Lisa Niver's Blog: We Said Go Travel, page 82
December 28, 2020
Thank you to #Afluencer for naming me one of the "10 Top...
Thank you to #Afluencer for naming me one of the "10 Top #Travel #Influencers of 2021"https://t.co/W27s5KLRBo
Also in "The Top 210+ Influencers to Watch in 2021"
https://t.co/qvTMIWZkr3@afluencerlyfe #influencer #Journalist #traveler #video #2021 #grateful #gratitude #YAY pic.twitter.com/UvAtQaudwo
— Lisa Niver
(@wesaidgotravel) December 24, 2020
The post appeared first on We Said Go Travel.
Creating 2020 Content during COVID-19
2020 has not been the year any of us expected. I did write for Ms. Magazine, Jewish Journal, TODAY and for the first time for Thrive Global where I have 13 articles about books and movies. I never gave up. I kept making videos and being on podcasts and I was even a ski expert for a TV documentary! I did travel in Jan, Feb and March and have been home in Los Angeles since March 9, 2020. I am hopeful that with the vaccine, 2021 will be very different.
Please see below for my 2020 articles, interviews, podcasts and videos. To see all of my articles on We Said Go Travel from 2020, click here.
December 2020
Thrive Global: Book Review: Building Life Again After Loss: Sliding Doors, Braver Than You Think and My Wife Said You May Want to Marry MeInterview: Just Breathe: A Dialogue with Mallika ChopraInterview: How Did She Do it? Learning about Writer and Executive Producer, Tiffany Paulsen!Book Review: Ready for Better Relations? GROUP has the answers!Book Review: “How Jew(ish) Are You?”Time Matters: Podcast Interview: My Pearls of Wisdom
November 2020
Thrive Global: Book Review: Coping with COVID through Groundhog Day, Total Meditation and Badass HabitsJewish Journal: Book Review: The Gift of Kindness: 2020, COVID and ChanukahNewsletters: 131 on AWeber WSGT Newsletter
[image error]Lisa Niver on her COVID birthday Oct 18, 2020
October 2020
Thrive Global: Book Review: Escape into Fiction this Fall: 12 books to fall in love with
Video: My Birthday StayCation in Venice Beach
Sept 2020
Interview: CNN Underscored: How to create the outdoor workspace of your dreamsThrive GlobalBook Review: For The People: Kamala HarrisBook Review: Which Path Will You Pick? Jodi Picoult’s The Book of Two WaysBook Review: Searching for Answers, “Finding My Father” with Deborah TannenBook Review: Women Do Need A Lab of Their Own: Rita Colwell
[image error]Lisa Niver is a winner at the 2020 62nd Southern California Journalism Awards!
August 2020
Interview Travel Expert: Reader’s Digest: 13 Things to Never Say to TSA AgentsInterview/Podcast: Sessions by MonsterChat: Talking Travel with Lisa NiverThrive Global: Book Review: Are you ready to PIVOT? Be Your Own Publicist! Ask Aliza LichtBook Review: Is Talking Through Technology Making You More Human? with Rana el KalioubyBook Review: Finding Ways to Be More Human with Jen Pastiloff
Video: Walking Santa Monica Beach
July 2020
Ms. Magazine: Lessons from the Newest, Youngest Woman Superhero: “Stargirl”Interview: Authority Magazine: “Travel Expert Lisa Niver: Seeing Light at the End of the Tunnel; 5 Reasons To Be Hopeful During This Corona Crisis”Travel Expert/Host Video: Beaches Resorts Celebration of PADI’s International Women’s Dive DayInterview/Podcast: Mind Your Marketing with Cave SocialGrant: Center for Cultural Innovation Los Angeles County Visual Artists grantChalkboard Champions: Science educator Lisa Niver at the Enkereri School in Kenya
June 2020
Webseries: ScubaNationTV: Dancing with GusInterview Cruise Expert: Reader’s Digest: “13 Ways Cruises Could Change Forever After Coronavirus“Interview: Thrive Global: “Survive And Thrive After A Divorce”
Video: Dancing underwater as part of PADI’s International Women’s Dive Day
May 2020
Interview: Thrive Global: “From Avocation To Vocation: How I Turned Travel Into A Career“Interview: Facebook Live: Candid COVID19 Conversation with Celia WernerInterview: The Plug by XOMAD: Building a Creative Travel Blogging BusinessMs. Magazine: Book Review: 8 Books That Will Transport YouBook Review: “Untamed”: Brave Means Living From the Inside Out
Video: Walking on Santa Monica Beach: Do you see the sea lions?
April 2020
Interview/Podcast: University of Pennsylvania Momentum 2020: The Power of Penn Women: Lisa Niver C89 – Try, try again Interview/Podcast: Superman Saved My Girl Scout Troop
Video from my last trip in 2020: Skiing in the back country in March 2020
March 2020
Ms. Magazine: We Heart: These Seven Feminist Efforts to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030Bored Panda Travel: I Might Be #safeathome And Stuck Inside, But I Remember When I Walked With The Animals!
