Hi everyone,

Welcome to the May 2011 issue of the YouthSection eNews.

When I began asking for submissions this time around, some articles just made sense, but when I asked for others, I wasn't exactly sure why.  I didn't start out with a planned theme. Obviously, anyone in our network has something really important to offer, so why did I choose these particular people?  I'm still not sure, but I get the feeling now, as the eNews takes shape, that there is a theme. 

This issue is about empowerment.  But it is not a kind of empowerment within the existing system; the empowerment that shines through these articles, photographs, and works of art is more of a transformative empowerment: an empowerment that flips the system on its head, or inside out.  In these articles you may find yourself challenged; I encourage you to take these ideas up as fodder for conversation.  Maybe the Basic Income idea seems crazy.  Why? What would the world look like if it was adopted?  Similarly, what happens when someone asks you to teach them to do something you didn't even realize you could do?  What is the experience of being asked, and of offering?  

The joy in all of this is that each of us will read in our own way, in our own context.  That means we've got space for exciting conversation.  

I wish you lots of joy in heated conversation!  Let's see what we can come up with...

All the best, 
Caitlin 

What's all the fuss about placemaking?

I have been talking about placemaking for a while now. I like it because it is a verb, an active process, and it invites participation in the principles that I work with every day – ensuring equity, promoting collaborations, and contributing to developing places that are just and beautiful. This is what placemaking is essentially about.

I am often asked, “What can I read about placemaking? How can I learn more?”  My mind scans different literature, pieces I have written, and ideas I have yet to realize. I think of the history that led to this moment. Whole neighborhoods were razed and replaced with large-scale infrastructure again and again in the name of development, power, and wealth.  Many have been exploited, displaced, further segregated, and removed from the strength of their social networks. The impact on the earth and humanity is evident.

But the practice of awakening place cannot be fully communicated through texts. More of a sensing, a craft, it must be developed with others, through experience-based education and learning. My own placemaking education comes from mentors, elders, and urbanists. It comes from community organizers and civil rights leaders. It comes from indigenous knowledge, women’s grassroots leadership, from youth work, from my experience of trying to build and live in community. Unfortunately it also comes from the violence of removal and the pain and disorientation of being disconnected from family, culture, and home. True placemaking calls to the head and the heart as well as the hands and invites participation. It is a lived process. It happens when there is a collective longing for truth and beauty and when people seek peaceful reconciliations.

The following is not an attempt to define placemaking, but instead to put out a call to those who share pieces of this picture. Let us come together and co-create in a way that serves our places and ourselves right here and right now.  In the midst of the tremendous swell that was the Initiative Forum, hosted by the Youth Initiative Program (YIP), I felt the longing of different aspects wanting to manifest together as one and struggling to initiate a new interplay. With YIP generations past, present, and future sharing knowledge, and YouthSection members spanning over a decade joining new people and networks, there was so much energy swirling about. It calls for a new capacity required within and around us. Question arose about what might be required in order to connect across the boundaries that we have outgrown.  At the same time I see many of the key elements of placemaking practiced and illuminated at the Forum. I heard a kind of longing, which speaks to me very deeply. I want to share some of this vision, which I offer as three distinct realms within placemaking.

A place of consciousness and self-realization

People are so hungry for a place where they can overcome the noise and distraction of everyday life and discover their soul – where they can uncover their wounds and offer their gifts. In the midst of trauma and crisis, many are seeking to find and share the light. Throughout the world, we feel a pull towards healing, meditation, yoga, mindfulness, spirituality, wellness, energy and bodywork. Young people everywhere are now discovering their own practices and commitment to inner work and the timing is not a coincidence. As the call for action increases intensity, so too the arc of inner work must increase in order to meet the challenge. It is not a surprise to see those who are called to carry these challenges searching for ways to orient themselves and garner the inner capacity required. It becomes clearer each day that if we can look inward and heal ourselves, we can also look outward and begin to heal our places. If we can do it with each other, we will dissolve preexisting structures of inequality and develop new places of consciousness, inner development and collective care.

At the Initiative Forum, the performance artists reminded us that culture, music and the arts are crucial to this realm also. When artists and cultural workers express their own internal voice, they give other’s permission to engage in that dialogue. Through connection to our own culture, we can access the gifts of our ancestors.

