication is a skill, and a skill does not in itself make or break a relationship. There are some underlying be-liefs. And the way we communicate is a reflection of some faulty beliefs.

So those are a few things, just to give you a little bit of a taste. But in my third book, The Love Lies, [there are]

10 that I present.

The last part of the book is about detoxing. So here are those beliefs I’ve been socialized in, reinforced in other people, in the media and everywhere I look and everything I listen to. How do I get out of this trap? Well, you’ve got to go through detox. You’ve got to clean [the] poison out of your system, and part of that is forgiveness, which we don’t talk about in our cul-ture.

Oh, I went to therapy. Oh, what forgiveness work did you do? Forgiveness has five parts to it. What have you done to handle your emotional wounds and bag-gage from past experiences? Oh, I went to therapy. Well, what forgiveness work have you done?

So most of us are walking around with all kinds of emotional wounds and baggage and closed hearts, trying to have deeply fulfilling love relationships and marriages. And it doesn’t work.

So that’s the short answer. [Laughs]

Trillions: Whoa. I have to ask, after all of that, because you talked a lot about the women’s side. Can you give us just a little hint of what us guys have in our bag of tricks that we convince ourselves of that isn’t really true?

Debrena Jackson Gandy: Let me see. One of the [sim-plest] is that – to a fault – men are socialized to put weight and emphasis on a woman’s physical packag-ing and image. Her appearance, her looks. Now, I’m not saying that’s [not] important. But I said – to a fault – the amount of weight on it. It gets men into more poor decisions, because they’re making decisions with their eyeballs and their hormones, and they re-ally don’t know how to recognize, most men, a good woman.

Now that doesn’t mean a good-looking woman can’t also BE a good woman. But men have no clue what the cues are, what the indicators are. I ask them, in Mentality, tell me what some of the cues are of a good woman. And how would you know? You can identify a good-looking woman in two seconds flat, visually, with your eyeballs. But what will have much more to do with your fulfillment in your relationship is her “be-ing in her woman,” first of all, which is a concept I talk about versus her “being in her girl” and being in a spir-itually mature, emotionally mature state. So you don’t know ANYTHING about how to recognize if she’s “in her woman” versus “in her girl,” not to mention “is she a good woman?” So tell me, what do you go by? And they all look at me like I have five heads. They’re like, “Wow. Wow. Wow, we haven’t even thought about that before.” I said, “Exactly.”

You need to know, as a man, what the cues and clues and indicators are of a woman having authentic self-love. Because it is hard for you to love a woman who


doesn’t love herself. It will be like trying to pour buck-ets of water down a well and wondering why the well is never ever filling up. The easiest woman to love, gentlemen, is the one who loves herself. And the hard-est one to love is one who doesn’t. Because even the love that you extend to her, she’ll be suspicious of it because she’s damaged.

So most men have no clue about how to recognize a woman that loves herself, loves her body. And they don’t know what questions to ask. Because you can ask a few key questions and get a lot of insight into a woman’s relationship with herself. Men don’t listen to the words women use when they communicate, be-cause they’re distracted by her physical package. And the words that a woman chooses to use to describe [her] life and self will give [a man] tremendous insight into her relationship and perspective, self-concept, self-identity and self-love.

The reason that’s so important is because if you have a child with that woman, that baby is in her body for nine months. Living and growing, before that baby is born into the three-dimensional world. So her thoughts, her eating choices, her hormones, her emotional en-ergy [are] already moving through that baby for nine months before you even get to see that baby. And that mother’s influence on that child is more direct than the father’s influence, particularly for the first year of the physical three-dimensional life outside the womb.

So it’s CRITICAL that a man knows how to recognize a good woman, whether he has a child with her or not. More men have ruined their lives, careers, business-es, political offices, etc., because they tethered them-selves or linked themselves to an unhealed, un-self-loving woman.

Trillions: As you went through all that, one of the things that I was thinking about was something I remember hearing when I was much, much younger and as time went on I saw more of the wisdom of. When you’re around your parents, when you’re growing up, which is where you learn some of this – though obviously you learn some of it elsewhere too – one of the things that was said was that when Mom or Dad sits you down and gives you the “birds and bees” talk, it’s general-ly clinical at best. But in fact some of the best rela-tionship training you can get is to see Mom and Dad hugging and cuddling and caring for each other and seeing stuff like that. They’re caring for themselves as well as they are manifesting that with each other. But with our busy lives, even if you have that, you’re prob-ably not showing that as much to your kids as might have been in earlier generations. I’m sure that’s part of the reason for this, that growing up we don’t have those examples or learnings.