Video: Travel Conferences in 2020: IMM, NYTimes Travel Show and LA Travel and Adventure Show
February 2020
Interview: Reader’s Digest: “What These Women Love About Being Single: Life is an Adventure!”Ms. Magazine: 10 Global Travel Adventures To Inspire Global Eco-ActivismMedium: Can your family vacation change the world?Bored Panda Travel: Do You Want To Walk With Polar Bears? I Did It And You Can Too!
Videos from scuba diving at Beaches Turks and Caicos
January 2020
TODAY: Cultivating Curiosity in the Galapagos IslandsMs. Magazine: How Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti is Mixing Business with Feminism25 Years After Beijing, What’s Next for Women Worldwide?
Videos from my adventures in the Galapagos Islands:
Please see “A Decade of Content from Lisa Niver: From 2020 to 2010,” for more of my articles, interviews and videos.
The post Creating 2020 Content during COVID-19 appeared first on We Said Go Travel.
December 27, 2020
December 26, 2020
WOW, 2020!
[image error]Photo by Cherice Taylor
2020 … whew, what a start
Happy New Year!
What, Kobe’s gone?
Coronavirus is here!
Telework and school work are now what is known.
Isolation, illness, death, repeat
Please follow directions,
so once again we’ll be able to go out and eat.
Families together, yet apart.
Zoom and FaceTime to the rescue
That darn technology sure is smart
What’s the lesson?
Why has the world been brought to her knees?
What’s the lesson?
What do you see?
I see giving. I see dedication.
I see sacrifice. I see collaboration.
I see families walking, talking, resting and grieving.
I see gratitude, bravery, selfless cooperation and some desperation.
What’s the lesson?
2020, you’ve made us reset.
You’ve made us slow down.
It took a pandemic to bring back humanity.
It took a pandemic to make the world pause.
I am hopeful and prayerful
that we have learned the lesson.
2020, let integrity and
love guide the next part.
By Cherice Flanagan Taylor
Copyright 4/13/2020
[image error]Photo by Cherice Flanagan Taylor
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December 25, 2020
Will Santa Love Me if I am Gay?
[image error]Photo from MonoVisions
Buckminster Fuller often noted that that we have enough wealth and technological capacity for everyone in the world to live in abundance — if we would only collectively decide to it. As he put it, we have within us the capability “to make the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, though spontaneous cooperation.” At this historical moment, when the world has been brought to its knees by global pandemic, economic downturn, racial injustice, and political strife, such optimism seems naïve. And yet, even without access to the vast calculations for which Fuller was famous, there remains something intuitively true about his sober conviction on this point. Anyone who has a sense, deep down, that society could be working better, knows what I am talking about.
As an urban planner, much of my thirty-year career has been focused on the systems and infrastructure we need in society to undertake such large-scale economic distribution. I have worked with school districts, colleges, and employers on workforce initiatives; advised local government agencies and planning commissions on equitable development; and organized teams at financial institutions and supermarket operators to open branches or grocery stores in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty. All of these efforts have sought to address the economic divide by changing the systems through which basic products and services are brought to people in their everyday lives.
But as fruitful as these efforts have sometimes been, they have often felt unnecessarily laborious, grindingly slow, and deeply resisted by people who are afraid of change. That’s partly because they often depended on a few people to do the heavy lifting. And that has just never felt completely sustainable. Moreover, the inherited infrastructure on which we graft these changes is typically made up of entrenched bureaucracies. Navigating them has entailed understanding the hierarchies of leadership, the divisions of roles and responsibilities; and the organizational cultures, protocols, and practices. I have seldom seen evidence of the “spontaneous cooperation” that Buckminster Fuller envisioned.
And yet I hold with certainty to the idea that it is possible. One reason I do involves a Christmas story that is little known to many people today. It started in 1912 in the James M. Farley building of the United States Postal Office in New York City, a grim, imposing building directly across Eighth Avenue from Penn Station. It is a building whose vast size and granite columns could not more perfectly exemplify the control and inflexibility built into modern bureaucracies. The story concerns an unlikely man, Frank Hitchcock, who some might say embodied the principles of command and control institutions. As Postmaster General he aggressively prosecuted mail fraud, and he led the development of the country’s airmail service.
In December 1912, however, Hitchcock became aware that his postal workers were becoming preoccupied with what at first seemed to be a relatively inconsequential topic: what to do with the avalanche of letters arriving in the post office addressed to Santa Claus in the North Pole. Most letters had return addresses, which conscientious post workers recognized as tenements on the lower east side or in other poor neighborhoods across the Burroughs. Hitchcock made a rather extraordinary executive decision, one that that ran counter to all conventional training of postal workers: he authorized them to open and read the letters.
