ABOUT
The Center for Systems Awareness is a global community-based organization that serves a collaborative surface—a space for people who want to engage in compassionate systems change can come together, collaborate, explore, and learn from each other.
COMPASSIONATE SYSTEMS CHANGE
If our current global situation–with mounting impacts of climate change, international conflict, and inequity–has taught us anything, it is that we live in deeply interdependent and complex systems. Yet little in our education–from school to university to professional development–prepares us to understand and work with this complexity. The result is institutions of education, government, business, and the social sector locked in a perpetual reactive mode, often implementing ‘fixes’ that ultimately make problems worse–and societies increasingly caught in vicious cycles of frustration, polarization, anger, hopelessness, and disconnect at all levels.
The Center for Systems Awareness supports ongoing compassionate systems change by helping people reorient toward a different way of showing up and being in relationship with themselves, each other, and the world, thereby enabling greater collective action, kindness, and resilience. Modeled on understanding of living systems, the approach enables people to reflect on and more deeply understand, and respond mindfully and compassionately to humanity’s challenges, their interconnections, and their far-reaching impacts.
We do this work through:
- Workshops and Programs
- Site Development Initiatives
- Youth Programs
- Community Building
- Research Partnerships
Our approach teaches people how to reflect on, more deeply understand, and respond mindfully and compassionately to humanity’s challenges, their interconnections, and their far-reaching impact.
We aspire to support communities in envisioning and creating more regenerative and hopeful trajectories for our collective future.
OUR PURPOSE
- centers on reconnecting with and cultivating our truest nature as interconnected individual humans, born out of life on this planet as unique expressions of nature’s innate creative capacity. This is what we relate to as the personal, emotional, individual system – the system of self.
- focuses on developing our capacity for connectedness with one another and to intentionally shape and nurture more generative and relational social fields and spaces. This is what we relate to as system of self and other
- revolves around understanding and nurturing interdependence as nature’s organizing principle to support biological and social well-being. This is what we relate to as systems of self and larger societal and ecological realities.
OUR WHY
Our focus is on human systems in the broadest sense, working in places like education where people understand that shifts in how children and young people grow is key to our shared future. For us, education is not just ‘schooling’ in the traditional sense but learning together how to live in ways that support communities in envisioning and creating more regenerative and hopeful trajectories for our collective future.
Recognizing the growing gap between our current reality and the vision for safe, healthy, equitable and regenerative societies has led many to see that our problems are systemic not piecemeal, and that they arise from deep structural challenges that elude most efforts at change.
But even sincere efforts at ‘systems change’ fail as they often carry the seeds of their own limitations. As we seek solutions to these issues, we need to develop systems–from education, governance, social services to industry–that help people, especially young people, cope with these inner and outer complexities. Such systems are not just “outside ourselves” but arise from our own ways of thinking and acting and how such inner systems interact with the metrics, policies and formal structures of institutions. Our systems work the way they work because of how we work.
OUR APPROACH
Based on ancient ideas from diverse spiritual and developmental traditions, tempered by experience of the past few decades from a multitude of change initiatives, we have come to organize all our projects around “the mandala for systems change.”
Mandalas, in general, are an ancient way of representing a holistic perspective, such as the Native American ‘medicine wheels’ and Tibetan Buddhist sand mandalas – a model to “hold the whole,” which is essential to systems level change processes.
The Mandala helps practitioners identify a set of interconnected domains crucial for organic, self-sustaining, long-term change – research, practice, capacity building, and community building, each embodying a distinctive set of questions:
- What are we seeking to accomplish? (Practice)
- What are we seeking to learn, especially that can benefit others beyond ourselves? (Research)
- How do we need to learn and grow, individually and collectively, to be successful? (Capacity building)
- Who is the “we”and what is the quality of the relational space we create? (Community building)
This orientaion guides the work we do in supporting invidiuals and communities in growing change processes.
UN Sustainable Development Goals
The Sustainable Development Goals developed by the United Nations are central to The Center of Systems Awareness’ own mission and work.
In the words of leadership author and professor Steen Hildebrandt,
“The world goals, the UN 17 global sustainability goals, is the biggest leadership challenge that has ever existed. And it's the biggest possibility for a better world, for all humans."
We take seriously this collective work by raising awareness of our profound interconnectedness, and in preparing leaders of all ages with the knowledge and skills to collaborate and lead change within complex systems.