Dear Friends, Supporters, and Well-Wishers,
This season’s School of English for Engaged Social Service (SENS 2023) is in full swing. We have just completed eight weeks of the program, with our graduation date set for April 8th. We have 15 students from five countries, and our work team expands that out to several more. If by chance you saw our funding appeal in October or November last year, I would like you to know that we were able to fund and bring most of the students whose stories and photos we shared. You might not have known that at that time we had a negative balance in our account, and didn’t know how we would bring anyone at all.
It is close to a miracle that we could. And you who donated here on GlobalGiving were the ones who made it happen. Thank you so much! In one day, November 29th, we took in enough in donations to fund one and a half scholarships. And that helped to set everything else in motion. Your donations around that time, and since then, and the support of those of you who are our monthly donors, have made it possible to bring together a wonderful group who are fully engaged in our program this season.
I’m grateful to GlobalGiving for offering us additional funding late in the year, which enabled us to add to the number of funded students. I’m grateful to other institutional donors who made it possible for us to bring as many participants as we have. I’m grateful to our Vietnamese students, who in many cases contributed significantly to their tuition. I’m grateful to those of our students who braved the risks and horrors of a harsh military regime to attend our program, and who, along with some from other countries, had to pass through many bureaucratic hurdles simply to come to Thailand for the required number of months. Thank you all for your commitment!
These days, money flows like water in many fields—the fields where weapons are sold, the fields of Congressional lobbying, the fields where medical care is offered only if a profit is to be had. But this flow of precious water slows considerably when it is not private benefit or national power that we seek to amplify, but compassionate leadership without regard for national or ethnic boundaries. Thank you again for directing the flow of your own personal resources to support us in this endeavor. It means so much to each of our students, and ultimately to the fate of our deeply interconnected world!
The students this year are on the whole more advanced in English than in previous years. And their commitment and openness to learn, and to each other, is palpable. The outpouring of support for fellow students, when they need it, is remarkable. As is the willingness to share with each other, and to be vulnerable. In our very first days, as students introduced themselves, first in the opening ceremony, and then in their native language on our first day of class, several cried spontaneously about the effort it had taken to come to the program, and the fact that they had arrived at a safe and hopeful place.
When I look across the classroom during a workshop, it is not unusual to see a young Myanmar humanitarian worker rest her shoulder against that of a female social entrepreneur from another country. It is not unusual to see students listening intently to each other, or laughing, or crying, or talking quietly in groups of two or three. Whenever we do “Mingling,” which has the students simply find another person or two and ask and share about what’s going on, it can be hard for the end-of-activity bell to be heard over the din of the conversations.
Our students are energetic and self-motivated. We ask them to think about the world, and about their goals, and they are eager to do this. They have appreciated and sometimes loved the films we show, usually once a week, and they comment insightfully about what they saw in each film. We are offering a crash course in the humanities and social sciences, all with a focus on building a network of young leaders who care not only for the future of their country, but of humanity. Who care not only for the future of humanity but also for each other’s wellbeing. Who are able to look at the great social landscape they are part of, and consider everyone a potential ally. This strengthening of relationships is at the core of SENS’s work.
We have also faced tragedies together. One of our students got word one day that their closest childhood friend was shot to death by the military in their home country. We offered our student time in the morning class to share about the friend who was killed. And we want to memorialize the fallen friend in some form. How shall we do that? And why is it that we live in a world where a group of young leaders devoted to study for a time have to face this needless death? These questions weigh on my mind.
The SENS 2023 students are fortunate in that we have had numerous workshops and out-of-class experiences, and there are more to come. The students have had, and will have more, chances to meet with some of the outstanding workshop leaders, and leaders period, in Thailand and in the region. For the first time ever, students have had the chance to interview the director of a film we have viewed together, including At the Gate, on the impacts of Israeli checkpoints and crossings, by our tutor Kathleen Kamphoefner. They also interviewed Ann Hu, the director of Confetti, a filmon dyslexia, online. And they will have the chance to see a film directed by one of our own students before the course is over.
