“Love One Another”

What better response to 9/11 than to celebrate the legacy of loved ones taken on that day (Taken 9-11, Father Figure Still Missed)? Let’s embrace our veterans (LZ Lambeau Highlights), our seasoned adults, our neighbors with different abilities, our families, etc. America needs to link it’s neighborhoods, schools and businesses with each other.  As proposed by activist Václav Havel, communities need “leadership from the heart” (The Art of the Impossible) to thrive.

From rural Alaska to urban New York City we have homes, schools and businesses that share physical proximity, but essentially function as “silos” and who could benefit from better social, emotional and wellness connectedness. This phenomena to connect seems consistent with the human need and interest to build “villages” where children, youth, and families (including seasoned adults and people with disabilities) convene with regularity, are intentional, and interact in a healthy and safe manner. How can we create self-sustaining, safe, and healthy neighborhoods?  The Center offers to “walk with you” in this quest.  The Center’s facilitator, Paul Maguire, believes that real change begins and is sustained at the grass-roots (villages/parks/parking lots) of our neighborhoods.  Paul will come to your neighborhood or village  and lead a “Seeds for Change” dialogue by bush flight  (Alaskan villages) or by parking his RV w/car in tow in an appropriate parking-lot area so that he simply “be” with you inside your neighborhood.  We will begin to engage in a conversation designed to support/create neighborhoods of “caring and competence.”

We are committed to supporting communities who express diverse human identities, spiritual orientations, political preferences, and with people who are most vulnerable (i.e. the poor, people with disabilities, people who are homeless, seasoned citizens, people who have been abused, people who have been bullied, boys needing healthy male role models, etc.).

The Center provides short and long-term supports for enhancing human connections through:

• parent, teacher and business education and training (i.e. effective communication).
• using humor as a conduit (can-do it) for re-connecting and learning in safe places.
• creating neighborhood traditions (i.e. establishing active social networks).
• connecting businesses with neighborhoods to establish sustainable projects that are life enhancing.

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The Center hopes to empower others to “love one another” and to support individuals to become “community” through the operationalizing of the Latin saying “Agere Sequitur Esse” or “What I do flows from who I am.”