Awakin Calls

Sonia Deotto is co-founder and executive director of OraWorldMandala, a global peace movement whose objective is to use art and activism to spread the practice of ahimsa (nonviolence).  Since 2004, the headquarters of Ora World Mandala Research/Action Lab have been located at the Peace Research Centre of Gujarat Vidyapith (a university founded by Mahatma Gandhi in 1920) in Ahmedabad, India, where it functions as a laboratory for research and action to promote nonviolence through art and science in cooperation with local communities affected by social conflicts.  The Lab has created an extension program in collaboration with various educational institutions located at its geographical opposite side of the globe along the Tropic of Cancer, in Mexico.

OraWorldMandala has emerged out of research on the Mandala’s concept, a universal icon of peace.  It is a synthesis of three concepts – Ora: (Latin) “invitation to pray”, World: “our planet and its human continent” and Mandala (Sanskrit): “circle”.  The concept of mandala has taken shape from the visions of many ancient traditions and civilizations where external reality is perceived as a reflection of human consciousness.  The mandala represents that human beings are interconnected with each other and with the earth through five elements that are manifested in many forms (from the space and air that we share, to the plants and animals that are the part of the life cycle).  Because humans lack consciousness of this connected relationship, the project aims to magnify our harmony with this interdependence.  The art and science of a “World Mandala” is a way to express the interdependence among all beings. 

Trained in Italy as a social artist, Sonia experienced a life-changing moment at the age of 28 years when she met the Dalai Lama in 1999. He suggested she study Gandhian philosophy to attain inner and outer peace. Thus started her journey of self-discovery. She became a research fellow at Gujarat Vidyapith, involved in organizing with twelve religious communities of Ahmedabad a series of peace actions as part of a reconciliation process. Her aim was to connect India with a country on the other side of the Earth – Mexico – while experimenting with the tenets of Gandhian philosophy: truth, non-violence and compassion. “My outlook was transformed once I got involved in [the] project,” Sonia said in 2008. “It gave me a fresh perspective on life. Now, I feel I’m helping others while growing spiritually myself.”

The OraWorldMandala project seeks to promote cohesion among people through artistic representation of mandalas via global community offerings of the five elements (earth, fire, water, air, space).  The project organizes various events (called “actions”) in communities around the world.  The first action was conducted at Sabarmati Ashram (Gandhi’s ashram) in Ahmedabad on April 23, 2005, with 500 people from 8 different religious communities coming together in a congregation where they sang devotional songs, worshipped, prayed and shared their lunch in order to experience the essence of Mahatma Gandhi’s message of harmony. The action culminated in an offering of one of the five elements, earth. All 8 religious communities brought soil from their respective sacred places and placed it in a common receptacle.  Subsequent actions have taken place in both India and Mexico, involving offerings of the natural elements, art, music, and prayer by children and others in various communities.

Sonia lives between India and Mexico to serve the OraWorldMandala.  

Maria Jain is a seeker, traveler, writer, entrepreneur, advocate, and story teller. For the past 8 years, she has been working in international development, focusing on women's empowerment, gender equality and ending gender-based violence.  Between 2008 and 2012, she lived and worked in Liberia and in the United States.  Together with her partner, Maria also is co-founder of Kantha, a web store where India’s rich craft tradition meets design that appeals to the contemporary eye.  The business is dedicated to clothes and accessories that honor some of India's age-old craft traditions – such as hand block printing and kantha embroidery – and livelihoods that still today rely on them. 

Now living in Helsinki, Finland, Maria is a traveler and writer who considers India a second home.  She strives to keep her heart and mind open for stories and connections – a way of seeing and being that has brought her to consistently unlock the blooming possibilities around her – whether in finding a painter of the desert or a yoga program for South African inmates, to bright Greyhound bus journeys, to a heartwarming laundry shop.  “While traveling has always been important in my life, it has evolved into a new kind of exploration. I began seeking stories while traveling,” Maria says.  “My intention is to spread the inspiration of the ways people are following their hearts and making a difference.  For me, this has become a way of being a student of life.  Also, a way to be of service.” 

Her biggest journey is the one that she has traveled on the inside – “cultivated in silence and stillness, and practiced in the everyday life, here and now.  On this journey, I connected with Moyo: a fellow traveler, a fellow meditator, a fellow writer and seeker, a fellow curious mind, who lives on Death Row for the crimes he committed at a young age.”

