Independent Sector
The Fetzer Institute and Independent Sector join together in a multi-year collaboration to mainstream inner work in the voluntary sector and beyond. Both organizations aspire to catalyze a spiritually grounded movement to counter the toxicity and polarization that has been building in American civic life over the past several decades. We join together in this endeavor with a sense of urgency to address the spiritual and moral crisis with which we are increasingly beset.
Compassionate Leadership a Spiritual Innovation?
Compassionate leadership, a rare skill set, is a core competency Uvinie Lubecki is dedicated to making commonplace through her work with Leading Through Connection. No stranger to the business sector, Uvinie has worked in the start-up world selecting, managing, and evaluating innovation projects. She was part of the incubation team at Aetna; head of business strategy and new product innovation at RelayHealth McKesson; and a management consultant on Deloitte’s innovation strategy team.
Sacrality Practice: Feeling Spiritual
Our free, downloadable “Guide to Exploring Spirituality & Civic Life” includes key findings from “What Does Spirituality Mean to Us? A Study of Spirituality in the US,” related activities, questions, and actions to help you explore your own spirituality and how it relates to your civic life. We invite you to use the following prompt from the guide for this month’s practice.
Sacridity Practice: Taming Our Egos
“The spiritual life, the spiritual work is fundamentally about, for us normal human beings, overcoming the many facets of our own egoism, the tyranny of the false self,” says Kabir Helminski, co-founder and co-director of The Threshold Society. The challenge is that the ego is frequently more powerful than our will, often outsmarting our clever thinking with its subversive and devious nature. But there is something that the ego will give into, and that is sacred love.
Sacrality Practice: Visualizing Spirituality
Last year, we released “What Does Spirituality Mean to Us? A Study of Spirituality in the US,” a groundbreaking study designed to help us explore what spirituality means to us and how it influences our civic lives. The study revealed that:
Esperanza International
Esperanza International cultivates global citizenship through service.
TechBridgeWorld: Technology with a Global Heart
This project will test the prototype of the Stand-Alone-Braille-Tutor (SABT). The SABT helps blind children learning to write using braille, thereby creating a cognitive pathway that promises to take down socio-economic barriers as well.
Toward a New Contract Theory
A previous project provided planning funds for a symposium on the doctrine of “just price,” which questioned the assumption that the field of private transactions is alien to love by proposing a general standard of equality in exchange based on the proposition that the presence of justice can be considered as a minimum requirement for the emergence of love. Building on the outcomes of the symposium, this project requests support to develop a book proposal for a university publisher.
Leading to a Compassionate Society: A Toolkit for Women in Post-Conflict and Transitioning Societies
To develop a learning manual: Leading to a Compassionate Society: A Workshop Toolkit for Women in Post-Conflict and Transitioning Societies. To develop strategies that promote forgiveness, tolerance, and compassion, the target audience for the workshops is women in Muslim-majority societies and other societies that are currently undergoing revolutions/regime change/coups or are otherwise in the throes of rapid political and social transition.
Moral Elevation and the Brain
Among all of the chemicals human body produces, oxytocin is distinctly positioned to drive prosocial states and may very well ease suffering. The study aspires to undertake foundational research on neurochemistry of love. When completed, this paired look into oxytocin and pain will determine how increases in oxytocin can trigger a parallel reduction in the experience of pain. The findings of the research would have benefits in terms of enhancing quality of life materially and psychologically while at same time reducing malaise, akin to experiences of spiritual uplift.