Program areas at Commonweal
RESILIENCE:Commonweals Resilience program is an umbrella that includes both The Resilience Project and Omega. The Resilience Project (TRP) builds on four decades of work at Commonweal on healing ourselves and healing the earth. TRP focuses on the polycrisismore than two dozen environmental and social stressors that have created a perfect storm of human and biosphere threats. TRP goals: Empower people, projects & practices to meet the Global Challenge; welcome diverse views across the global spectrum; encourage respectful dialogues across regions & cultures; inspire creative responses to the polycrisis. Stanley Wu serves as director. Omega incubates new initiatives for living in and through the global polycrisis. Omegas goal is to help build the nascent field of polycrisis research and action. This includes: (1) to map the best thinking on the polycrisis, (2) to identify the global network of those working toward creative solutions, (3) to identify the community of those who can work together to strengthen resilience, and (4) to identify and support specific projects with special value added. Omegas initiatives include: The Omega Collaborative, a steadily growing working group of partners around the world committed to a better future through a focus on systemic risk, interconnected and intersecting stressors, complexity, equity, governance, and the full range of issues threatening civilization; and The Omega Resilience Awards (ORA), which provides fellowships, research grants, and media creation to support new models of thinking, leadership, communication, and engagement in response to the challenges of the global polycrisis. Michael Lerner serves as director. (omega.ngo)
Partners for Youth Empowerment:Partners for Youth Empowerments (PYE) mission is to unleash the creative potential of young people. For 25 years, guided by this mission, PYE has been working to shift the field of youth work to respond to the deeper needs of young people for meaning, purpose, creativity, and connection. PYE does this by training individuals, schools, and organizations in their Creative Empowerment Model, a unique combination of experiential education, group facilitation, and the arts, which together foster key life skills that help youth thrive in a rapidly changing world.PYE prioritizes engaging diverse populations, in all of their programs, with the end goal of reaching youth who are marginalized and furthest from opportunity. (partnersforyouth.org)
HEALING CIRCLES:Founded in 2014, Healing Circles is an international learning community for people who want to do deep intentional healing work with cancer and other diseases or experiences of loss. Designed to extend the core work of the Cancer Help Program, it seeks to bring the deep experiences of healing to people who want to create a healing circle in their living room, church or any other setting. Healing Circles was founded in partnership with three other centersin Vancouver, B.C., Washington State, and Smith Center for Healing and the Arts in Washington, D.C.that have done residential retreats based on the Cancer Help Program model for at least 20 years. We now have new centers in Langley on Whidbey Island, Washington, and in Houston, Texas. Our three Bay Area CCHP alumni groups are our laboratories for Healing Circles work in the Bay Area. Healing Circles are forming in North Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Another Healing Circle just began in Jerusalem. Hundreds of people have experienced and studied Healing Circles work. Oren Slozberg serves as the director for Healing Circles.