Inspired by a prison pen pals initiative, Maria began corresponding in the spring of 2014 with Moyo (an artistic pseudonym).  At the age of 18, Moyo killed two people – a crime for which he was sentenced to death and, for the past fifteen years, has been held in solitary confinement on death row in the United States.  There, in his solitary confinement cell, Moyo began a quest of self-discovery, working to “polish his soul, clean stains from his heart, and open windows of his mind.”  In an effort to understand and reclaim his own narrative, he became an avid reader, delving into books on black history, art, the justice system, psychology, spiritual texts, fiction and more.  He began making art as a means to explore his own experiences and emotions, and was introduced to yoga and meditation – in time committing to a regular practice of all.

Though living vastly different lives on the surface, Moyo and Maria swiftly found common ground for friendship.  A year into their correspondence, Maria received a special letter from Moyo with a stunning work of handmade art – a gift that planted the seed for an art exhibit of Moyo's transformative story. Moyo continued to correspond with Maria regularly, sending letters, postcards, photographs, poetry and artwork.  In August 2016, Maria exhibited his work as an art exhibition in Helsinki and online.  The exhibition, Buddhas on Death Row, is titled in the spirit of Moyo’s body of work: a series of Buddha portraits with accompanying reflections on suffering and happiness, conflict and peace, impermanence and eternity, ignorance and awareness.

As Moyo wrote to Maria:  “When the state’s attorney at trial painted me as someone unfit to live, this greatly eroded my already non-existent self-worth, and I didn’t want to allow anyone to determine how others viewed me after that.  What that ultimately did for me is show me that despite my grave mistakes in life and all the harm that I’ve created for others, there was something still worthy in me.  I try to make use of discarded or ignored bits in my art because we all have something worthwhile for another, we just have to find it – and it took me coming to death row to find my worth as a human and as a citizen of the world.  I have committed some grave acts in my life and I will never be able to undo them.  Yet the very least I can do is to improve myself.”

For Maria, “Moyo's friendship has propelled me forward in so many ways: to stay committed to my practice, to understand responsibility, transformation, healing in new ways, to slow down, listen, to be still and to be present, to grow in perception and courage, to get back to reading books, to foster creativity and also to remember to give space to being jolly and playful.   What started as an art project, turned out to be a form of practice.  A practice of inner cultivation, art and friendship that has by now touched thousands of people . . . . It has been an immense journey to be able to hold this space and to witness the ways in which people have been touched.”

Please join us for an enriching conversation with this remarkable storyteller on the unifying potential of art as a tool for transformation.

Mike Dickson encourages people to be generous, and guides them so that their giving is as fulfilling and effective as possible.  He is the Founder of Rainmaker Foundation, a collaborative charity launched in the United Kingdom in January 2012.  The Foundation's aims are to “inspire generosity” and “to create a world where what matters most is what we do for others.”  The Foundation connects philanthropists and change-makers (“rainmakers”) to inspirational causes in the UK and globally.  Rainmakers use their collective resources, funds, contacts and expertise to help charities and drive greater social impact.  Rainmaker also advises companies on developing effective partnerships with charities.

Mike’s own generous gene was kick-started more than 25 years ago, when he was challenged to run the London Marathon, and accepted the challenge.  Laughing about the “ridiculous” and “tragic” nature of the quest, Mike recalled:  “By the time we [my challenger and I] got to the start line of the London marathon, we'd both run a maximum of six miles.” But he found the stamina to complete the 26.2 mile race because a few weeks earlier, a limited-mobility child with cerebral palsy had entered his store in Covent Garden with a motorized wheelchair – leading him to the thought that “if we're going to go 26 miles and try and get around we should try and do it for a purpose.  We should try and give mobility for a child who can't move.”  Two weeks before the race, he visited a girl in her home who needed a wheelchair and was profoundly moved by the visit.  So he ran the race to raise money for a powered wheelchair for the girl, which he accomplished.

He later recalled:  “In simple terms, we did something mildly ridiculous – we ran 26.2 miles to give mobility to a disabled child who couldn’t move.  And it had a profound effect on the young girl who could move around and go to school and go to shops and move around her own house, but it had even a more profound impact on me.  I decided to establish a charity to allow disabled children to whizz about.” 

After the race, Mike co-founded the successful children’s charity Whizz-Kidz, which provides mobility equipment for disabled children. Whizz-Kidz is now the largest UK supplier of pediatric mobility aids outside the British National Health System (NHS), and has raised over £100 million to provide equipment for more than 20,000 children and young people.

