Will McGarvey is Pastor at Community Presbyterian Church of Pittsburg, California and Executive Director of the Interfaith Council of Contra Costa County. He is an active force in the Bay Area and beyond. Will shares about his recent experience on the Interfaith Council where he found that service can often find common ground in security, […]

Nevida Butler, former Executive Director of the Ecumenical Hunger Program in East Palo Alto, retired but couldn’t stay away. Why? She loved the many families and individuals who struggle to just get by in Silicon Valley. So, she returned in 2013 to work as a contractor. Housing in Silicon Valley, home of high tech, high […]

Brandan Robertson, lead pastor at the Mission Gathering Christian Church in San Diego, prolific author, and a somewhat reluctant activist, is a valued partner of the AWI. Brandan has with a vital ministry grounded in conservative evangelical Christianity. After coming out as a gay man, he now finds himself in the position of bridge builder, […]

Carolyn Anderson, DMin Candidate and Director of the Seminary Singers Choir, is a musical treasure, with the special ability to hear and express songs in real time. Classically trained, she uses that as a solid foundation for improvisation and exploration. After Floyd Thompkins of the Applied Wisdom Institute joined her to lead worship one day, […]

Brandon Hoeflein is a PhD candidate in Clinical Psychology at Palo Alto University. He, as AWI’s first TA, is the individual who blazed a trail the magic that happens in the AWI seminars. He is the person who makes the space that enables people to move forward on their spiritual journey and help others. If […]

Dr. Michael Adee, Director of the Global Faith and Justice Project, a partner of the Applied Wisdom Institute, was with us on the Marin campus to collaborate on an upcoming certificate program that will train the next generation of LGBTQ leadership. His experiences around the dining room table growing up in Louisiana gives clues to […]

Dr. Carson is Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute and a Professor of History at Stanford University and. For over 30 years, Carson has focused his career on the works of Dr. King and the movements that his words inspired. Dr. Carson was not the obvious choice to be the […]

Debray Carpenter, born and raised in San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point, a historically African-American community, is an emerging technology leader and a positive force in his community. He takes us through his perspective of the massive changes in San Francisco brought on by the rapid ascent of Bay Area tech titans and their employees that often […]

Byron Reeves, the Paul C. Edwards Professor of Communication in the Department of Communication at Stanford University and co-author of The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, and New Media Like Real People and Places, is on the cutting edge as media is a vital component of many if not all sectors. With electrodes […]

Annanda is an Associate Pastor at First Presbyterian Palo Alto and an advocate for the LGBTQ community. Annanda and I, Stewart Noyce, exemplify the unity and diversity one finds in the spirit. From appearances, we look very different, in age, race and sex. Yet, we share an understanding that the spirit speaks to us all […]