Nurturing Learning Communities in a Time of Crisis

Dear Kind Supporters and Donors,

This project, "Nurturing Learning Communities in a Time of Crisis," is focused on growing a support team that can carry on the work of the School of English for Engaged Social Service (SENS) into the distant future. This emerging support team is part of a higher-level training program we refer to as ALPS, the Apprentice Leaders Program in Sustainability. The participants are lovely young adults who are taking on higher responsibility with every passing month. It is a delight to work with them.

We want to thank you first for having already supported this work of cultivating young leaders, and for considering offering further support in the future. We feel that cultivating leaders of integrity within communities of mutual care and shared learning is one of the most powerful things we can do right now. For we face civilizational threats from state-sponsored violence, climate change, and biodiversity loss, to mention only some aspects of the current crisis.

The difficulty is that for many of us these catastrophic processes remain distant, or abstract. Yet their consequences will affect us all in ever more concrete ways in the coming months and years. Our response in this project is to foster the formation of small groups of people who make the decision to support each other in meaningful ways, and to help bring about profound and enjoyable learning experiences for their peers. It's about self-awareness but also social and ecological awareness that is made vivid through each meeting. Their peers then are more likely to carry this process on. We thank you for being a part of this work through your financial contributions, and for the highly individualized training and engagement your donations make possible.

We would like you to know that July 10th is a GlobalGiving Bonus Day, with very generous matching funds for any donation over $100. Please consider a donation (of any amount) on that date. For greatest chances of receiving matching funds, please donate as soon as possible after 9:00 am Eastern Daylight Time (US) on the 10th of July.

We would like to share the following updates on our program:

1.  We ran our SENS 2024 program from January to April for the first time this year without an Assistant Director. Instead, the ALPS team played the role of joint Assistant Director, with the help of experienced English teacher (and lawyer) Kerry Raleigh. They helped in assessing our progress, determining our next steps, handling individual difficulties, choosing appropriate teaching approaches, and supporting my leadership as director.

2. Two of our ALPS members, Au (nickname) and Soe San (nickname), took on major tutoring responsibilities during the SENS 2024 program. Following the program, they spontaneously chose to continue offering tutoring to their tutoring groups (and others), and are still doing so. This provides ongoing support not only in English but in creating a meaningful community for our students far beyond the three-month program.

3. Our ALPS team spent 10 days in the border town of Mae Sot at the end of April and early May. Together we offered a full-day follow-up workshop to Myanmar teachers we had invited to our two-weekend workshop last year. We then spent several days evaluating the SENS and ALPS program and making plans for the future. Finally, we participated in two days of field study along with an international cohort of professors and activists brought together by Civic Engagement 4.0, a project under the Office of International Affairs and Global Network of Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. One of the photos we have shared here shows us visiting with a staff member of the charitable organization, Help Without Frontiers, which provides educational and other kinds of assistance to Myanmar people in Mae Sot. We visited with four or five such organizations while in Mae Sot, and joined in reflection sessions on how we could best provide additional support to the large number of forcibly displaced Myanmar citizens who have been seeking refuge in Mae Sot.

4. In early May we also invited two new people to join the ALPS team. They are Trang (nickname) from Vietnam and Paung (nickname) from Myanmar. Like all members of ALPS, they are alumni of SENS, and are thus especially knowledgeable and supportive as they assist us to carry on our program in different venues and circumstances. Their next big task will be to help us provide our second year of programming for Myanmar teachers living in exile in Mae Sot, Thailand, in August of 2024. They will be learning by doing this work, along with the senior members of ALPS. We have shared a photo here of a women's panel on International Women's Day, and these two new members of ALPS are the two women on the right side of the photo.

5. Mi Bu (nickname), one of the senior members of ALPS, was one of only 112 out of more than 2,000 applicants from Myanmar to be offered a scholarship to study at the master's level by a well-known scholarship program. She hopes to apply the scholarship to complete an MA in Human Rights at a US university. We are proud of her accomplishment, and will keep you updated.

6. Au (nickname), one of the senior members of ALPS, will become my Assistant Director next year for SENS 2025, and is already and effectively taking on more responsibility, as well as honing his English and teaching skills. We have shared a photo of him here tutoring several members of his tutoring group.

Thank you for reading this report. Thank you for your companionship in this work. And thank you again for your support!

We would be glad if you could share this report and/or talk about our work with your friends and family.

With profound gratitude,

Ted Mayer

Links:

• Application Form for the August Workshop for Myanmar Teachers
• Application Form to Attend the SENS 2025 Program

• Upcoming August Workshop Poster (PDF)
  
• Temporary Advance Brochure for SENS 2025 Program (PDF)
  

Dear Friends,

Thank you so much for choosing to support this project! We'd like to let you know how your funds are being used during this period.