Debrena Jackson Gandy: Well, it certainly helps, but it doesn’t become the reason why we can’t create juicy, fulfilling relationships for ourselves, because we didn’t

see it modeled. It certainly helps. But one of the mis-takes that women make – my first book is called Sa-cred Pampering Principles – is that oftentimes when a child comes onto the scene, we redirect way too much of our energy to the child, and the husband becomes alienated.

This is not intentional. But there’s nothing that’s sup-posed to come between a husband and wife when they’re in a covenant marriage. Nothing – not even the child. They’re to be a team in raising the child. Of-tentimes a woman starts to take on way too much of a feeling of “it’s my responsibility.” And the behavior starts to follow that. A lot of times you think, “I’ve got to give the child all of this attention” for the child to turn out all right. But actually it builds tremendous confidence in the child, as you mentioned, to see healthy, expressed, solid, grounded love occurring be-tween their parents. The child is actually fortified as a result of seeing and being in the space of two loving parents, where it’s expressed and it’s heard and it’s seen and it’s felt.

So we have it all twisted as women. We shift all the energy to the kid instead of letting this union continue to be fortified and fed and then out of that both of us contributing to the child. And then the funny thing is, women talk about wanting the husband to be more involved with the kids, not realizing their own behavior is what’s marginalizing him to the edge.

There’s just a lot of hypocrisy, a lot of unconscious patterns going on, a lot of confusion about love and how love behaves. We have a materialistic culture, so we know about what we can see and taste and smell and knock on. We’re a materialistic culture where we put value in what we can take in through our senses. And we’re a capitalistic culture, so it’s about pursuit of profit. So those two things are killing us, literally killing us. It’s killing us spiritually. We’re the sickest industri-alized nation, so our bodies are communicating in the form of disease and breakdown. So we’re past due for a huge paradigm shift. [There are] a lot of factors that are contributing to our massive breakdown in the are-na of loving and relating.

Trillions: True. As I’m listening to you describing a lot of this, it certainly does ring true in many ways. One of the other things that is dramatically changing – and I know that you’ve made some comments on this in the past, based on some of the research I have done – is the whole idea of courtship and how you meet peo-ple is dramatically changing. I’m interested in some of your own reactions to that, with dating apps and other ways that people are meeting with each other. At least, with Tinder and things like that, there’s a specific pur-ported objective; at least they’re clear on what they’re doing. It’s not a matter of a long-term relationship. It’s not “Mr. Right”; it’s “Mr. Right Now.” Courtship and how we meet each other [are part of] a very different world now. What are your thoughts on this?


Debrena Jackson Gandy: Yeah. Well. In my book The Love Lies, I introduce something called “Modern Court-ship.” Capital M, capital C. Modern Courtship. It has a very specific set of principles, objectives and ways of engaging. It is in contrast to what I call being in an era I call “Online Meeting.” Not “Online Dating”; you’re meeting online. And in a culture that already strug-gles with loving and relating, and already is confused about love and about sex, and has the nerve to call sex “casual,” the last thing we need is more speed in the process and something that allows us to be more shallow and to forgo depth in getting to know a per-son. So you may have one out of 20,000 people that meet somebody and have a long-term lasting relation-ship that maybe even culminates in marriage, if that’s their intention, but the odds of that are like .00001%.

And so now there’s a lot of contempt around love re-lationships. For all the reasons I mentioned earlier, all the crazy beliefs that the fabric of our Western social-ization is very anti-love and anti-relationship, if we tell the truth about it. Getting resigned. And so they say “Okay, it’ll be about a good screw.” So it’s a reducing of what used to be a deep, profound and glorious expe-rience called “love relationship” with another human being. But out of frustration, failure, wanting to avoid emotional hurt that is the result of the confusion, the belief delusions, being unhealed, we reduce it to “Let’s just have a good screw and have some body parts join up for just a few minutes. And let’s at least milk some thrill out of it and move on to the next.”

