Background: on Sunday, @dorotea, @hazem and @danohu talked a bit about arranging Berlin-based interviews for the stewardship case studies.
We wanted to choose interviews that would cover different aspects of stewardship, so we could understand it from all angles. But it turned out we didn’t really have a clear/shared idea of what stewardship is.
So this is an attempt to break down stewardship into component parts – both to understand it better ourselves, and to choose the best people or groups to interview:
Definitions
- From elsewhere
- Dictionary: "the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one's care"
- Wikipedia: "Stewardship is an ethic that embodies the responsible planning and management of resources"
- In Christianity: as a way of thinking about the environment and social justice, -- e.g. http://www.usccb.org/beliefs-and-teachings/what-we-believe/stewardship/
“As each one has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of God’s varied grace” (1 Pt 4:10).
What identifies a steward? Safeguarding material and human resources and using them responsibly are one answer; so is generous giving of time, talent, and treasure. But being a Christian steward means more. As Christian stewards, we receive God’s gifts gratefully, cultivate them responsibly, share them lovingly in justice with others, and return them with increase to the Lord
- From within Edgeryders:
- "Stewardship is the act of taking care, preserving, maintaining. We mean it in the sense that communities – starting with us – need to become better at being stewards of public goods"
- "the ability to come together to take care of assets in an unstable context"
- https://edgeryders.eu/scattered-fields-notes-from-london-s-stewardship-meetup
- "Stewardship manifests as the gardening of an ecology. In so much that it is not curation or archiving. Stewardship can only relate to that which is active - it acknowledges and works towards the preservation and growth of use value, exclusively. "
- "work against the sense of just working for today"
- "act as carrier of the learnings of what we develop around Stewardship to communities who...could benefit"
- "creating conditions for real support and mutual aid" [including mental health]
- "“responsibility of stewards to ensure something doesn’t get fucked up by externalities"
Breaking it down
- Dealing with public goods
- Preserving
- Protecting
- Maintaining
- Support and mutual aid