Our first field trip included meetings with three remarkable women: Dhammananda Bhikkhuni, the pioneer who through careful study and brave action made it possible for women who wish to become Buddhist monks to do so, in Thailand and beyond; Khun Krarok, who led villagers in a years-long fight to prevent the building of a dirty coal-fired power plant in an otherwise flourishing fishing and agricultural area; and Khun Ploy, a woman who has helped to build a community enterprise of homestays and an eco-fabric printing workshop in a small town in Ratchaburi province. These visits are part of our intention to open up the classroom into direct contact with Thai society and into direct engagement with outstanding leaders who have arisen from within Thai society. As an anthropologist, I can confirm that such direct face-to-face meetings are far more inspiring of imagination and appreciation than even good writing or a video might be.
Our multinational work team, and our students, have not only been responsive to and supportive of each other. They have also been remarkably generous and kind in offering support to me, as I direct a challenging program. It is challenging because our program can only work when it is truly responsive to the needs of the students. And these needs evolve as we offer our curriculum in English, leadership, and awareness of planetary challenges and solutions. Thus the next three weeks will be characterized by experiences that are fresh and new, even for those of us whose job it is to point the way forward, as we traverse this dense and beautiful forest of mutual learning that is the SENS program.
A heartfelt thank you to you for reading, and for making all of this possible.
Sincerely,
Ted Mayer
Director of the SENS Programs
Links:
Dear Faithful Ongoing Donors and Generous One-Time Donors,
Your donations allow us to design and run life-changing courses for young leaders from across Asia. At a time when literally billions are going into the production, sale, and use of destructive weapons, and into the coffers of fossil fuel companies, there is a small but growing number of clear-minded people around the world who are working to solve real problems. We count you among that number. Your donations from now through April of 2023 will enable us to offer scholarships to the young leaders who want to join our School of English for Engaged Social Service (SENS) in 2023, because they need the support, because improved English will allow them to write better reports to their donors, because a broader understanding of international relations and the world economy will help them to understand better the climate crisis, and how they can work to bring about change at a time when many world leaders are effectively frozen in greed or in the past.
I will say a little more about our SENS 2023 program and the students who have applied. But I first want to let you know that we just completed our first English Teacher Training Online, which we called SENS LibrETTO. This name deliberately compares teachers to librettists, the writers of the story and the script of an opera. But instead of a fictional drama, the drama is the lives of their students. The whole orientation of the SENS programs, which we shared in the SENS LibrETTO class, is that we teach about everything—the social oppression and the severe ecological changes, for example--that affects our students and will affect them in the future, because we care about them. We teach them to be excellent listeners for each other, and to listen in a way that supports and heals. And we do this all in English, and in this way they learn English quickly and with genuine interest. We compare the teacher to the writer of the script and the story for their own English classes, and our teachers spoke movingly about how they care about their students in ways that go beyond English, and how this changes their teaching.
We are now preparing for our sixth in-person SENS program of three months, and our seventh SENS program if we count this year’s online English program for Myanmar civil society activists. The SENS 2023 program will take place from January 22 – April 8, 2023. In 2020 and 2021, our first Vietnamese students returned home with glowing reports about their experiences in SENS. And as a result we have a large number of applications from Vietnamese students. It has been lovely for me to meet these students in one-on-one interviews. Among those we have accepted is a medical doctor of 26 years old from central Vietnam who works long hours in a public hospital, but also volunteers at a non-profit association that shares accurate information on helpful and up-to-date treatments for common diseases like diabetes, or the problems of the elderly. Our applicants include young women and men who have decided not to follow the conventional path of education, work, and family. Instead, they have pursued alternative paths fed by their genuine curiosity about the world and their purpose in life. We have several young English teachers as well, and we have prioritized them because we know they will carry on our innovative and student-centered approaches to language learning.
