Welcome!

Dear Friends:

The best of our humanity is needed now to address the spiritual and moral crisis in leadership.

What is Reconciliation Leadership™?

Reconciliation Leadership™ is a systems approach to peacebuilding, arising from the leader’s vocational calling, skillbuilding, and a commitment to be at peace in oneself and in service to others for a post-competitive society. The Reconciliation Leadership™ Certificate Programs are offered to emerging and existing leaders called to create a just, multiethnic, intercultural sustainable peace – in their community, institution, national or global setting of their choice.

More of our humanity is needed now to address the world leadership vacuum. The learning methodology provides personal, interpersonal, systemic and global competency building integrated with vocational training. Participant leaders learn new skills and develop their calling with sensitive and skilled guidance.

The program is unique because it helps leaders tap their internal strengths to better promote peaceful resolutions to conflict. The approach has broad applications to family feuds, community and national disputes and global challenges. The methods learned are useful to professional and international peacemakers as well as anyone interested in creating a just, sustainable, multiethnic and intercultural world community. Participants are welcome from all sectors and may participate in the full program or take the Introduction program.

Being effective leaders in the current global reality requires different values, skills and experience than what leaders have brought to a September 10th world. The differences are vocational, cultural, societal and global. You may not have thought of yourself as a traditional leader or you may have an unexplored calling to leadership and the resolution of local and/or global challenges. If your understanding of leadership is about influencing others in a deeply respectful and empowering way; if you do not not know how to achieve your goal, we hope you will call to see if trust can emerge between us so we may be of assistance.

The Institute for Global Leadership’s learning methodology provides personal, interpersonal, systemic and global competency building integrated with vocational training. Participant leaders learn new skills and develop their calling with sensitive and skilled guidance.

The Purpose of the Reconciliation Leadership™ Programs

Reconciliation Leaders™ are committed to bring balance of career/home life, reflection time, a methodology to deal with the high level of stress in their own and other people's lives. They have a compelling vision and broad world view at this important moment in our history. They provide assistance to support the commitment of the United Nations from reaction to prevention.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has stated the need for a soft infrastructure to address the ills of the global economy. We have responded to that need by creating a leadership to fill the vacuum of the ills of the global economy — embodying excellence, integrity, commitment to human rights, peace and the ideals of the UN Charter. Our response is a soft infrastructure with a learning methodology that acknowledges the leader’s unique calling, competency building (personal, interpersonal, systemic and global) and the leader’s being at peace and service for a post-competitive institution and society.

Reconciliation Leaders™ lead from their unique vocational calling, special gifts, inner governance and leadership competencies cultivated through our training program. They have the courage to refrain from advocating their own solutions to a crisis or problem, while eliciting solutions from the people who will live through the problem.

Additionally, they lead from an ongoing self-assessment of their assumptions, behavior patterns and limitations that unconsciously contribute to the perpetuation of abuse and violence. This discipline corrects the behavior of leaders that undermine the power and effectiveness of their leadership. It is this deep and critical attention to leaders' inner landscape as mirror to the dynamics manifested in the outer environment — including abuse, coercion and subtle manipulation — that distinguishes these leaders from those whose personal agendas have wreaked havoc over peoples' dreams.

The Institute for Global Leadership presents Reconciliation Leadership™ and the Global Mediation and Reconciliation Service™ as a way for existing and emerging leaders to address highly stressful, complex and seemingly intractable problems. The best of humanity is needed now to address the spiritual and moral crisis in leadership as well as to cultivate new skills for a post-September 11th world.

These leaders offer interventions with awareness of their own cycle of violence, which can be as subtle as unconscious manipulation and coercion, so as not to perpetuate the cycle, knowing how much havoc the cycle has wreaked in families, communities, nations and global politics. Recognition in this model of the need to heal one's inner conflicts (anger, fear, shame...) is a way to address the United Nation's Education and Social Council's claim that war begins in the minds of people.

We provide the resources called for by Dr. Patricia Mische, Lloyd Professor of World Law, Antioch University, when she writes:

"We must become wiser than we have ever been before, for the world we are entering cannot be understood or addressed adequately with past visions, analyses, and systems. We must become more fully conscious and holistically spiritual than ever before, awakening and attuning ourselves to the sacred presence in all life and bowing to the inner workings of the Spirit in the Earth's processes — lest we destroy our own lifeline out of
ignorance, unawareness, or arrogance."

I welcome you to Reconciliation Leadership™ and The Global Mediation and Reconciliation Service™.

Sincerely,

Virginia Swain
Director

My Personal Story

References:

Collins, Michael. Unpublished ideas about a new politics based on Servant Leadership, peaceful evolution and consciousness. Community Resource and Renewal Center, Portsmouth, RI 02871.

"Our Global Neighbourhood: The Basic Vision", Commission on Global Governance. Geneva, 1995.

Mische, Patricia. "Towards a Global Spirituality", New York: Global Education Associates, 1997.