A place of truth and justice

A grandmother of placemaking, Jane Jacobs, said,  “If you want a city that meets everyone’s needs, it must be built by everyone.” Placemaking is rooted in the idea of participation, collaboration, and open public process. In the U.S. we are still living the legacy of slavery and racism just as the world continues to live out the repercussions of the colonial project. Our cities and nations suffer from uneven development, war, conflict, and painful inequality.  The results have been widespread displacement of people and large-scale removal of rights. It is a kind of structural violence that we have endured, and the blood in its wake is part of our collective truth. A system that deliberately harms the health of people, animals, and the earth makes everyone in the system sick.  If we want to live together and build healthy, awakened communities, we must teach each other to see structural inequities and then reknit ourselves and our places in ways that speak to multiple truths. When we are able to share the wounds society has inflicted, we can begin to understand our differences, and then we can each contribute the unique knowledge we have to contribute to a new society.

So how do we take collective responsibility for that co-creation? YIP is responding to the State cuts of all funds for the Sophia Project that allows for people who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford YIP to participate. Without this support, so much of the world's wisdom is missing. YIP is working on building new strategies for addressing the challenge. A commitment to the YIP diversity Fund and to building infrastructure to support difficult conversations around truth and justice represents a bold step forward in realizing the potential in this loving community.

A place of imagination and beauty

The foundation for our new society comes out of our relationship to the earth. How do we look at our relationship to the earth? What is the ecology of place? How do we use our imagination to seek a future of innovation and sustainability? Can nature provide the inspiration and beauty we need?  The deep connection to the sacred anchors us to the past, nature awakens us in the moment, and then we begin to invent our future.

I see a growing desire for bold new ideas that respect and listen to the earth. As the wisdom is accessed, creativity and imagination are inspired. The Initiatives presented at the Forum illustrate numerous examples of this. By living closely in solidarity and building friendship, inspiring creativity, and eating and living in connection with the earth, we build solidarity. When we were saturated with new ideas, we trekked down the fjord. We clamber over big rocks, gaze into the sun, and breath into the reeds, the beauty refreshes our soul and replenishes our imagination once more. The answers are there.

With so much strength and sophistication in each of these arenas, why does the existence of all three spheres together remain so rare? Perhaps, at a time when so many young people are moving and building in different communities, this three-folded perspective of placemaking offers a pressure point for possibility.  Many are working to hone their unique abilities and they are longing for a place to exchange, to practice and to play where they can begin to harmonize with others. We now are called on to use all our capacities, trust our instincts, and appreciate all contributions. If we unleash and shine this inner light, then we will begin to see a world of places that are fit for life.

Thank you to the generous hosts of the Initiative Forum for opening a place that inspires our best selves and allows for challenge and change to occur.

- Kiara Nagel 

These beautiful windows were created by Saskia Beck from Switzerland.

Dear Friends,

It is a pleasure to greet you all, initially through eNews! It's amazing how many people this publication reaches, in so many countries worldwide! In the last issue of the eNews, Elizabeth told about the process from the moment of her decision until today.

To approach the Youth Section in this moment is like entering a room that is filled with all your thoughts, all that you worked for together, all that you wanted, filled with the sound of Elizabeth's Bell, and also filled with everything that can develop in the future. It is an area of ​​the given - where we have to be so grateful! - and a space of possibility. The possibility of the continuous creation of our time, for meetings, for work and for questions.

To live in our time is indeed a challenge - and a joy! We are faced with tasks that have never been present in the world before, with the unlikely possibility of encountering each other and with leaving the question open of whether we truly unite. And yet, living in our time is our shared destiny and purpose; to be in this world now and to transform it by our presence.

Where are the forces that enable the fulfilment of intentions, to accomplish what is possible? Our tasks are often given as a result of an encounter, of a silent conversation between what I sense as a longing within me and the world, and what is actually a question or request from the outside. In this encounter between the world and me appears the space of all possible transformation.

The YouthSection can be a place for the unspeakable. Here the questions can be developed which arise out of an inner wakefulness to the challenges and needs that are present in our time.

This openness to all world phenomena and for structuring reality can be extended and deepened through Anthroposophy. Through this openness you can always stand steadier in the world with "very open eyes," as the Brazilian writer Guimarães Rosa said, and with the heart wide awake. And precisely this: to live in the unpredictable, in the changing, in the encounters - and be awake, find oneself, always new, always creative; this seems to be the task of the YouthSection.