We also have a number of applicants from Myanmar. Due to the military coup in their country, they have to do their humanitarian work or civil society support with great care and secrecy. I have recently taught Myanmar civil society activists online, and it is distressing to hear that the director of the grassroots program they work for was arrested simply for accepting money from a non-Myanmar bank account to support their work. The charge? Treason, punishable by long prison sentences under harsh conditions or even death. My students tell me about harrowing experiences passing checkpoints, where any small misstep can lead to suspicions and arrest. Now we have four applicants from Myanmar applying to the SENS 2023 program. This will be a welcome rest for them, but also an enlivening encounter with young leaders from other parts of Asia. They will get to experience the joy of learning with others under a program whose theme this year is: Building a Bridge to Common Ground: (Re-)Discovering the Joy of Learning Together.
We have our first applicant this year from Cambodia, a leading dancer in Cambodia’s first all-gay classical dance troupe, who wishes to communicate the meaning of traditional dance to international audiences. We also have received, and expect more applications from marginalized Dalits in India, and from Indonesian students and teachers. Two of our students in SENS 2020 and 2021 had no intention of becoming English teachers. But their experience in the SENS programs inspired them to consider teaching. They are now doing excellent work replicating and adapting our program to their own home contexts. This year we expect to have a number of applicants who are English teachers, and your donations will indirectly support the transmission and evolution of our own approaches within South and Southeast Asia through them. This is our own small but potentially profound contribution to creating a peaceful world.
We would appreciate it very much if you could think of others who might want to donate to support our programs. Every dollar that comes in through GlobalGiving brings us closer to offering a scholarship to yet another student and to yet another budding teacher who wishes to carry on our work. Our aim is to bring in as many students as we can in SENS 2023, which means 18-20 total.
I cannot share photos from our recent online classes because those photos include the faces of people who encounter security risks not only in Myanmar but also in other countries we work with. Instead, I will share here photos of some of our previous SENS programs, so you can get a sense of the atmosphere that we and the students collaborate in creating every year. In the documents below you will find our brochure for 2023 along with a few “Image Description Projects” from our recent SENS LibrETTO class.
Thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your kind donations. They allow us to keep building on and improving our effective and transformative work. Such work takes time, and we are especially grateful to those of you who have supported us for so long.
Thank you again, and may any blessings and good outcomes that arise from our work reverberate back to you who make our work possible.
Ted Mayer
Designer and Director of the School of English for Engaged Social Service (SENS)
The SENS program is proud to work under the auspices of the Institute for Transformative Learning of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (The INEB Institute).
Links:
Dear Friends,
Over the past three months we have continued our work on two key projects, the School of English for Engaged Social Service (SENS), which provides group classes in-person and online, and One-On-One Mentoring (3OM), which provides online tutoring to individuals or very small groups of students. Many, though not all, of our students are from groups that are facing some kind of existential risk. In the case of 3OM, we generally work with members of ethnic minorities around Asia who face discrimination and limitations on their speech and actions within their home country or region. In the SENS program we have been running a six-week course for students who bravely continue to do community support and humanitarian relief work inside of Myanmar or in the border areas with Thailand. They carry on this work under a brutal military regime that is widely known to hunt down, arrest, and sometimes murder Myanmar citizens who are engaged in work of this kind.
My primary work over the last few weeks has been to teach the six-week course for young Myanmar community leaders. It has been a moving yet also gratifying experience. It is moving because in many ways the students are like students everywhere, wanting to enjoy life, to learn, and to contribute constructively to their communities. Yet at the same time, they face genuine risks to their well-being and safety. Nearly every week at least one student shares that he or she has been forced by local circumstances to move to a safer area. Occasionally there is also news of a friend or colleague who was arrested or even killed. Arrest can be very serious under the current military, as individuals may be detained under harsh conditions for many years or even face capital punishment for engaging in community support. Such is the reality of life under the Myanmar military coup group, who hopes to terrify the Myanmar people into silence.