Nurturing Learning Communities in a Time of Crisis is primarily intended to support the well-being and growth of promising young leaders from Asia who have completed our flagship program, the School of English for Engaged Social Service (SENS). Supporting well-being means responding to anything from serious medical needs to helping those facing natural catastrophes or enforced exile. Growth here primarily means maturing into compassionate and thoughtful leadership. We reason that all of us, not to mention young and budding leaders, need ongoing individual support and learning opportunities to be the best leaders we could be. So, much of our energies in using the resources for this project go to nurturing the ongoing learning of such young leaders.

At the moment the bulk of our funds are being used to support ALPS, or the Apprentice Leaders Program in Sustainability. Our interpretation of sustainability is broad. Abstractly, it includes environmental, social, and spiritual sustainability. More concretely it includes the sustainability of caring communities and genuine intimacy, keeping alive the possibility of living both thoughtfully and joyfully in precarious times, and taking beautiful and time-worn human practices and discoveries and helping them evolve gracefully and durably into the future.

In July of 2023 we invited 6 young graduates of the SENS program to join the new ALPS program. Their training was to consist of several stages:

1) Helping prepare for our new and ultimately very successful series of weekend workshops for Myanmar teachers living in exile in Mae Sot, Thailand. Key forms of work at this stage were a) drafting and distributing an appropriate application form in communication with Myanmar teachers we knew, b) assisting with the applicant interviews to choose the most promising candidates; and c) communicating schedules, workshop content, and next steps to selected candidates in both English and Burmese.

2) Acting as the work team for the two-weekend workshop format, including all aspects of transportation, set-up, room arrangements, communication with the teachers, making decisions about and helping with delivery of the lessons, and seeing to the process of evaluation.

3) Participating in 5 days of internal training between the two weekends. This included receiving opportunities to hear from and work with outstanding resource people in several areas, for example Philosophy with Children, conservation, UNESCO programs that support young leaders, and more. It also included doing readings together, practicing peer counseling, undertaking a contemplative walk into Mae Sot city, and helping prepare for the second weekend.

4) Participating in weekly Saturday morning classes online during which we discussed insightful readings on leadership and related issues.

5) Helping with the preparation of the SENS 2024 program, especially with interviews but also, for a few, essentially acting as assistant directors to myself, the SENS program director, in all major decisions of selection and financial support.

6) Becoming the work team to the extent possible for the entire SENS 2024 program. (We are in the midst of this process now, having completed 4 weeks out of the 12-week program.) Only one of the six ALPS participants has been able to commit to being with SENS 2024 for the entire 12 weeks. But nearly all will be able to spend some substantial periods with the program.

7) The final stage will be 2-3 days of evaluation of the entire first year of the ALPS program to see what we did well and what could be improved for the next round. We may carry out this evaluation in the town of Mae Sot, which would provide us the opportunity to end with a day-long follow-up workshop with the 18 Mae Sot teachers for whom we presented our earlier two-weekend workshop.

Your funds have been critical in allowing us to move forward with this bold program. It is bold because we are inviting young adults to participate at a high level of decision-making and involvement in the training of those who are essentially their peers. The donations you have provided enable us to provide a modest but fair and dignified compensation to the ALPS leaders who take leave from other work opportunities or delay studies in mainstream institutions so they can work with us. Many have deeply felt obligations to support their parents or family members, regardless of their own life choices. Your funds thus free them to continue their own growth and training by joining our program as part of the work team.

The results have been wonderful, in my view. I have been delighted to work with young graduates of our program, because they already understand to a great extent what we are aiming for. They are vividly aware of the many crises we face as human beings, and of the many ways these crises are refracted at local and regional levels. They are aware of the many ways we can nurture within ourselves the ability to provide genuine support to young people facing a difficult time in human history.

It has been delightful to work with a team that is full of energy, that is capable of being honest with me about difficulties, and with whom there is a great deal of margin for trying out new things, making mistakes, forgiving each other our faults, and then moving forward without regret. It has been delightful to have the trust of these young Asian leaders. It has been inspiring to see how well they communicate with their peers--the participants--sometimes in their own languages and sometimes in English. It has been gratifying to see the depth and the care with which they think about each other and about the participants, and to observe their keen interest in helping create a vibrant learning experience. For our whole purpose is to provide an experience of a caring learning community in which the welfare of each contributes to the strength and the well-being of all. As a learning community, we continue to find new ways to make the experience fresh, joyful, effective, and supportive of the participants' growth and independent thinking.

All of this requires much thinking not only about the group as a whole, but about each individual participant, about their strengths, challenges, triumphs, and newfound directions. It is this kind of thinking that I feel is most required of those of us who wish to encourage the natural leadership abilities of others. And it is in this area that I see most clearly the growth of our ALPS leaders. I have come to rely on them ever more for their insights and perspectives on the learning journey of their esteemed peers.

I continue to believe that nurturing leadership of this caliber is absolutely critical to the future of our planet and of our deeply interconnected societies.

Thank you so much for choosing to support this work!

With gratitude,

Theodore (Ted) Mayer

Links:

• Our Website

• SENS 2024 Brochure (PDF)