But then Mike noticed something more, beyond the external measures:  “I began to notice the impact that giving had on the people who gave,” Mike said.  “The people who received were very grateful.  But the people who ran marathons to give were all profoundly moved.  That was when I first realized the power of generosity.  The more you give out, the more you get back.”

So he began to write about the power of generosity to create purpose and meaning in people’s lives – generosity of time as well as of financial resources.  He wrote a thought leadership book on generosity that was launched at TED Global to inspire a global movement to encourage generosity.  His more recent book on the topic, Our Generous Gene, was published in late 2015 and is a response to the wish to carry his journey further.  

The book in turn has spawned a broader movement led by Mike:  “The latest trends, thinking and research confirm that – amazing though it sounds – we can and are rewiring our brains, literally, to take charge of our own evolution. Unlike Darwin feared, the first human instinct is to nurture and care for each other.  Although seriously battered by self-centred cultures, generosity and kindness are things we can learn and teach our children.  A win/win that also makes us happier and more fulfilled. . . .  [We can] move from a culture where ‘having’ matters most to one that values ‘being’; from a society where a few profit at the expense of many to a place of greater interdependence.  The underlying message is that we have a choice.  Everyone can live a healthier and happier life if they choose and it’s OK to start small, because the ripple effect is amazing.  Action is all it takes.”

Mike has given many talks, including two at TedX events, on What is Enough and Success to Significance.

Mike is married with two children and lives in West London. He has run six marathons, led several treks and completed a 100 mile road race.

 

Sonya Shah has decades of experience as a facilitator of restorative justice practices in her family and community, as well as in schools and prison settings. She has been teaching social justice education for 20 years and grounds all of her work in critical pedagogy and a systemic analysis. She is actively immersed in seeding restorative justice and trauma healing modalities locally and nationally, and ending the charity-based model of working in “marginalized” communities. Her experiences as a survivor of child sexual abuse are critical to her analysis and approach to this work.

As a group facilitator, Sonya creates learning environments that reflect values of equity; nurture the unique perspective of each participant; build collective and community-based knowledge and agency; and challenge oppressive assumptions and structures. She has trained hundreds of people in group facilitation, and helped communities design their own restorative processes particularly around healing severe trauma and serious violence.

Sonya is currently facilitating circles for survivors of sexual harm and people who have committed sexual harm in an inaugural cohort of grantees and fellows with Just Beginnings Collaborative.  As part of this initiative, in 2015, she founded Project Ahimsa, which offers non-punitive approaches to addressing and healing harm through workshops, trainings, circles and writing. Projects are grounded in and through the lenses of restorative justice, trauma healing, transformative justice and critical pedagogy.

Project Ahimsa will access, record and publish the foundational wisdom of people directly involved in and affected by child sexual abuse. To access this learning, the project will conduct a series of talking circles in California prisons with people who have committed sexual abuse. This work is grounded in the belief that people who have committed harm can surface critical insights into what gave rise to their harmful actions. They can articulate the circumstances under which they perpetrated, the triggers that would cause them to do it again, and the factors that would have helped them stop. They also have insight into the specific familial, cultural, historical and economic factors and inequities that created the context for them to cause harm. Finally, if they themselves are survivors of child sexual abuse, they can speak to what impact that experience had on them.  Survivors of child sexual abuse also have essential answers for ending the crisis. Project Ahimsa will learn how people were victimized by talking to survivors about their victimization and, without blaming them, explore the causes and conditions that produced their susceptibility to sexual abuse.

“What survivors know about their abuser’s motivations and causative factors will vary greatly. But only they can describe the details of what happened, and the lasting impact of child sexual abuse on their lives. They can tell us how particular structural inequities made them more vulnerable to the harm, and the systemic failures that did not stop it.”

Prior to founding Project Ahimsa, Sonya was the Replication, Training and Curriculum Director at Insight Prison Project and responsible for oversight of the Victim Offender Education Group (VOEG) program in prisons statewide and nationally. She is a founding member and chair of Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice, an initiative of Californians for Safety and Justice. Sonya has served on the advisory board for Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth and the board of trustees for the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), where she is an Associate Professor.