This group of Myanmar students from various ethnic groups has been fully engaged as we explore English; practices of listening, mutual support, and self-inquiry; the nature of the current world crisis; and life under the military coup. We have budgeted time so that I can meet with students individually to work on their writing projects, and this has been a wonderful way to get to know the students. Recently they all chose an image that they went on to describe in five lines and then in a final paragraph explain why the image is important to them. This was their first experience of preparing and giving a presentation in our online classroom. I learned so much about their lives and circumstances through their choices and their writing!
As for the 3OM project, in the recent period we have continued to accumulate expertise and experience in organizing it to run smoothly and to meet the needs of the students. For example, when two or three people who are already friends learn about our project and request tutoring, we put them in a class together if their English levels and interests are close enough. With three students in one class, each person still receives a great deal of individual attention, yet the class is enriched by the exchange of experiences and the diversity of questions and concerns that arise from a group of three people. Expanding classes in this way allows us to stretch our precious resources, while still conserving the security and intimate ambience of our one-on-one classes.
A final development that I am very pleased about is that we have been seeing more and more cross-fertilization between our different programs. Now, for example, one of our alumni from the SENS 2021 program, a Vietnamese student with excellent English who had started her own online tutoring program, has begun tutoring within the 3OM program. Another alumnus has been taking the concept of SENS and designing online and in-person courses in their home country. They have done so with great creativity, and they have continued to receive a warm and enthusiastic response from their students, who have rarely if ever had the chance to express themselves so freely or to learn with such unabashed enjoyment.
We will be inviting applications from young adults from around the region for our upcoming in-person SENS 2023 program that will begin January 22 and run through April 8 of next year. In addition to inviting young adults with a commitment to working for social and personal transformation, we will also invite 4 to 6 English teachers who will be able to a) benefit through improvements in their own English, and b) learn new and engaging ways of teaching language that they can apply in their home contexts. In this way we hope to make more widely available our approach to holistic, student-centered, socially conscious, and transformative learning through a focus on English, supporting students’ self-confidence and clarity of vision, and strengthening their leadership abilities.
Your donations have been an essential part of enabling this work. Thank you so much for your generosity in these anxiety-filled times. We are working on building durable and long-term connections of mutual support and ongoing learning with young adults from all over Asia as a way to meet the challenge of these times. While facing tremendous pressure to get ahead so as to ensure their personal or familial security and success, these young adults are choosing to support their communities, friends, ethnic groups, and national futures as an important part of fulfilling their own life goals.
Supporting young leaders takes time. So, when a tutor comes to me and asks if they can continue tutoring a particularly promising student, or gather enthusiastic students together for a focused course of a few weeks, your donations allow me to say “Yes” more often. Thank you for making this work possible!
P.S. Under current conditions we are unable to share photos of our students. For this report I am sharing photos of my online teaching setup. Thank you for understanding!
Links:
Dear Friends and Supporters,
At the end of 2021 we want to express our deep gratitude for your support of our work in these challenging times. Our work has consisted in creating educational spaces that are safe, personalized, characterized by the natural delight of learning together, and capable of cultivating compassionate leadership. We bring to our work a commitment to the universal dignity and value of all human beings, a focus on supporting those who have been excluded or oppressed, and the realization that genuine transformations toward free and humane societies require changes both within individuals and within larger social structures. We believe and have seen that out of these changes the desire and the ability to cooperate for a common future emerges naturally.
The heartland of our work is Thailand and Southeast Asia, but we also reach partners and ethnic or religious minorities throughout South and East Asia. Our primary institutional framework has been the School of English for Engaged Social Service (SENS) and the One-On-One Mentoring (3OM) programs, both under the Institute for Transformative Learning of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB Institute).
