Follow up letter to participants of the workshop

Tom Munnecke May 14, 2003

I am very pleased to announce some of the follow up activities to last week's workshop.

Nancy Glock-Grueneich has volunteered to lead a meeting on the design of the Uplift Academy... I've tentatively reserved July 23 for this at the Quaker Center.

Nancy also organized a dinner after the meeting with Bliss Browne and others to discuss the kickoff of an "Imagine Santa Cruz" group.

Jane LaPointe has been working on her minutes of the meeting during her "vacation" trip down highway 1. I'll post them soon. I've had such a positive reaction to the photo page that I am considering some way of posting photos and letting people enter their stories of the conference as a form of note-taking and post-conference reflection.

Andrius is in Tijuana, Mexico (I think), looking for independent thinker/scholars as well as future retreat locations.

Jane, Heather, Andrius, and hopefully some other GivingSpace folks are having a dinner at my home this Friday.

I've had some very interesting email traffic from Victor van Reijswoud [victor@umu.ac.ug] in Kampala, Uganda. He was referred to me by Aldo de Moor from Holland who attended our April workshop at Stanford. An excerpt from his email:

"In the features of GivingSpace I find the first feature very close to my heart; GivingSpace focuses on opportunities and not on problems. As Aldo mentioned I am working in Uganda at a small university with a very special mission. The university was founded with the mission to restore human values in Uganda after the bad times of Obote and Amin. At that time the country was in shambles and the people were looting and grabbing what they could. In order to restore the country, the mindset of the people had to return to normal.

Now all the students are trained professionally (learning a job), but also in ethical issues, e.g., what are your responsibilities as a Ugandan. One of the lessons that we try to teach our student is to view problems as opportunities for change. Another aspect that is very interesting in the light of the university is the fact of openness. In spite of the difficulties we have with the policy, we try to be an open learning center for the community. The community is very skeptical and they try to take advantage where possible, but we try to push on. One of the initiatives that we undertook last summer is a summerschool for the people from the villages in using a computer. In Uganda these courses are generally very expensive, but with some people we decided that it is our task to show people that a computer is not a tool for the rich only, but for everyone. So for $30 we offered a six week evening course for all people in the surrounding community. That is $1 per evening. This course was a big success for the people and en enormous investment for the university.

On the subject of the AIDS Orphans. Almost next to my house there is a school for AIDS Orphans. The School is led by an old woman who feels that she has an obligation to help these children so that they get at least primary education. At the moment the school houses 52 orphans. Me and my wife and some of our friends from the Netherlands are helping this school financially. From the money every month the school is donated enough food so that the children can eat. For the poorest we buy cloths and school uniforms. This is however very little that we do. More needed. The children need to develop a positive view on life, and the will to change in a direction growth (mentally). This can not be achieved by money alone. May be you see a possibility to show an other route? In the message of Tom, he suggest to organize an African Uplift Academy meeting. Let me say to you, Uganda Martyrs University will be very willing to host this. When the students are off campus we can arrange accommodation, there are lecture rooms and the campus is located at in the beautiful hills 80 km outside Kampala so the attendants can clear their minds for better ideas."

Anyone want to help those orphans see another route? Heather has suggested sending them seeds to plant in a garden...

I am researching the possibility of having a meeting in Africa, perhaps in August, to collect and meet with an initial group of "uplift scholars" with a focus on HIV/AIDS orphans in Africa. I'd like to find a location which is convenient for travel, and provides a beautiful, natural setting for the meeting while also allowing field trips to areas of great need. I am open to suggestions or pointers; it seems that Nairobi area is a leading candidate.

All in all, this is quite a remarkable cascade of activities from a 2 day workshop. Thanks to all for coming, and thanks, Mac, for facilitating this.

The Principle of Radical Inclusion

The workshop last week was an amazingly diverse group of people. We spanned three generations, from 3 to 63 years old. We spanned from the devoutly religious to the non-religious, and from a variety of political, medical, and personal points of view. We even had Java, LISP, and Python programmers talking together.

The whole point of the workshop (and GivingSpace as a whole) was to seek ways of connecting people according to their positive core values, available to us independent of specific religious beliefs or social, commercial, or political belief systems. And, that we can build chains of trust and community by focusing on positive discourse which amplifies these values.

Children reading "See Spot Run" are not learning about dogs, but rather how to read. Similarly, our efforts at projects are not just about the projects, but also a more elevated level, building a literacy in a new language of uplift which we are both inventing and using at the same time. We are learning how to build trust and community with a combination of people and technology. Love to Iraq spans an amazing range of people, belief systems, emotions, history, and politics. To slip through all of these differences with a positive, constructive web of trust and community is a remarkable accomplishment...and I am confident that we can do it. But the value of this project is also "learning about learning" and how we can do this in other instances. Can we find connections via positive core values for those orphans in Kampala that Victor mentions above? Can we figure out a "pay it forward" approach to uplift which propagates itself, both through interpersonal contact and global connectivity?

This language of the positive can emerge from stories and "lessons learned" from the field, as well as approaches such as Appreciative Inquiry, Positive Psychology, Positive Deviancy, Social Constructionism, and many other areas. We are focusing on amplifying the positive, what David Ellerman suggested at our early GivingSpace meetings as "finding where virtue is afoot."

This approach does not mean that we are ignoring problems, but rather that we are elevating our thinking to starting and connecting people according to these positive core values. There are many, many positive connections between people that have great uplift potential, but are frequently ignored because, as Gary Gunderson said, "we don't know how to value things that don't come with a price tag." Thus, we resort to endless lists of catalogs of problems, only to discover that we are perpetually in a state of "too many problems, not enough money." We need to flip this to, "So many forms of uplift, so little appreciation."

There are plenty of outlets for discussing problems of the world, but preciously few ones for positive discourse. I look forward to developing this actively in this group and an expanding circle of friends, all of whom are inclusive to the positive core values of humanity.

Tom