In describing her work, Sonya says:  “Gandhiji had a saying—that we should be creating policy for the last girl in the last village and then we’ll have equity. I feel like that’s the nexus of where I work/live— in the U.S.A the last girl is sometimes the man sitting in solitary, sometimes the small child being abused by her mother who has locked herself in the bathroom, and sometimes that family dangerously crossing the U.S./Mexico border with nothing in their pockets. I have been teaching in education and healing for 20 years and believe it to be a practice of personal liberation and collective transformation. Whether it is in my university, community, family, or a prison, I feel my role is merely to create the conditions for people to experience their own agency, to feel that they are the authorities of their life experience and get to decide the trajectory of their future. I don’t think I have the right to talk about anyone else’s suffering, what I can talk about is my experience of witnessing suffering and transcendence in the most extreme places and what it teaches us about the human condition, in particular why we harm each other. And, I can talk about is what it teaches me about myself.”

Sonya earned a BA from Brown University and an MA in Film & Video from the Art Institute of Chicago. She was awarded the prestigious Fulbright fellowship and Jacob Javitz fellowship. She has appeared on various radio programs including NPR, KPFA, KQED and KALW, and has a blog on Huffington Post.

Like the story of the blind men describing an elephant -- a tree, a rope, a snake! -- the name Carol Ruth Silver evokes different responses when being introduced:  "Oh, weren't you elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors with Harvey Milk, and allegedly targeted along with him in the Moscone-Milk assassinations?  Weren't you a Freedom Rider -- one of the first white women arrested and incarcerated for protesting segregation in Jackson, Mississippi, at a pivotal time in our nation's civil rights history?  Weren't you the lawyer for the prisoners in the San Francisco County Jail -- who quit to protest the War on Drugs?  Didn't you run for Congress in Humboldt County as a tree hugging environmentalist?  Weren't you a civil rights attorney in North Carolina, back in the day?  A poverty lawyer in Delano, California?  Aren't you the one who founded San Francisco's Chinese American International School, the first and most modeled Mandarin Chinese immersion program in the United States? What are you doing with the One Laptop Per Child Project?  And was that you on Oprah?  You're a single mom?  And a grandma too!  Hey, you helped me buy my house."

Carol Ruth Silver's service journey has been one of courage, impact, and contribution -- across decades, across geographical regions, and across substantive areas. Underlying it all has been her unwavering commitment to help open doors of opportunity for all.  As a 22-year-old recent college graduate in June 1961, Carol, originally from Massachusetts, headed south as a Freedom Rider to protest racial segregation in the American South.  Before doing so, she received training in nonviolence (along with her fellow bus riders) from sponsoring civil rights groups such as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Everyone in their integrated group was arrested upon arrival at the bus station in Jackson, Mississippi.  Silver spent the next forty days in Mississippi jail cells, including in the Maximum Security Unit at the infamous Parchman Prison Farm.  She chronicled the events and her experiences on hidden scraps of toilet paper, the outside and inside of envelopes and anything else she could find, and amazingly was able to smuggle out the paper.  She fashioned these raw written scraps into a manuscript, which waited, unread for more than fifty years, until she published it in 2014 as Freedom Rider Diary: Smuggled Notes from Parchman Prison.

Being a Freedom Rider "was a life-affirming, life-changing event for me," Silver says.  "After you get out of jail having been a Freedom Rider, nobody and nothing can frighten you, or tell you that you have to accept injustice.  You stood up and said, 'No.'"

Citing her Jewish roots as inspiration for her early and lifelong commitment to civil rights activism, she often says: "Everybody knows about the Ten Commandments.  But in the Jewish Bible there are actually 613 Commandments.  Of those, some are archaic and properly forgotten, but one of the most important to my family when they were raising me is tikkun olam. That means 'fix it' or 'repair it', for whatever that 'it' might be, your responsibility is to try your best to make it right."

Following those early experiences, she went on to get her law degree and embark on a distinguished career as a civil rights attorney.  She moved to California, working as a law professor and legal aid attorney.  She also embarked on a political career.  Settling in San Francisco, Silver was elected to three terms as a San Francisco supervisor, under mayors George Moscone, Dianne Feinstein and Art Agnos.  She reportedly was an additional target of Dan White, who assassinated Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk on Nov. 27, 1978, but she escaped because she was late getting to City Hall that day: she had opted to have a second cup of coffee with a constituent.