We want you to be aware that in 2022 our work will be making a shift towards supporting leadership of young adults from the many ethnicities of Myanmar. We are inspired by their determination to survive the current deadly violence, to make democracy and respect for human rights the norm, and to chart a path forward to a new social contract of inclusion and mutual respect. Our close partnership over several decades with various organizations in Myanmar (mostly Buddhist and Christian, but more recently also Muslim) means that we cannot ignore the trauma occurring in our neighboring country, or the huge increase in the populations of IDP (internally displaced persons) camps, or the growing numbers who are escaping across the border into Thailand for refuge. Most horrifying have been the deliberate targeting of civilians, the bombing of residences in towns and villages, and attacks on religious sanctuaries, including churches, mosques, and temples.
Reflection on these issues, and how to respond, have characterized the last few months of our work. We saw glimpses of the situation, and how we could help, during our SENS 2021 course. One Myanmar participant who had fled Myanmar in fear for her life wrote the following about having been a part of our program:
Most importantly, the program has been a safe space for all of us. The feeling of being in a safe place helped me to heal. In the early days of the class, I was deeply distressed by the traumatic events that I experienced since the coup. I was in shock, overwhelmed with fear and despair. Looking back myself from now to beginning days, the change in me is very obvious and clear. My inner strength has returned, and my thoughts become clear again. I will uphold these profound personal transformations to continue fighting for the freedom of my country, my people. I will be aware of my privilege and use it to benefit everyone. And I also promise myself to cultivate deeper compassion toward myself and the Earth and the Universe.
Our response to the new conditions that we experience on the ground now could be characterized as a “Focus on Myanmar.” Those new conditions are characterized by threats to physical well-being, violations of human rights, and attempts to shutter democracy and the voices of dissidents. All these conditions are heightened now in Myanmar, thus our shift in focus, yet they are present in various forms and in different degrees throughout the region. Furthermore, large-scale threats like the climate crisis will not disappear of their own accord, but will require united and concerted action. In this context, our work of building cross-border and cross-ethnic ties has never been more important. Thus, even with a Myanmar Focus, we will continue to work more broadly.
Specifically, we will continue to offer personal support, leadership training, and skill building in all the learning communities we foster and sustain. The skills we work to cultivate are listening effectively to each other as well as to survivors of trauma and others in need of help; heightened awareness of the sources of social oppression and ecological destruction; communication in English as a means of creating cross-border and cross-ethnic ties of support and cooperation and of speaking to the outside world; personal and freely chosen goal setting; and moving out of fear and timidity to take bold but thoughtful action.
The three women in the photo on our project page—all of whom I have had contact with recently—demonstrate the impacts of our work. All participants in SENS 2018, the woman on the left, from Laos, is now working for an organization that trains young adults to do COVID-19 preparedness and response training in the Lao countryside. The woman in the center, from the Karbi Anglong tribal lands in the far northeast of India, has worked with NGOs from Mumbai to create a three-month tour of her region that will allow participants to experience and understand the life of indigenous people within the complexities of also being citizens of India. The woman on the right, from Myanmar, is head of human resources for a large humanitarian organization that continues to provide on-the-ground relief in her country.
We are now working with a loose consortium of groups in Thailand who seek to provide support for the education and training of Myanmar civil society leaders both within and outside of Myanmar. One of our first programs under the SENS program in 2022 will likely be an online English and leadership program for members of Myanmar civil society organizations. Please stay tuned for updates and for changes to this project’s main page.
Meanwhile, we hope and pray that you and your loved ones will remain safe in the coming year, and that we will all find appropriate ways to contribute to the many hopeful initiatives occurring across the world.
Sincerely,
Ted Mayer
Academic Director of the INEB Institute
P.S. The photos we have shared contrast sharply with the troubling social and political situation in the region. Our team met on Samet Island for a very relaxing but also highly productive work and planning retreat in early December. This welcome and much needed work retreat was supported by funds from INEB, not by funds donated to this project. Thank you again for your support!
Links:
Dear Friends,
I want to begin by expressing my deep gratitude to all of you who have contributed to our project on GlobalGiving. It is your contributions—whether occasional or monthly— that enabled us to organize and run a highly successful SENS 2021 course over the past few months under very difficult conditions. We were able to bring 9 students from Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam, and a third country. This smaller-than-usual group proved to be highly engaged, responsive, and committed to forming strong ties of connection, solidarity, and mutual support. Your contributions also funded a strong work team including myself, Assistant Director/Co-Teacher (Nilanjana Premaratna), Logistics Coordinator (Topsi Rongrongmuang), and three Volunteer Tutors.
