March 2010 Archives

With each project I engage in my collaborative consulting practice, I dig a little deeper to examine the root causes of policy failure and social injustice as a whole. I'm reminded of my favorite professor in graduate school at Brandeis, Dr. David Gil. In my graduate studies, I focused on oppression: sources, dynamics and manifestations. The first day I walked into one of Dr. Gil's courses, he said (in his thick Austrian accent), "If you want to begin to understand social policy as we have it today, you must go back to the beginning and understand the first roots of oppression - when individuals began to store food and control its distribution." After that, one of my classmates asked about our reading list for the semester. Dr. Gil handed us each a bibliography of no less than 100 books and commented, "You can start here."