Actually, if you look at human beings, that’s a demon-stration of being very low in the maturity and evolu-tion scale. Because that reduces us to operating like animals in heat. We have the conscious ability to choose not to just be driven by hormonal urges. So we are actually devolving, in my estimation, when re-lationships are either all based on sex or can’t sustain without that or “that’s it” and there’s not even a rela-tionship around it; it’s just body parts joining. That’s where we’ve come to. We’ve justified it; we’ve glamor-ized it. That’s what we do in America, and that “makes us sick.” I think that’s a default response.

People are more frustrated because [of] what they thought [would solve the problem]. Women thought it was access to larger quantities of men. You know, “There’s no men among those I work with” or “There’s no men in my city,” which is all untrue. So the myth – or part of it – is about access to quantities of men. So now I’ve got access to 20,000 men, plenty of fish. I’ve got access to 55,000 men on Match.com or whatever. Now I’m still not able to “find” someone? It actually creates increased frustration, not less. Then the date, which we used to have when we used to go out to a physical place or space, now the date is antiquated. So in the “online dating world,” a.k.a. “online meet-ing world,” it’s mainly thumbs talking, texting, fingers talking, emailing. And we’re going from that to now

meeting up live and then having sex. So the date is not even occurring anymore. That’s the wrong direction. It’s damaging; it’s making people more pessimistic and hopeless, regardless of how we’re trying to glam-orize it.

Trillions: It probably gets to the point where – I’m not sure if this is the right word – it could make one more desperate [because] the more one tries, they see more failures. And then they say “Let me just grab more hard at the next one.” You do that, you spend less en-ergy, less thought, less heart, less passion in really getting to know someone because [as they might say] “I’m running out of time [and I need to find someone].”

Debrena Jackson Gandy: Yes, to your point, I say abso-lutely, positively! Resignation and desperation, and it’s a deadly combination.

Trillions: Desperation is never the best way to do things. In relationships, in business. It would be like going into a negotiation and the first words you say are “I’ve got to get this contract, and I’ll do whatever you want.” You would never do that in business. Why do you do that in a relationship? But we do it anyway.

One of the other things that I see as killer in relation-ships is that, in our best situations, we come togeth-er as selves – this is building on what you said. We are three-dimensional beings who understand how to love ourselves, care for ourselves and have our own uniqueness and character and development path. Then we meet someone that’s wonderful – and then we promptly kill the individual. We submerge it into the relationship. And the best relationships are where you continue to develop [individually] and the relation-ship, which is a third being, also grows.

Debrena Jackson Gandy: Particularly with women, it’s amazing how we can no longer continue to sus-tain and feed our female friendships, as it becomes all about the boyfriend or the husband. We can stop working out if we were working out before. If we have any kind of spiritual practice, it tends to cease. It is scary. It’s almost like a merge. Like I lose myself and I become a combination of him and me and the me is gone. It’s just amazing what happens. I think that was very well said. But unfortunately that’s not what tends to occur. People cease their growth and don’t realize that one of the reasons that the relationship was cre-ated was for it to enable – and be a catalyst for – new kinds of growth that could not happen in the singular journey. So we’re missing that gift altogether.

Trillions: Yours is a particular area of expertise where a lot of people speak to it, but you come across as much deeper in their thought and understanding of this. What is your background that brought you to this?

Debrena Jackson Gandy: Everything has brought me


to this. The catalyst, I would say, was the journey my own marriage relationship went through, which was about 15 years ago. We’ve now been married 23 years, but it went through a period of breakdown and almost divorce. Divorce didn’t happen, but we were at the point of both saying yes to that.

During that time, I had a powerful experience at the end of four years of trying to save the marriage [with] counseling and therapy and pastors and people pray-ing for me and reading books. And all the things you do when you are putting forth a great effort to try to save a marriage. After four years, we were both tired, we were both resigned, we were both emotionally worn out. And I was having my morning meditation and, in frustration, shouted out, “God, what do you want me to do?” because I had done all the things I knew how to do. And I didn’t realize I had not asked that question previous to that moment.

The Holy Spirit said to me, “Thank you for finally ask-ing.” And I thought, “Oh, my gosh.” I’ve been coming out of my humanity these four years, trying to figure this thing out, and I never went to the Divinity. And so God placed before me an invitation saying, “I invite you now to follow my path, because I have a way for you to not only restore this marriage but to transform it to be better than ever.” In my book, I would call that “juicy.” Juicy marriages, juicy love relationships.