Despite all your generous contributions, we struggled this year with additional costs brought on by the need for quarantine, COVID tests, and extra medical insurance for those who entered the country. Thus it was all the more to our delight and surprise when we learned half-way through the course that our project and fellow projects on GlobalGiving under the Sathirakoses-Nagapradipa Foundation had been selected by GlobalGiving in collaboration with Airbnb to receive a donation to support our work! This completely changed the financial picture for us, and I want to express our profound thanks both to GlobalGiving and to Airbnb for this generous contribution to support our mission of cultivating leadership for sustainability in the Asian region. It reminds me too that due to its regular bonus days and to unexpected contributions such as this, GlobalGiving provides us with an enormous level of net support, even after the necessary administrative fees are deducted. I hope this will encourage you to continue your tax-deductible contributions through this platform.
What Remained the Same This Year?
SENS 2021 carried on our now six-year tradition of providing a 12-week experience of personalized support to our students. This experience allows the students to build their English skills at the same time that they grow in confidence and self-awareness and deepen their understanding of the challenges we now face globally at the wider social and ecological level. At the heart of the program are three keywords: play, connection, and integrity. Play emphasizes the fact that learning in the SENS program is designed to be enjoyable and engaging. While this learning is actually a form of work, it often feels to the students more like play. A big part of their enjoyment also comes from the close friendships that students form with participants from other countries. Connections formed in this way give our program a warmth and ease that can be difficult to find as we face pandemics, the climate crisis, and the many social divisions and inequities that characterize our societies. Precisely because they are at times challenging, these connections also becocme a deep source of learning as students strive to break through barriers that have been built up around every conceivable social and cultural difference. Integrity means that we respect the students’ own choices about how they will respond, while also making vivid the need to respond in some way that is thoughtful and constructive, and that reflects the self-chosen life goals of the student.
Running the SENS program provides a unique opportunity for participants to learn at many levels. Yet it is also a tremendous learning opportunity for the work team. We learn from our own unexpected reactions to people and to events within the course. We learn from the success or failure of what we try to accomplish in the classroom, or on a field excursion. This means that we are learning things that one might not be able to find in any text on pedagogy. I feel we are trying things in this program that put us at the cutting edge of language teaching, and that brings its own delightful rewards. Our approach of taking personal growth and social awareness as the focus of all our English language content allows for a depth that might otherwise be hard to find in a language program. We feel that we are not only preparing the students for their encounters with the international world through developing their English skills; we are also preparing them to live a meaningful life by providing useful information about where we stand now as a species, and by encouraging them to make their own informed decisions about what kind of life they would like to lead.
One area in which we face difficulties every year at the level of language teaching methodology, is how to help students undo habits of incorrect speech or language use with which they have become comfortable, in some cases over many years. We find, for example, that students often do not hear our subtle corrections, as we restate with correct pronunciation or grammar something they had said incorrectly. This forces us to find ways to call their attention to the form of their speech in surprising, enjoyable, and non-judgmental ways. Humor and lightness help, but are sometimes not enough. This year we found some success in sharing on the board a series of statements or questions that we had heard students use over the previous week. Students needed to rewrite these expressions so that they were grammatically correct. This is an old method, but we found it helpful not only as a learning tool but also as a diagnostic tool that could tell us who needed additional help. We also decided that in our next SENS course we would try to focus intensively but creatively on disrupting old but incorrect habits immediately in the first two weeks of the course, so that such habits would have little chance to survive or become more deeply rooted.
What Was Different This Year?