And he didn’t stop there. Under his leadership, New York’s postal workers began creating and maintaining a vast record-keeping system. Children’s names and addresses were painstakingly noted in ledgers with details on the toys they had requested: wooden hobby horses, wagons, tricycles, model trains, tin soldiers, Teddy Bears (popularized a decade earlier by Teddy Roosevelt), Campbell Kids dolls (manufactured by the soup company starting in 1909) or the new Kewpie dolls. Lists of requested toys and quantities went out through informal associations and networks in New York’s middle class and affluent families, as well as civic and charitable societies. Toys were purchased, boxed, wrapped, and delivered to the James Farley building, where postal workers affixed the appropriate labels and handed them off to deliverers. The initiative has continued to the current day and expanded nationwide. In fact, the US Postal Service has declared that 2020 is the first year that “Operation Santa” is national.
What is significant about this strategy — and what always stays with me– is that it created opportunities for large numbers of people to participate meaningfully in a bold crystallized vision. In this case, it is a vision propelled by the archetypal ideal of Santa Clause, the principle that there is a higher intelligence in humanity that can figure out to how to give everyone what would make him or her most happy. To be sure, such a system would not work without the bureaucratic infrastructure of the United States Postal Service as a coordinating entity and delivery apparatus. But nor would it work through bureaucracy alone. The creativity, ingenuity, and sense of responsibility are distributed widely.
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In a new documentary, “Dear Santa,” filmmaker Dana Nachman interviews a New York City postal worker, Michael Munoz. Michael, who is gay, read a letter from a little boy who had not asked Santa for a toy, but simply asked him if he loved gay children. Michael mobilized dozens of his friends to pull together a pile of books and materials that would show the little boy how loved he was by a community he had not even met yet. As I recall childhood T.V. shows about Santa Claus, they usually depict him as an wise man who seemed to know about every child’s conduct and needs. But I never saw one Santa depicted who could have pulled off what Michael Munoz did.
And that really was Buckminster Fuller’s point. If humanity ever decides to collectively deploy the intelligence and compassion of every person, it will be as if we have once again discovered fire. And I, for one, think we will get there.
[image error]Pictured: Michael Muñoz from The Advocate
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December 24, 2020
Time Matters: My Pearls of Widsom
Thank you to Cherice Taylor for interviewing me on her show, Time Matters!
[image error]Lisa Niver and Cherice Taylor
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From Cherice Taylor’s Linkedin:
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Thank you for including me in your show!
Lisa Ellen Niver, M.A. Education, is a science teacher and an award-winning travel expert who has explored 101 countries and six continents. She sailed the seven seas by cruise ship for seven years and backpacked for three years in Asia. Find her talking travel at KTLA TV and in her We Said Go Travel videos with over one and a quarter million views (1,250,000) on her YouTube channel. She is the founder of We Said Go Travel which is read in 235 countries, named #3 on the top 1000 Travel Blogs and the top female travel blogger 3 times in 2019. She has hosted Facebook Live for USA Today 10best, is verified on Twitter and has over 160,000 followers across social media. Niver is a judge for the Gracies Awards for the Alliance of Women in Media and also ran fifteen travel competitions publishing over 2500 writers and photographers from 75 countries on her own site, We Said Go Travel.
From 2017 to 2020 in the Southern California Journalism Awards and National Arts and Entertainment Journalism Awards, she has won three times and been a finalist fourteen times for her broadcast television segments, print and digital articles. Niver won an award for her print magazine article for Hemispheres Magazine for United Airlines in the 2020 Southern California Journalism Awards. She was also a finalist for four other categories including online journalist of the year, digital story for activism journalism with Ms. Magazine, educational reporting for Wharton Magazine and a broadcast lifestyle feature for KTLA TV in Los Angeles.
Niver won a 2019 NAEJ (National Arts and Entertainment Journalism) award for one of her KTLA TV segments and was a finalist for articles published in both Ms. Magazine and Wharton Magazine. In 2018, she was a finalist for stories in Smithsonian, PopSugar Fitness and the Saturday Evening Post. Niver won a 2017 Southern California Journalism Award for her print story for the Jewish Journal and was a finalist for travel reporting.
Niver has written for AARP, American Airways, Delta Sky, En Route (Air Canada), Hemispheres (United Airlines), Jewish Journal, Luxury Magazine, Ms. Magazine, Myanmar Times, National Geographic, POPSUGAR, Robb Report, Saturday Evening Post, Scuba Diver Life, Sierra Club, Ski Utah, Smithsonian, TODAY, Trivago, USA Today 10best, Wharton Magazine and Yahoo. She is writing a book, “Brave Rebel: 50 Scary Challenges Before 50,” about her most recent travels and insights. Look for her underwater SCUBA diving, in her art studio making ceramics or helping people find their next dream trip. http://lisaniver.com/one-page/
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December 22, 2020
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