And so after, I needed some cajoling because I real-ly was very resigned at that point. And God says to me, “And by the way, if you decide to say yes to this invitation, [there are] a lot of people that are going to benefit.”

Little did I know that what lay ahead was a book. Little did I know that what lay ahead was Love Academy, which I’ve now led over 45 times in states across the country. Little did I know that Mentality lay ahead, a seminar for men only around relationships so they have their sacred private space to let it rip and be truth telling. Little did I know that Covenant Academy for married couples lay ahead. Little did I know that Courtship Academy lay ahead, teaching women my Modern Courtship principles of engaging and relating to men. Little did I know all the relationship blogs and guest blogging and TV and radio and podcasts that would come out of that one “Yes!”

So when God said that a lot of people would benefit, thank goodness I wasn’t shown all the people, be-cause I would not have been able to conceive it.

So that’s how I got moved into this specific lane of love relationships. I’ve been fascinated by love rela-tionships and marriage for at least a couple of de-cades. Why do some work? Why do some not? What are the ingredients of it? Our culture tends to focus on behavior skills: Do this, do that; don’t do this, don’t do that. Well that is not working.

I already have a certain lens I bring to life. I tend to cre-ate new paradigms that are a departure from the tradi-tional or agreed way of doing things. I’m not trying to be a rebel or a radical. It’s just the way my mind works. I often create different paradigms that give me very different outcomes and a very different experience in my life. A very positive, joyful experience.

So I took that same lens and, along with my own experience with my marriage breakdown and break-through, restoration, transformation and all, I brought that way of perceiving life to this whole arena of love relationships.

But it’s interesting, because I was a business major in college and a marketing minor, so it wasn’t that I was in psychology or transpersonal psychology. So, it has really been fueled by a curiosity from a very young age, about humans, and life, and why some people have a very fulfilled experience in their lives, and why some don’t, and they might be in the same family. They might be siblings, they might be neighbors, they might be from the same street, in the same city. What makes for the different experience that two humans have in this journey called life? That’s probably been the propulsion for me moving into this human poten-tial, spiritual growth, spiritual development, empower-ment and transformation field. It’s that curiosity.

If we learn how to pay close attention, which most of us don’t, because we’re ripping and running and we’re busy… And I don’t use the term “busy” to describe my-self. Notice when I opened up, I said I have a full life, but I did not say I’m busy. That’s not a word I choose to use to describe myself, because you can be busy and making no difference.

So I have a purposeful life. I have a full plate, with only what I love on it. I’ve trained myself to pay close atten-tion to things most people miss. And if we just learn how to pay close attention in our daily lives, so many answers and so much illumination can come from just paying attention. So a lot of what I share comes from research, absolutely comes from all of the two decades of work that I’ve been doing with people all around the world. And being highly observant. You know, studying, research and all that, along with the curiosity and this lens, and training myself to be high-ly, highly observant, all of that culminates in the work I do now. And also my curiosity about love relation-ships. So it’s an eclectic background.


Beijing City Skyline and Smog. Image: Adam Gamble / shutterstock.com

Air Pollution May Be A Major Factor In

Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Transmission


Researchers in Sweden have identified another rea-son to be concerned about air pollution. Tests they did of air samples from Beijing showed trace DNA from antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The group doing the research was the Centre for An-tibiotic Resistance Research at the University of Go-thenburg. Their focus has been on understanding how and why bacteria are evolving at such a rapid rate into so-called “superbugs” that are resistant to some of the most powerful antibiotics we have.

In the study, the researchers looked at air sampled from several places around Beijing. They were specif-ically looking for genes that make bacteria resistant to antibiotics, based on a database of 864 samples of DNA collected from humans, animals and different areas of the world. And in flagging the test results, the researchers raised high concern for the presence of genes that provide resistance to carbapenems, one of the most powerful antibiotics prescribed when all else fails.

The concern associated with these discoveries is two-fold. The first is the presence of genes that suggest antibiotic-resistant bacteria may be spreading faster than ever. The second is that air pollution may be a major means of spreading these genes, which eventu-ally would mean far more rapid growth of such antibi-otic-resistant bacteria than previously imagined.