What was different this year was that we had a smaller group, and this allowed for greater personal attention and may have also contributed to the formation of a more cohesive group that often wanted to spend time together. This was lovely to see. This group was also deeply interested in playing—board games, in-class spelling games, badminton, and many other forms of play. I still do not know whether this orientation to play was a response to the restrictions of the pandemic, or an expression of their individual personalities. I suspect that both factors were at play. We accommodated their eagerness for play as best we could and were rewarded by a level of attention and engagement that is hard to find in groups of students. The students took our questions, activities, and challenges with great seriousness, and their doing so created a strong feeling for everyone of traveling on an authentic and shared learning journey in which outcomes were not predetermined.
This year was very different in that we could not take any field trips, aside from a few days of exploration in Chiang Mai following the excellent workshop on power analysis led by Ouyporn Khuankaew. The reason of course was the high risk posed by the growing pandemic in Thailand. The result of this constraint was that we made full use of the expertise of our work team and of our students as well. For example, Assistant Director Nilanjana Premaratna, who had exercised this role in the first and second years of SENS, often designed her afternoon classes in a way that resembled thematic workshops. In one such instance, students had to make decisions about how to develop their imaginary island nation. Logistics Coordinator Topsi led a workshop on how to organize and plan a non-violent action. Tutor Petra Carmen led a workshop helping students envision the creation of an eco-village, and the learning steps they would need to take to actually start or contribute to one. Student Wichai Juntavaro led a workshop on appreciating and relating respectfully with nature. We also invited outsiders to lead workshops that did not require the group’s travel. Toshi Doi led an in-person workshop on how citizens could affect the decisions of financial institutions that sometimes enable harmful development projects, and K. V. Soon led a workshop on digital literacy, joining us over Zoom. Melissa Storms, Assistant Director from the previous year, led two writing workshops on Zoom, and generously offered one-on-one guidance to students as well.
Finally, this year was different because it took place not only in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also in the shadow of the extraordinarily brutal and destructive military coup that took place in Myanmar. Our students’ harrowing stories of travel to Thailand, concerns for their families and colleagues, and the news from Myanmar formed a daily backdrop to our classes. One student suffered through seeing a family member paraded on TV by the Myanmar military, in a condition that made it clear he had been beaten while in detention. Such experiences led to a dawning realization that we were not only providing leadership and life training for budding leaders from various countries. In the case of Myanmar we were also providing a safe haven for them—a refuge within which they could live, work, and study in safety for a time.
We are especially grateful to you that your contributions made this possible.
Looking Ahead
The COVID-19 pandemic has not abated in Thailand, as of this writing. For this reason we have decided not to run our regular three-month course in 2022. We love this course and sincerely hope and expect to organize it again in 2023.
Meanwhile, in 2022, your contributions will be supporting our growing online work, and shorter in-person workshops and courses in Thailand when these are possible. Before the February 1, 2020 military coup in Myanmar, we had already been providing both in-person and online courses for our Myanmar friends and partners. From late October 2020 to the present, we have also been working with one ethnic group that faces constraints on their movement due to political repression at home. That work has enabled the development of a small but committed network of tutors who have been providing one-on-one mentoring to individuals from the group in question. We call this program 3OM (One-On-One Mentoring), which has become a new project within SENS. Of great significance for us is that through SENS and 3OM we have also begun training teachers of English in designing humane and student-centered pedagogies that support the critical and creative abilities of the students. This is of course significant because those teachers will help us expand our work to reach new populations.
We now want to expand that work yet again to include students from marginalized groups from across Asia. We would like to offer one-on-one mentoring and perhaps online classes to young leaders who are Dalits, or who identify as indigenous people, as well as to aspiring English teachers from other regions of Asia. We will keep you posted on these developments.
For now, thank you for reading this long report. Without you we could not be doing the work that we are doing. Thank you so much!
Sincerely,
Ted Mayer
Designer and Director of the SENS Programs
Links:
Project Reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you will get an e-mail when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports via e-mail without donating.
We'll only email you new reports and updates about this project.
Support this important cause by creating a personalized fundraising page.
Start a Fundraiser
Make a monthly donation & get 
