➢ I’ll be leading a team of consultants on a major, California-wide initiative designed to improve access to healthcare for key populations. The project is sponsored by the state’s largest healthcare foundation, The California Endowment (“TCE”), and involves a consortium of healthcare leaders and institutions across the state. Our work will shape major policies and strategies of TCE’s Building Healthy Communities initiative, which will invest $500,000 to $3 million per year for ten years in each of fourteen sites across California – with a goal of dramatically increasing ten crucial health outcomes for millions of people. We also anticipate that the healthcare leaders and institutions in the consortium will spin off several larger projects that will, in turn, affect several more million people.

In addition to being excited by the aims, scope and funding of this project, I am delighted that the project calls for using some of the most leading-edge approaches in complexity-science consulting (which applies insights from the study of complex systems in nature, society and science to human organizations). The initial meeting of sponsors and consortium leaders in November 2009 was to determine whether or not consortium members would undertake this project. Given the complexity of the issues, conventional consulting approaches would not have been effective. Instead, my colleagues and I used practices from evolutionary biology, scenario planning, and The World Café to facilitate consortium leaders through grappling with weighty issues, after which they arrived at a decision to undertake this initiative. Throughout 2010, we look forward to using similarly innovative complexity-science consulting practices in service to the great mission of this project.

➢ I’ll be serving as producer of or special advisor to three films about Two Spirit and Twin Spirit people. These include:

• A film directed by four-time Emmy award winning director and cameraman, Rick Butler. The film will center on an historic gathering of Two Spirit and Twin Spirit leaders in 2008, and will include footage from several other facets of Two Spirit and Twin Spirit life.
  
  
• "Hidden History," a 90-minute documentary on the sacred spirituality of Two Spirits, Twin Spirits and our counterparts among Indigenous peoples on all continents. Directed by Peabody and Telly award winning producer and director, Cheryl Rosenthal, shooting on "Hidden History" began in 2009.
  
  
• A rare interview with the great Two-Spirit poet, novelist, scholar and activist, Paula Gunn Allen, completed a few months before her death in late 2008. Directed by Carmen Goodyear and Laurie York of Turtle Time Productions, producers of the award-winning documentary, "Freedom To Marry," we hope to get clearance from Paula Gunn Allen’s estate to release the film by mid 2010.
  
  These films are significant not just because of their affirmation of the centrality to Indigenous life of Two Spirits, Twin Spirits and our counterparts on all continents. Additionally, they point to key roles that we play among many Indigenous peoples as principal stewards of the wisdom traditions, ceremonies and practices for honoring the interconnectedness of all life – from harmonious interactions with the so-called “natural world”, to harmonious and effective ways of organizing groups and societies. In this regard, these films highlight critical contributions from the Indigenous world towards shifting our society towards a life-sustaining civilization.
  
  Stay tuned for news of opportunities to contribute to the production of these wonderful films.

➢ I’ll be building on my work in 2008 and 2009 as Executive Director of Shades of Equality Coalition, documenting the Coalition’s activities, campaigns, and stories --- all to be featured centrally in The Loving Quilt: A People’s History of Marriage Equality and Family Justice Movements and StoryCorps OutLoud.