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CONNECTIONS: COMMON INTEREST GROUPS
This section of our website is intended to provide a space where classmates, wives, and associates can describe interests they are exploring or projects in which they are engaged and would welcome others from ’52 as collaborators. If you would like others to join you in your work or pursuit of your interests, please provide our webmasters with a brief description of your work and a precise statement of how others could join.
Contents:
1. Healing Racial, Ethnic, and Other Group Relationships -- Sustained Dialogue (Hal Saunders)
2. A Walk Through Time ... From Stardust to Us (Sid Liebes) |
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Healing Racial, Ethnic, and Other Group Relationships
Hal Saunders posts the following in hopes of finding classmates with common interests
For the last thirty plus years, much of my professional career has focused on helping groups in deep-rooted human conflicts to transform their relationships. In the last decade, I have conceptualized from my experience a process that I call Sustained Dialogue. Today we have partners in Russia, Tajikistan, South Africa, and New Zealand. AND in the United States college students on a dozen campuses are using the process to improve relationships ranging from racial and ethnic to gay-lesbian straight and far right-liberal and others between.
This college movement started at Princeton and grew out of the ‘02-’52 relationship. Last year’s Princeton student leader is working this year with my International Institute for Sustained Dialogue as a catalyst in moving this experience to other campuses. At the Kettering Foundation a couple of years ago we held an experimental workshop with non governmental organizations in five North American communities to deal with racial and ethnic relationships in their communities—black, white, Hispanic, Asian (several nationalities), native American. We are also investigating uses in corporate settings where dysfunctional relationships often reduce effectiveness.
I would be very much interested in knowing who else in the class has similar interests. I would be particularly interested in any thoughts from those with long experience in the corporate world on how to introduce this process there.
Rather than burdening this space to describe the process of Sustained Dialogue, may I point anyone who is interested in exchanging views to our Institute’s website:
www.sustaineddialogue.org and invite your responses to hsaunders@kettering.org. I look forward to any kindred spirits out there in ‘52.
Hal
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A Walk Through Time ... from Stardust to Us
Opportunity: Champion or otherwise bring the exhibit "A Walk Through Time ... from Stardust to Us" ("the Walk") to your community.
What is the Walk? It is a transportable one-mile-long outdoor exhibit unfolding a scientific understanding of the 5,000 million-year evolution of life on Earth. Each foot of the Walk corresponds to one million years. The Walk comprises eighty-nine panels of text and color illustrations mounted on easels placed along the route to depict significant events and concepts. Background and a web-formatted version of the exhibit are available on-line at: http://www.fgconline.org/wtt.
Why the Walk? The Walk is motivated by the belief that worldviews that sustain the accelerating life-destructive and future-destroying behaviors we witness today are inadequate to the times and unbefitting the gifts of life and human intellect. As distinguished biologist and Pulitzer prize-winning author E.O. Wilson puts it, "The question of the century is: How best can we shift to a culture of permanence, both for ourselves and for the biosphere that sustains us?"
One of the world's magnificent solvers of great problems, Albert Einstein, offered the following profound and prophetic insight: "Problems cannot be solved at the same level of awareness that created them." Scientific knowledge in the hands of technologists, acting at our behest, has granted us unprecedented power to satisfy material desires, while, often in manifestation of the Law of Unintended Consequences, causing or abetting our greatest problems. On the other hand, science has enormously expanded our level of awareness of the Universe in which we live. Looking inward we have deciphered the genetic code and examined the particles that make up the particles that constitute the nuclei of atoms. Gazing outward toward the far reaches of the Universe we observe that our Sun is but one of a universe of stars comparable in number to the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world.
Rapidly evolving scientific understanding of our origins and our place in the scheme of things, awareness of the long potential future for life, and what we are doing today to foreclose options for that future present a tremendous opportunity. The Epic of Evolution, or Universe Story, must be presented to the world not only as interesting science, but also as a grand cross-cultural context for identifying and addressing the most significant issues of the future of life, for instilling humility, and for inspiring responsibility and action commensurate with our power to affect the future.
The physical exhibit: The Walk, created in 1997 under sponsorship of the Hewlett-Packard Company, is the property of the Palo Alto, California educational non-profit Foundation for Global Community. The exhibit panels are color printed in UV-resistant ink on 30"x45" paper, double-sided laminated and stretched onto 5-ft. easels. The easels are stored in a customized 18-ft. trailer hauled to location by commercial or private suitable towing vehicle. The exhibit can be laid out in serpentine form to conform to site constraints. The Walk has been presented in parks, zoos, botanical gardens, city plazas, university campuses, research institutes, corporate campuses, parade grounds, on urban sidewalks, and, occasionally, in large indoor areas. A surveyor's measuring wheel is provided to facilitate course measurement easel placement.
Where the Walk has been shown: In addition to presentations throughout the U.S., the Walk has been shown in Australia, Canada, Costa Rica (Spanish), England, Germany (German), Mexico (Spanish), Switzerland (German), Singapore, and South Africa, and soon to be in Portugal (Portuguese).
Bringing the Walk to your community: Domestic rental cost for up to two weeks is $4,000 for non-profit and cultural-event sponsors. Commercial hauling is available for approximately $1 per mile, each way. Exhibits are housed in California and Pennsylvania. If you are interested in exploring the possibility of bringing the Walk to your community please contact exhibit presentation coordinator:
Samantha Schoenfeld
Foundation for Global Community
222 High Street
Palo Alto, CA 94301-1040
and/or classmate:
Sid Liebes
98 Monte Vista Avenue
Atherton, CA 94027
Tel: 650-322-4719
Fax: 650-324-9720
E-mail: sidliebes@earthlink.net
A book, "A Walk Through Time ... from Stardust to Us" by Liebes, Sahtouris, & Swimme containing all of the exhibit text and color illustrations plus augmenting text, is available, hard copy list $29.95 (available from Foundation for Global Community for sale price of $25, including domestic shipping; contact Samantha Schoenfeld, above).
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