I was interviewed for a Jewish newspaper on the work I do for Reboot . I've pulled out an excerpt, but you can find the whole article here.

Are there any continuities between your work with the Milarepa Fund organizing the Tibetan Freedom Concerts and your involvement with Reboot?

Yes, the continuity between the two is that young people are powerful agents of change. Also that culture is the right venue to engage young people. The work that I do now is a continuation of the concerts, and stems from my study of how to engage people, to build movements and communities, and to create culture.

People today engage in community and in the world differently. They look at institutions differently. The work that my company does helps nonprofits re-engineer their activities around this new way of engaging.

Most nonprofit institutions in this country haven’t realized that people are demanding a different way to be involved, while many for-profit ones have. I’m personally tired of social change organizations being 20 years behind the corporations, especially because I have a hunch that nonprofits, with aspirational missions at their core rather than products, will excel at this new type of engagement beyond what the for-profits have been able to do.

Recently my sister, Lhadon (Executive Director of Students For A Free Tibet) traveled to Beijing just in time for the one year countdown to the 2008 Olympics. Her plan was to travel and blog about how China is doing on improving their human rights record and try to meet with the International Olympics Committee president as he was visiting Beijing. By her being in Beijing and blogging her thoughts and feelings was testing China and their stance on freedom of expression. The second part of their plan was to document and release footage of a banner hang on the Great Wall of China.

With careful planning and technical savvy SFT was able to pass the footage to their New York office and release it to the world keeping it out of the hands of Chinese authorities and censors. The actions generated a lot of press around the world. I spoke to the CBC during the protests, and later, a great news story aired on Canada's national news, SFT Harnesses The Power of the Internet, to call out a few good ones.

As for how China is doing on the freedom of expression? Shortly after the banner action happened they arrested and deported my sister simply for writing and expressing her feelings.

Deyden has been doing a ton of press lately because her sister, Lhadon who is the Executive Director of Students for a Free Tibet, was in Beijing, and blogging about her trip regularly. Simultaneously, six other Tibet independence activists hung a banner from the Great Wall of China.


After 6 days of posting video and text to her blog, www.beijingwideopen.org, Lhadon was arrested and deported, along with the six protesters.

Here is a clip of Deyden's interview on the CBC.

More here at www.beijingwideopen.org