These are some thoughts on the work that have been given to me through Elizabeth and the Goetheanum. With great joy for our future meetings, with hope and gratitude, I will end my teaching here in São Paulo by the end of this year.

I want to, very briefly, introduce myself: I was born in Chile in 1967 and grew up mainly in São Paulo. As early as the 1980s we had an active YouthSection work here in São Paulo: Jörgen Smit and later Heinz Zimmermann came to visit us. So I participated in many meetings and conferences. I studied mathematics at the university, and later I studied at the teacher seminar in Dornach. At this time I first met Elizabeth! For the last 19 years I have been a high school teacher at the Waldorf school in São Paulo. I went back to study at the university some years ago and am currently working on my doctorate. At the university I found so many and such interesting thoughts developed there, researched, and sought after for dealing with the challenges and needs of our time. To be able to “think with,” to contribute, is really something inspiring to join! This presence is felt every day in this huge, incredible, differentiated, and busy city in which we live.

To move from Brazil is for my family (my two sons and my husband, and me) a huge and wonderful adventure, a step into an open future where we will all try to develop things together.

Warm greetings to all of you. Next time you will hear more concretely about our future work!

Constanza Kaliks. 

Klick den Link um die deutsche Version von Constanzas Brief runterzuladen.

History was written on Robin Island in many ways. When members of the African National Congress (ANC) were imprisoned during apartheid on this little island off the coast of Cape Town they had no access to news and most importantly, no access to education. Since education is a key factor for social and political change, that was exactly what the government had hoped for and planned. The plan did not work though, and Robin Island University was founded. The university was the unique way in which the people on Robin Island learned from each other. Without having access to teachers, they began exchanging all the knowledge and education each one of them had acquired before being imprisoned. Everybody became a teacher and a student at the same time. While this seems like a self-evident step to take in this situation, it does not seem to be so self-evident in everyday situations.

Some time ago, I sat around a table with a few friends, and we had only one goal: to find out what the others knew and had experience in. We began with writing down everything that came to our mind, quietly and without talking to each other. The lists became quite long. It's impressive to see everything you can do written out in front of you, from making great coffee to project management to stacking a shelf to writing poetry. The first realization was: Wow, I never would have thought there are so many things I can do! The second realization set in as soon as we started telling each other about our lists. We all knew each other pretty well, and yet we had no idea of the amount of knowledge, experience and skill each of us brought to the table. It was like seeing the underwater part of an iceberg, the remaining six-sevenths that are not above the water. Right away, we wanted to stay around that table for a long time. There were so many themes that one of us was more experienced in and that the others wanted to know more about. We all became teachers and students at the same time.

There is an old paradigm that there are only a few teachers in the world and the rest has to learn from them. In this paradigm, a teacher is usually certified through a number of diplomas and other qualifications, and that is what makes her or him a teacher. Is that what really qualifies someone to be a teacher? Only one of us sitting around the table was certified, but quite frankly nobody cared! We were interested in everyone and the knowledge and experiences they each carry, diploma or no diploma.

The new paradigm is very simple: Everybody is a teacher.

This new paradigm requires everybody to become aware of her or his own unique life experience and to see that other people might be interested in those experiences.  We are surrounded by people and we are therefore surrounded by tremendous amounts of skills, knowledge, and experiences. We just have to recognize it and start asking. But we still have to deal with the “iceberg problem,” that we only see and know very little about the people around us. We might be sitting in a café, wondering how our upcoming trip to Tanzania will be, and right next to us is a person who just returned from living there, but we just would not know. How often is the answer to our questions right next to us, and yet we have no idea? This seems like one of the biggest wastes of resources, knowledge, experience, creativity and innovation mankind has ever seen.

New education does not only take place in institutions and it does not depend on diplomas. It takes place between all of us: between old and young and in every possible situation. It takes place between human beings who want to learn from each other. We can already see strong individuals in the world who have chosen this new path, regardless of the dominance of the old paradigm, and there will be more!