Silver's compassion and commitment to equal opportunity have found expression in all aspects of her life.  As the adopted mother of a Taiwanese boy, Silver was very concerned that he learn his original language and study about Chinese culture.  After a long discussion of educational ideals with the Gold Mountain Monastery in the early 1970s while she was running for office, she agreed to help get a school started, then called the Instilling Virtue Elementary School in San Francisco, and now part of the Instilling Virtue Elementary and Developing Virtue Secondary Schools on the grounds of the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Mendocino County, California.  Silver also was the driving force in the founding of the Chinese American International School in San Francisco in 1981, the first in the United States to have a Mandarin immersion program.  Currently a board member of the Dharma Realm Buddhist University at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, Silver has also been active in helping create a Montessori-Inspired early childhood education program for children in Ghazni, Afghanistan.  And she has been active in promoting the extension of the One Laptop Per Child Program, as a speaker for law enforcement against drug prohibition (LEAP) and in many other causes.

Join us for a conversation with this remarkable and indefatigable social change leader!

Dr. Teri Delane is the founding Principal of the Life Learning Academy in San Francisco. The Life Learning Academy (LLA) is a tuition-free San Francisco Unified School District charter high school, located on Treasure Island, and founded in 1998 by the non-profit Delancey Street Foundation.  It is committed to creating a nonviolent community for students who have not been successful in traditional school settings.

LLA is designed specifically to serve the highest-need students in San Francisco and the Bay Area. Nearly all LLA students come from low-income households, with 85% qualifying for free or reduced lunch.  Most students are involved in or at risk of involvement in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems. Many of LLA’s new enrollees report histories of physical and substance abuse, and more than half have parents known to abuse drugs or alcohol. Nearly half report current or past gang affiliation, and the majority have profound histories of school failure and truancy.

"We get kids that no one else wants and kids who are lost in the big school system," Teri says. "All of these kids here are what people consider at risk. It doesn't mean all of them have been in jail but about 50-60% have been arrested. Thirty percent are on probation."

Delane can relate to her students because of the tough times she went through growing up.

"I was using heroin from age 14," she says. "I spent a year locked up in Caliente youth prison in Nevada at 16. By the time I was 20, I overdosed for the third time."

Delane got help from Delancey Street, the renowned San Francisco-based self-help program for drug addicts and ex-offenders. Teri entered Delancey Street in the early 70s as a teenage prostitute, drug addict and school drop-out. At Delancey Street she went on to get her college B.A., two Masters' Degrees and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. Then 17 years ago, with the help of Delancey Street staff, she opened this school, and brought with her the program’s strong commitment to non-violence.

"We don’t have cops here. We don’t have security here," she says. "We have kids that have given me their word to (practice) non-violence."

Since its founding in 1998, LLA has never had a fight on campus. The school requires an unwavering commitment to nonviolence, and maintains a culture free of bullying, threats, and intimidation by building peer support, conducting groups for conflict resolution, and offering students the means to regain good standing within the school community. When tensions do arise, students and staff intervene to resolve conflict and keep the school culture safe and positive.

No fighting is just the beginning of the bigger goal of having everyone actually get along with each other. It’s a goal reached every day around the lunch table. At Life Learning Academy, lunch is a big deal, cooked up from fresh ingredients by a resident chef and student interns. The entire school population – staff and students – sits together as a family every day.

With 60 full-time students, a teacher-student ratio of 1:6, and unique courses such as Culinary Arts, Engineering, Organic Gardening and Digital Media Storytelling, LLA's multidisciplinary team of educators, counselors, peers and alumni use dynamic, hands-on learning and interdisciplinary, project-based classes that challenge students to develop strong academic, critical thinking, and teamwork skills across subject areas. LLA helps students earn employment opportunities while enrolled, provides one-on-one college and career counseling, and rewards graduates with access to a scholarship fund that has awarded over $15,000 in scholarship support for college costs since 2010.

"The best way to change your life is by helping others," Teri says.  "I was kicked out of school in the ninth grade with a serious heroin abuse problem. I spent a year locked in a juvenile detention facility.  After an overdose, the Delancey Street Foundation saved my life by surrounding me with people who would not allow me to fail. I teach that the best way to change your life is by helping others."

And what change she is helping bring about.  Life Learning Academy boasts an extraordinary success rate. Compared to the 80% California high school graduation rate, 99% of LLA students earn their diploma and 85% go on to earn a college degree.  It has been recognized as a model school by the California Department of Education and the national Coalition of Essential Schools, and as a model Juvenile Justice Crime Prevention Act program by state leaders and local law enforcement. LLA was the California Charter Schools Association’s 2010 Charter School of the Year, and was a finalist in the 2004 Kennedy School of Government's Innovations in American Government Awards.  LLA has provided training, tours and replication materials to hundreds of educators and lawmakers worldwide. In 2012, LLA received the full 6-year re-accreditation from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges.

