Our core mission is inquiry.

This past year we've been looking at The Nature of Desire.

Curious?  Check out the Lecture Series tab above.


Recently we presented three key strategies to friends and supporters as we embark on our second decade of providing a unique regional forum for environmental innovators.

These strategies boil down to challenge, collaborate, and communicate:

• We’ll continue to present challenging ideas, and add opportunities for action.

• We’ll offer these opportunities by working with specific partners on each lecture.

• We’ll completely re-conceive our digital communication strategy.

Challenge
Many of our economic, social and environmental problems have solutions.  Some of these solutions are obvious.  But most of them are difficult, or we would have already employed them. What’s stopping us? Maybe it's as simple as  this: Various economic, belief and affinity groups are able to wield veto power on progress.

Cultural change, like biological evolution, can be incremental.  But it can also be sudden and transformational.  It appears we’re in the middle of rapid environmental, political and cultural change. Change happens when one paradigm loses power, and another replaces it.  But how does that happen?  And how do we participate in that process to bring about the future we want?

Past Illahee speakers have touched upon the subject of power and change in various ways.  We’ll invite some of them back, and mix them with some new faces, to focus on what appears to be a rapid social transformation – what it is, what we can do, and where we might be going - ten years into the 21st century.

Collaborate
Addressing fundamental issues like power and change is only part of the answer.  Going forward we want to collaborate more meaningfully with partners we believe in, to highlight their programs and get our audience involved with the good work that they do.  Illahee people have asked for ways to take action and we want to give them that by linking each speaker with a potential partner like The Post Carbon Institute or The Food Alliance or The Natural Step – the list goes on.

Communicate
Let's face it, this website is basically "web negative 1.0."  We need a major upgrade to the way we use digital media so we can engage and collaborate with people who get a lot of their information from their laptops and smartphones.  Over the next year we'll upgrade our database so we can communicate more effectively with all of you. We'll re-conceive our web site to give people a better sense of what the lectures are about with audio, video and interviews with speakers and their colleagues. We'll come up to speed on social media like Facebook, and yes, Twitter.

So, this gives you a sense of our organizational plans, how we'd like to operate, and what we'll be up to next season. 

Here’s the place where you come in.  What do you think?  Give us your feedback in the coming days, weeks and months (info at illahee dot org). 

And if you’re excited with what we’re doing, go ahead and hit that Paypal button on this page, call us at 503-222-2537, or contact us via US mail at:

Illahee
720 SW Washington, Suite 800
Portland OR 97205

Your contribution will provide essential funding and is tax-deductible to the full extent of the law. We also accept bequests and gifts of appreciated stock. Illahee's tax identification number is 93-1260527.