This is why we began to tackle the iceberg problem by developing workshops and methods for groups of people to learn from each other and use all of the resources present. Of course the question remains: How do you find the people you could learn from? So we are also working on a website to help you find interesting people in your area. If you like the idea and want to stay informed, write me an email and we'll let you know about our progress! 

 - Valentin Vollmer

I recently returned to my home in Australia. On the flight from Singapore I looked out the window somewhere above the Western Australian coast. It was a dark night – no moon. Below were the scattered lights of the Pilbara – station (ranch) country. Desert. The land was completely black, broken only by a solitary light here or there. Somewhere further west I knew the land gave way to ocean, and from there spread up to sky. And in the sky were the shining lights of familiar stars, including the Southern Cross.

All of this – earth, ocean, sky – was not separated this night the way it usually is. No coast, no horizon. Without the reflecting moon it was all so dark that it looked like one scene, one canvas, one stage. The sky and the stars moved amongst the ocean and land, and the land and its lights moved freely amongst the stars. All was dark, with star and human light interweaving.

***

With so many cultural and natural upheavals taking place in the world at present – with so many phenomena forcing us back upon ourselves – and with so many ‘transition’ experiences existing for individuals and groups, we are confronted with numerous questions. Change is all around us, and all within us. From the most macro to the most micro situations, something is being asked of us. We can feel – like many people of the Arab world, for instance – that existing social conditions are no longer appropriate for the full reality of the human being today. Such conditions are of the past and are asking for transformation. Likewise, when faced with such out-of-date social structures, and with numerous natural disasters, we can also have a feeling that something within ourselves is asking for similar transformation. We can have the feeling: No longer can we experience the world with the same consciousness as we have previously been doing; that in order to overcome such natural and social crises, something of ourselves must also develop.

Such feelings as these – that something is not right in the world and in our own selves; that the world has become something hostile to the essential nature of the human being; that the essential nature of the human being does not find itself rightly in the world – can lead to all sorts of consequences. Change must come, we may rightly feel, but it must also come in the right way. If we do not bring these feelings to the full light of consciousness by permeating them with thoroughly worked-through thoughts, then our actions can take on revolutionary, re-actionary or event violent tendencies.

One test of such a situation may be to ask ourselves: What is it we are actually fighting for?

To our feelings we must also add clear thoughts. To our noble, and often beautiful, feelings we hold for change we must also add truth. If we do so we will move from being revolutionary to being evolutionary, for we will be able to act not simply in reactionary ways, but in ways which are in accordance with the reality of the change being asked for in the world today. The transformation of the world is of course necessary, but it must be in accordance with what the world itself is needing to become. In order to act in such a way, our thinking must align with what the world itself is asking for in us. In our thinking our own becoming must align with the stream of world becoming. If I make a space for the becoming of the world in my own thinking activity, then something of the transformed world-picture can begin to speak itself in me. I then can act in accordance with my own highest potential, and in accordance with the highest possibilities of the world. I make of myself a free instrument in service of world possibilities. I transform the world not according to what I think it should be, but in accordance with how it thinks itself in me.

Such is the reality of what is confronting us in every micro, meso and macro natural and cultural difficulty in the world today. In a way, we have attracted these difficulties to ourselves in order that we can overcome all that holds us back from our own – and the world’s – lawful becoming.

The only truly transformative-evolutionary force in the world and the human being is the poetic – is the non-material, the creative – the spirit. In adding to our feeling for social change all that stems from poeticised and spiritualised thinking activity we are changing ourselves in accordance with that which the world itself is asking for. Out of this we can develop the necessary pictures for our very real next steps – and they will be lawful next steps because they contain within them the only truly transformative agent in the world. Evolution thereby steps itself out in us. We are stepped. We are evolved. The world becomes, in and through us. We are becomed. We are poeticised. We are en-spirited. We are spoken by the true speaking of the cosmos. We are Worded.

Through such activity we birth freedom in the cosmos. In overcoming our separation between I and all that is not-I (including our own bodies) we, through love, bring freedom into the cosmos. We awaken, as fully creative human beings, in a field of true freedom and of love. It guides us on, bridging the gap, and we become carers for the newborn part of ourselves that holds this as a reality in and for the world. We become with the world.

Through such activity as this we can awaken experientially within the field of true, beautiful and good next steps for the human being and the world. Every natural and cultural, world and personal disaster calls us more fully to this task. For within every disaster lives our own poetic self – with the poetic world – calling us on. Through such activity we can, without theory but in reality, develop the eyes necessary to see what it is we are in fact fighting for.