"When I got lucky enough to get my life together and come to Delancey street, I [got] lucky enough to be able to give it back," Teri tells her students.  "Every day, that’s what I have to do."

Join us for an inspiring conversation with this extraordinary visionary and leader!!

 

Charles Holmes is a convener, facilitator, and an educator. Described by Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, as a "true social alchemist," Charles authentically engages and connects people with ideas and possibilities to help them innovate, collaborate and deliver results they previously thought were impossible. His exceptional ability to respectfully surface and integrate disparate perspectives and approaches generates an environment of trust that effectively brings people together to create a better future.

Working at the intersection of strategy and humanity, Charles asks powerful questions that invite deep reflection, generate compelling visions, and reveal new possibilities. For more than two decades, he's designed and facilitated collaborative strategic meetings and multi-stakeholder dialogues for corporations, government, non-profits and communities. He helps organizations committed to “doing well by doing good” develop cultures where transparency, integrity and collaboration are the way business is done. His contributions allow people to bring their very best to work while they courageously do what is best for the world. His approach focuses attention on self-awareness, appreciation, and shared values and purpose.

He works with and draws extensively from the work of numerous colleagues and collaborators, including organizational thought-leaders and visionaries like Peter Senge, Peter Block, Meg Wheatley, Otto Scharmer, Angeles Arrien, and Juanita Brown. As a co-founder of the Learning Strategies Group at Simon Fraser University’s School of Business, he has helped develop and deliver many innovative leadership and management training programs. In 2005, he helped establish the Dalai Lama Center for Peace + Education in Vancouver. He continues to produce and curate the Connecting For Change program, which has brought a wide variety of corporate and NGO leaders together in dialogue with His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

Charles introduces creative processes that set learning and relationships on a new trajectory. As part of his commitment to creating a sustainable future for his children’s children, he teaches leadership, team building, facilitation and negotiation at universities in Canada and Saudi Arabia. With Peter Senge and others, he co-founded the Academy for Systemic Change, a global community for collective capacity building in business, education and community development.

A friendly neighbor, loving father and down-to-earth colleague, Charles can’t help but bring people together. His magnanimous way of being lights up any setting in which he finds himself. Join us, on August 20th, as we dive deeper into Charles' journey.

Cam Danielson is a co-founder and principal at the Conscious Leadership Institute. His work focuses on assisting leaders and management teams to revise future direction and opportunity amid the turbulence of personal, organizational, and societal change. Cam has distinctive competence in delivery of mindfulness workshops, executive development programs, building and leading high performing teams, and executive coaching.

Cam likes to say that his work is to create, build, and support environments for self-exploration. He has worked with thousands of leaders within hundreds of organizations around the world through a variety of roles that includes Air Force officer, speechwriter, English teacher, university administrator, executive educator, management consultant, and leadership coach. He has spent the last 30 years building a practice of leadership development that integrates experiential learning with greater self-knowledge. Most recently Cam has been teaching sessions on Mindfulness in Leadership for global companies such as Danone, Brambles, Ingersoll-Rand, Schneider Electric, and through his coaching practice with senior leaders. He co-founded the Global Leadership Program – a leadership development consortium of companies headquartered in Europe, India, and the United States. He has also developed a series of workshops on Conscious Leadership and Conscious Living.

Cam has researched the effects of various practices and leadership programs.  His research has appeared in The Integral Leadership Review, The Monroe Institute Journal, Academy of Management Executive, Human Resource Development Quarterly, Business Horizons, and The American Benedictine Review.  His current research on the effects of long-term practice in meditation has been published as a book entitled: Beyond the Horizon: Glimpses into the Lives of Exceptional Leaders. Beyond the Horizon is a book of stories, reflections, and insights about living and leading wholeheartedly in an age of rapid transformation. It is told through the lives of an extraordinary group of people who operate at a deep level of being. They have made the work of building a rich inner life—soul work—the means for greater adaptive capacity. This is revealed in their candid stories and lessons for continual growth and development.

Cam has worked with more than a thousand leaders in review of their individual goals and personal effectiveness to chart the next phase in their leadership journey. He has coached senior leaders at major international corporations. Cam developed the Global Partnership for Executive Development, a joint venture between the Kelley School of Business, The European Center for Continuing Education (CEDEP), and Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST), one of the first global consortiums to be offered by a leading business school.