And the reason why such genes are so dangerous is that they effectively block modern medicine’s abili-ty to use antibiotics when necessary to stop certain types of infections. Unfortunately, our addiction to us-ing antibiotics for even the most minor infection – as opposed to letting the body fight some of this on its own – has over the past 50 years contributed to the rapid evolution of more virulent and antibiotic-resis-tant bacteria throughout the world.

Getting hard numbers on exactly how much of each such gene will take more research. These initial tests, though considered meaningful, are still not wide-spread enough to fully size the problem. That is part of the next section of the research.

The researchers are also looking to see if antibiotic resistance is increasing through European sewage treatment plants. Wastewater treatment in gener-al could also be a bigger factor than was previously known in creating the antibiotic-resistant bugs.

Another area of research that some are encouraging is to look for the presence of glyphosate residue, the herbicide used in connection with genetically modi-fied crops, in some of the same locations. It would not necessarily create antibiotic-resistant bacteria direct-ly but is known to cause genetic mutations in large enough quantities and could be an indirect factor. The sewage treatment plants in particular may show some larger presence of this.

Image: Lukiyanova Natalia Fenta / shutterstock.com


Despite the evidence that has already piled up else-where about glyphosate being present in dangerous levels of our food supply, the corrup U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently announced that it has stopped testing for glyphosate contamination in foods produced in the U.S.

In recent years it has been proven that glyphosate, the main active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbi-cide and the partner to its genetically-modified crops (GMOs), contaminates our food supply and is a major cause of cancer and other debilitating ailments.

As a result, the FDA seemed to be aligned to start looking at how widespread glyphosate is as a con-taminant in foods of all kinds in the U.S. It did so in part because of pressure from private groups, non-profits and even the World Health Organization, each of which had already either identified glyphosate res-idues in the nation’s and world’s food supplies or had declared that glyphosate was a likely carcinogen.

What the FDA was doing was hardly a departure from past practices. Its agency is already doing routine annual testing to detect the presence of other less-er-used pesticides. So when earlier this year the FDA announced it was adding the far-more-common gly-phosate pesticides to its tests as part of a “special assignment,” this was seen as a major positive move.

However, it was also seen with some skepticism, as the FDA, far from being a scientifically driven agency, has developed over the years into a highly politicized one – one where Monsanto has clearly used its lob-byists, cash and political muscle to block all sorts of moves to investigate, regulate and/or ban outright both its toxic GMOs and its glyphosate-loaded pesti-cides.

The recent omnibus spending bill that included the provision referred to as “The Monsanto Protection Act” is just one example of this fine handiwork. In

that bill, the law essentially blocks the ability of judg-es anywhere to issue temporary restraining orders or bans on the sale, testing, planting, harvesting or end use of the GMOs and their glyphosate companions no matter how toxic and damaging they may be to hu-man health or the environment. For all practical pur-poses, the clause blocks the constitutional mandate of checks and balances being allowed between the legislative and legal branches of government and puts Monsanto above the law.

Now, news has come out that the FDA is, in its words, putting the glyphosate residue testing program on hold. The agency claims there have been problems setting up an agreed-upon methodology for doing such testing as well as in having sufficient access to the right equipment for doing some of the testing.

After the “on hold” decision was announced, a firestorm of criticism of the political agency erupted both pub-licly and privately. Trying to calm the reactions, FDA spokeswoman Megan McSeveney did first confirm that the testing was on hold and then responded to questions with the following statement: “As testing for glyphosate will expand to several locations, we are currently working to ensure that the methods are vali-dated for use in these labs. As soon as the validation is completed, testing for glyphosate will resume.”

As to when the testing would resume, she simply said, “We cannot speculate on timing at this point.”

In the meantime, the one thing that there is no need for speculation about is the continued poisoning of the American public from the continued growth and sales of GMO products made possible thanks to heavy dos-es of Monsanto’s glyphosate herbicides.

If you care about your health, your children's health and the environment you should avoid GMO foods and purchase food that is organically grown.

FDA StopsGlyphosate

ResidueTesting and

Imperils Public Health

Image: Jun MT / shutterstock.com


$2 trillion annually in businessopportunities and the tools to land them

www.BidOcean.com

trillions · 4 trillions december 2016 trillions is the official publication of the north america...

Documents