And so what is it that we can see? What is it that we are actually fighting for? We fight for the human being. We fight for the future of the world and of the human being.

We fight to create social structures worthy of the human being: body, soul and spirit. We fight to create a social world in which we can find the full reality of the human being – in which we can truly find ourselves. We thereby create the opportunity for others to develop themselves in accordance with their own becoming – with who they truly are. One feeds the other. We, in developing ourselves through the poetic light of clear thinking, feeling and willing, can awaken in the world waiting to be made. In making it we make a space for the future development of the human being.

The boundary between I and not-I, between self and world is hereby overcome. The subjective-objective duality is resolved – not theoretically, but experientially-perceptually. In and through the human being the world is seen and made anew. True and poetic science and art, through true religious experience. The human being stands in the centre of everything. Personal and world becoming overlap, without losing the differentiation of either. We stand as free and individual beings in service of the Gods, whose religion is the human being. The horizon line dissolves, and we find ourselves amongst the stars, and the stars amongst our human lights. The Earth mingles with the heavens, and heaven steps down upon the earth.

The human being becomes, and the world with it.

- John Stubley 

(Extract from an article originally published on the Centre for Social Poetry website. For the full article, please click here.)

All over the world an interesting question is fascinating more and more people: the idea deals with an unconditional basic income grant (BIG), which everyone is entitled to, independently of income, gender, religion or age. In times like these, as we are painstakingly attempting to bail out our financial systems, it is becoming more and more important to develop an alternative which realigns the economy to focus on the individual. We have to become aware of the fact that our economy should serve our needs and not the other way round!

The dramatically rising unemployment rate has become a pressing ‘problem’ in almost every country in the world. However, if we look closely, we can see that this problem has nothing to do with a lack of available work. Particularly in the social field, in care work, education or within the family, the amount of work that is desperately needed is infinite. The real problem lies in the fact that there are less and less jobs in this field. In other words; there is no money to pay and therefore enable people to do these important tasks.

So perhaps we should not focus on creating and designing new jobs at all. Perhaps we should shift our attention to creating conditions in which people are able to do the work that is seen as necessary, through an income. The BIG would do just that.

A basic income grant, which covers more than mere survival, is paid out unconditionally and on a monthly basis, and would initiate fundamental changes within society. At the same time it would enable many possibilities to emerge and develop. Let’s think it though...

Take young people, for example. A basic income grant would reduce the pressure of having to find the best paid job. It would give us the means to ask ourselves where our individual abilities and skills lie and in which way we can contribute to society. It would give us the ability to shape our education around what we want to become, instead of around the job market. As a society we would be able to turn our attention to the work we consider meaningful and indispensable. Today, so many of the interesting and important new projects and initiatives fail because of labor costs.

To clarify: the basic income grant is an income which guarantees a means for social and financial participation. It is meant as a foundation that can support work of any kind, and of course that includes employment.

My most recent art work was commissioned by the town of Reinach, Swizterland. Traditionally, every two years the town hires a dozen artists to carve sculptures from the remaining stumps of trees that have been cleared. Fortunately, I was one of those artists this year. 

The theme has always been the "Fairy Tale" and the sculptures have ranged from frogs to princesses. As I walked the forest trying to draw inspiration from previous works, I began to ponder the quality of a fairy tale, specifically the use of imagination to express legends imbued with moral code. Though technically magnificent, seeing dwarf after dwarf made me wonder if the substance still existed in these figures chain-sawed into wood. I questioned whether or not people still perceive the meaning that was once connected with the origins of  mythology. 

I decided then that I wanted to create my own fairy tale. Using the traditional characteristics of classic European folklore, I wanted to carve a sculpture which emphasized the role of imagination in storytelling and art. My first decision was to hand carve the entire work. This was a new style for me since I had never worked with wood carving before. I knew, however, that through this long meditative method of carving away the wood, I could watch the forms develop overtime and that I would be free to improvise how the sculpture changed with time. I could be free in my imaginative artistic process, allowing the form to come from my inner inspiration rather than a plastic toy model or photo from a Brothers Grimm children's book.  

- Tim Kowalski