Cam’s background includes 15 years leading the office of executive education at the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. He was a speechwriter for the President of Indiana University and a member of the faculty at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Cam received a B.A. in Classical Studies from the University of Kansas, a Medieval Studies Certificate and an M.A. in English Literature from Indiana University. He is a graduate of the Xerox Middle Management Program (1990), a participant in the American Center for International Leadership’s US-USSR Exchange Program (1985), and a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Squadron Officer School (1981).

 

Fleet Maull, a longtime student of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, is the Founder and Board President of Prison Mindfulness Institute (formerly Prison Dharma Network), with over 175 organizational members and several thousand individual members providing mindfulness-based programs in prisons, jails and juvenile facilities throughout the United States and many other countries. PMI's Path of Freedom programs are now offered in correctional facilities in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Australia, Canada, Chile and Sweden.

Fleet founded Prison Dharma Network in 1989 while serving a 14.5 year mandatory-minimum sentence for drug smuggling at a maximum security federal prison medical facility. He led a twice weekly meditation group in the prison chapel for 14 years (1985-1999). He also helped start the first inside prison hospice program and provided daily care to dying prisoners until his release. In 1991, he founded National Prison Hospice Association, catalyzing a national prison hospice movement that now includes more than 75 hospice programs in state and federal correctional facilities in the United States, positively transforming end of life care in corrections. Together, the two non-profit organizations founded by Fleet, Prison Mindfulness Institute and National Prison Hospice Association, are dedicated to transforming the criminal justice and corrections systems through the promotion of restorative and transformative justice, mindfulness-based programs and training for prisoners and corrections professionals and compassionate, quality end of life care for prisoners.

Recalling his commitment to deepening his practice while in prison, Fleet recalled in a recent interview, “Most prisoners are doing everything they can not to experience being there. They consider their time in prison down time, as if it doesn’t really count. They find a routine: a job, some exercise, a favorite TV program, cards, bed. People are trying to kill time. But I didn’t want to throw away fourteen years of my life. I was determined to be present, to learn everything I could from this, to use this as an opportunity to wake up. And I was determined to keep my heart open.”

Despite the obvious challenges of pursuing meditation in prison—the overcrowded conditions; the violent, chaotic atmosphere; the lack of personal space—he ordained as a novice monk and completed the foundational practices of Tibetan Buddhism, which include over one hundred thousand prostrations. One practice that was of great help to him while in prison was tonglen [the practice of taking on the suffering of others and sending them relief]. “Prison is a world of anger, and I certainly had mine,” Fleet said. “I had a lot to be bitter about: Some close friends had turned me in; I felt that I had been intensely over-prosecuted. But I was committed not to go there. I did not want to end up an angry and bitter person. It was not who I wanted to be. I really worked on transforming all that and on cultivating an attitude of loving-kindness through tonglen practice.”

Fleet is an Acharya (senior teacher) in the Shambhala Buddhist Community. He is also a Sensei (Zen teacher) and dharma successor of Roshi Bernie Glassman in the Zen Peacemaker Order and a senior priest in the Soto Zen tradition. Acharya Maull has written many articles and given numerous interviews on a variety of prison related topics in publications such as the Shambhala Sun, Tricycle, Tikkun, Hospice Journal and Turning Wheel. He has also been a guest on NPR’s Fresh Air program and other radio and television programs. His story was included in Roshi Bernie Glassman’s book, Bearing Witness .

He is the author of Dharma In Hell, the Prison Writings of Fleet Maull, and leads prison programs, meditation retreats, chaplaincy and hospice trainings, activist trainings, bearing witness retreats and street retreats throughout the world. He is also the founder and executive director of the Peacemaker Institute and co-founder of the Upaya Chaplaincy Program.

Acharya Maull has been practicing mindfulness meditation for more than 40 years and teaching mindfulness meditation for 32 years. He is an empowered senior teacher in two meditation traditions, a holder of the Way of Council, and a certified trainer with Partners in Leadership, New Line Consulting, Prison Mindfulness Institute, Center for Mindfulness in Corrections and The Event Training. He leads mindfulness meditation programs and retreats for newcomers and advanced students at meditation centers and retreat centers around the world. He facilitates deep transformation for individuals and organizations through his philosophy and program of Radical Responsibility, and has developed cutting edge mindfulness-based leadership training, consulting and coaching programs, which he delivers in diverse business, nonprofit and government settings.

