Be The Change: Symposium

2011 - THE BE THE CHANGE SYMPOSIUM

- for forthcoming symposium dates, please see below (and click here if you are interested in our facilitator training.

The most critical issue, and the greatest opportunity, of our time......and what you can do about it.

The Symposium takes a fresh look at our most critical current concerns - environmental sustainability, social justice and spiritual fulfilment - and explores and exposes what connects them. A unique, one-day workshop experience, it offers insight into the nature of our world, with leading-edge information, dynamic group interaction and inspiring video clips from some of the world's most respected thinkers and doers, including Paul Hawken, Desmond Tutu, Julia Butterfly Hill, Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry.

The aim of the Symposium is to explore how, by pulling together on an unprecedented scale, we can move in a new direction, towards an era of interconnected action and collective wellbeing. If you are ready to be disturbed, inspired and moved to action - if you are ready to be introduced to a thriving community of like-hearted, deeply committed people - we invite you to come to this Symposium.

The Symposium was created in the United States by The Pachamama Alliance, who generously gifted it to Be The Change. To date, we have presented over 80 symposiums around the country. We have completed seven trainings for UK facilitators, and the eighth will take place at the end of October. Meanwhile, events continue to take place across the country, from Brighton to Edinburgh, from London to Bristol, as well as in Holland, Belgium, Sweden and Australia!

Dates are announced below as soon as they are set - and the easiest way to be kept in the picture is to sign up for our newsletter. And let us know if you would like to help us present a symposium in your area. Just drop us a line at info@bethechange.org.uk

FORTHCOMING SYMPOSIUM DATES

Saturday, November 19, Newport, South Wales: The Ty Croeso Centre, Llantarnam Abbey, Torfaen, NEWPORT, South Wales, NP44 3YJ
Contact: tycroeso@talktalk.net, Phone: 01633 867317 (www.tycroesocentre.co.uk)

Saturday, January 28, 2012, Abingdon 10 am - 4 pm

Abingdon Resource & Wellbeing Centre, Crabtree Place, Audlett Drive, Abingdon OX14 3GD
Contact: 01235 529188, or sallyreynolds@btinternet.com

What is so compelling about the Symposium is the powerful way in which it brings together the people of any community, school or business around a real commitment to action in their particular community. It's not presenting a slate of policies - but rather opening up, in a unique way, the opportunity for a kind of collective evolution.

According to a majority of the world's experts, there is now overwhelming evidence that our modern society is headed for a catastrophe. Leading scientists are telling us that the impact of our industrial system, and the sudden expansion of humanity's ability to harvest the common bounty of our planet for short-term gain, may actually be upsetting the balance of our highly complex and fragile web of life.

It is as if we are living inside of a dream, sleepwalking toward oblivion, while self-serving, shortsighted interests encourage our slumber with managed news, celebrity culture and other weapons of mass distraction.

It has become clear that our political and commercial institutions are unable to effectively address this crisis, primarily because they don't realize that they are looking at an interconnected world through a fragmented lens. The villain here is not Big Business, the corporate media, the military-industrial complex, or even those who for personal profit seek to clearcut our forests, overfish our oceans, pollute our atmosphere or drain our aquifers. The villain is an outmoded worldview - a way of seeing the world in which such unthinkable acts appear reasonable, sensible, and even intelligent.

Indigenous people of South America who still live in their traditional Earth-honoring ways refer to our modern worldview as our "dream" and have urged us, for the sake of all life, to "change the dream of the North". Well, it appears that changing this collective dream of ours will be a do-it-yourself-together project. It will be accomplished by committed individuals working in concert with one another, tens of millions of us, each willing to think and act in a whole new way.

The aim of the Symposium is not merely to learn more about the world, but to grapple and come to grips with the very assumptions that underlie the way we ourselves see the world and our place in it, and with what each of us can do - both individually and cooperatively - to move the world in this new direction.

(And don't forget to sign up for the newsletter.)