Mentoring For Peace

Guiding the Next Generation
Towards Peaceful Ways

The goals for this project are to discover, gather, and share vital mentoring understandings from people, cultures, and experiences that have the ability to transform a person into becoming a peacemaker. Our work will distill together resources for the mentor from our own research and understandings with the amazing work of other people and organizations into a web of usable and useful tools to inspire and equip folks in becoming an effective mentor for peace. Our tools will be disseminated to thousands of people and organizations worldwide through intensive multi-media campaigns, writings, lectures and training workshops. Our efforts, along with many other kindred efforts of people and organizations, will bring a better understanding of the relationship between our basic human learning apparatus and how we can inspire and nurture constructive relationships between people and the environment that foster lasting peace.

The first stage of our effort is to uncover the commonalities of the mentoring process in the peaceful hero's journey and share our discoveries with a broad audience. The hero's journey is one of the most powerful cultural aspects we have as a species to catalyze change in people's lives that affect their daily routines. We have identified more than 60 individuals, from diverse backgrounds and accomplishments, who are widely celebrated for the expression of their gifts and who are walking a path of service. They are peaceful heroes whose contributions to humanity are often made behind the scenes of their celebrity, as the popular media tends to highlight personalities more than their journey of giving and connection. We will be audio interviewing each of these people to record the story of how they were mentored and explore the threads of how their peacemaking ways are rooted in their childhood environment. The interviews will delve into a deeply personal place of their learning journeys that few have had the opportunity to share. We will compare, contrast and distill the mentoring essentials from the interviews, looking for emerging patterns that offer us inherent mentoring tools that are key ingredients of today's peaceful heroes.

We are developing tools that weave the warps and wefts of a mentoring basket back into our own lives and the lives of our children. Mentoring is a multi-faceted way of opening the door and holding space for the learning journey of another and is a fundamental guiding vehicle in the human psyche in which a culture’s values move from one generation to the next. The culture of mentoring has been at the heart of human learning and world view formulation since the dawn of our species and holds the seeds of many solutions for awakening peace among us. It is in this environment that our children are inspired to find and express their inherent gifts, share them in service, and walk their own path of vision as they discover their connection to one another and the world around them. When we walk within the light of our gifts, peace emerges from us as our empathetic capacity to relate to our world is nurtured and honored.

Click on the link below to watch a PowerPoint Presentation from our Cultural Mentoring workshop that was held at the Cuyama Learning Center in California in November of 2004. This presentation will offer you valuable tools in earth mentoring and personal development.