Barbara Crooker has been writing poetry since the late 1970’s.  Her work, for which she has won many awards, incorporates themes of nature, home, family, love, loss, and disability. Over 700 of her poems have been published in anthologies and magazines, as well as compiled in several books and clapbooks, including The Lost Children (1989), Ordinary Life (2001), Radiance (2005), Line Dance (2008), and More (2010).  Her latest collection, Gold (2013), was published in the Poeima Poetry Series by Cascade Books.  Crooker frequently reads her poetry and gives lectures to the public. She resides in Fogelsville, Pennsylvania, in Lehigh County.

Crooker began writing poetry following the stillbirth of her first daughter and a divorce from her then-husband.  She initially wrote about family, birth, love, and loss, drawing on the hardship, joy, and bereavement she experienced as a mother. Her most widely reprinted poem, “The Lost Children,” was the first poem she published. It was included in The Poetry Review, a journal for the Poetry Society of America. It appeared again in three anthologies on parenting, two online journals, six magazines, and several books on loss. Crooker believes this poem was so popular because it provided healing power for other parents who shared similar emotions and experiences.

Following her marriage to Richard Crooker, she had three more children – daughters Stacey and Rebecca, and a son David.  Her children again became the main characters in her poems. These poems were later collected in Ordinary Life (2001). Much of the poetry in this collection focuses on Crooker’s son, David, who was diagnosed with autism when he was about two years old. The poems David inspired reflect on emotional issues involved with raising a disabled child and worrying about his future. Many of these poems have been reprinted in disability and parenting journals.

“My son and his different abilities (not his dis-abilities) have shaped my work in ways that are both varied and mysterious,” Barbara has noted. “Some of them are: how the notion of metaphor works as a way of grasping the world; how, as a mother, I have been forced to see beyond the conventional paradigms of good/bad, normal/abnormal; how abled writers need to be sensitive about what is exploitive versus the need to own one's own experience; how things that are seen as negatives by therapists and educators, such as obsessive behavior, can be viewed as writing tools; and how autism can be seen as a different way of visioning.”

Ordinary Life won the ByLine Chapbook competition in 2001, and Impressionism won the Grayson Books Chapbook competition in 2004. Crooker also received the 2007 Pen and Brush Poetry Prize, the 2006 Ekphrastic Poetry Award from Rosebud, thirty-two nominations for the Pushcart Prize, five Best of the Net nominations, and she was a 1997 Grammy Awards Finalist for her part in the audio version of the popular anthology, Grow Old Along With Me—The Best is Yet to Be (Papier Mache Press).

Radiance (2005), her first full-length book, won the Word Press First Book competition in its publication year and the Paterson Poetry Prize in 2006. She tells Diane Lockward in an interview, “[The book] was organized like a quilt patch, with each section containing poems on the main themes: a child with autism, an aging parent’s decline, the search for spiritual meaning in a secular age, love in a long-term relationship, ekphrasis (poems on paintings); all of these touching on some aspect of light.”

Her second full-length collection, Line Dance (2008) won the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. She says of her full-length collection, More (2010): “I’m using a block construction, with all the poems on the same subjects (art, my mother’s illness, family poems) grouped in the same section, each one dealing with a different definition or aspect or function of the word “more”: the hunger for more, (“Everybody’s got a hungry heart,” Springsteen); the desire for more love (“There is no remedy but to love more,” Thoreau); the need for more beauty, via art and culture (“It is the artist’s duty to create a world that is more beautiful,” Van Gogh); the reach for more of everything (“All I ever wanted was more,” anonymous).”

Over the years Crooker has become nationally recognized; Garrison Keillor has read seven of her poems on his National Public Radio (NPR) program The Writer’s Almanac. Her work has been read on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC). Known internationally, Crooker's work has been translated into both German and Korean, and has appeared in several journals in England, Ireland, Italy, France, and New Zealand.

“Some of [my poetry],” Crooker says, “is a reminder of the many ways in which we are not alone in our experiences of joy and suffering, even though we all walk different paths. Some of my topics include autism (my son, age 32, has this as his diagnosis), traumatic brain injury (my middle daughter had one when she was 18), loss (one of my books, GOLD, is concerned with my mother's death and the path through grief and mourning, and I have many poems on neo-natal loss; my first daughter was stillborn), cancer (I have a sequence of 22 poems on breast cancer), global climate change and its consequences), and (for the joy part) love in a long-term relationship, gardening, art, cooking and food.”