The Wikipedia entry captures the breadth of her work that explores loving, courage, vulnerability, shame, empathy, and leadership. She does not focus on practice itself, but rather on the core stuff that transformative democratic practice seeks to develop.

Two short statements from her website says a lot about her approach to her transformative work:

“I’m not here to make people comfortable or to be liked. My purpose is to know and experience love. This means excavating the unsaid. In the world and in me.”

“Cultivating meaningful connection is a daring and vulnerable practice—and one that isn’t possible without being a good steward of the stories we tell and the stories we hear.”

Few people have promoted and developed an understanding of the powerful social learning tool called the “community of practice” as Wenger has. He has done the job so well that the GDProject sees the basic unit for growing democracy in any location and at whatever scale to be what we call the Transformative Community of Democratic Practice.

Here’s one way he describes it: “A community of practice is a bit like a romantic relationship. It is as fragile and as resilient. It is as dependent on the personal engagement of members, on their social connections, and on their sense of individual and collective identity. And it requires as much care. Like the growth of a couple, the development of a community is a delicate process involving interpersonal dynamics, trust, and mutual commitment—and resulting in a new social entity.”

His website is a complete library of his work on the CofP. He also shares a good bit of his life story there.

An excerpt from a book he co-wrote with Richard McDermott and William M. Snyder is in The Project section here on our website: Seven Principles for Cultivating Communities of Practice.

Parker Palmer’s book, HEALING THE HEART OF DEMOCRACY: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of The Human Spirit, was a major inspiration for the Growing Democracy Project. He practically lays out our whole transformative program:

“When we choose to engage, not evade, the tension of our differences, we will become better equipped to participate in a government of, by, and for the people as we expand some of our key civic capacities:

• To listen to each other openly and without fear, learning how much we have in common despite our differences
• To deepen our empathy for the alien “other” as we enter imaginatively into the experiences of people whose lives are radically unlike our own
• To hold what we believe and know with conviction and be willing to listen openly to other viewpoints, changing our minds if needed
• To seek out alternative facts and explanations whenever we find reason to doubt our own truth claims or the claims made by others, thus becoming better informed
• To probe, question, explore, and engage in dialogue, developing a fuller, more three-dimensional view of reality in the process
• To enter the conflicted arena of politics, able to hold the dynamics of that complex force field in ways that unite the civic community and empower us to hold government accountable to the will of the people
• To welcome opportunities to participate in collective problem solving and decision making, generating better solutions and making better decisions as we work with competing ideas
• to feel more at home on the face of the earth amid differences of many sorts, better able to enjoy the fruits of diversity.”

As a legendary author he has this to say about his legacy: “What’s important to me is the way people have taken my words into their own lives in their own way—and then carried all of that into communities, institutions and the larger society. Without the deep, long-term partnership I’ve had with the Center for Courage & Renewal, none of that would have happened on the scale it has. I’m forever grateful for this gift of colleagues, friends and fellow travelers.”