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Working Groups PDF Print E-mail

Campus Peace Centers

The purpose of the Campus Peace Center project is to foster the development of a global, interconnected peace movement on college campuses. Members of the UN NGO Committee for Spirituality, Values and Global Concerns are exploring the means to encourage autonomous Campus Peace Centers by maintaining a website for the purpose of coordination among various Centers in the United States and worldwide, and will offer the resources available to us at the United Nations to widen the scope of peace-oriented collaboration.  For more information, please visit http://www.campuspeacecenters.net.

Contact:

Neil Altman - This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Deborah Moldow - This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

  

Culture of Peace

Mission: To assist the United Nations in fulfilling it's mandate to "eliminate the scourge of war" by working in various ways to cultivate a culture of peace and pursue alternatives to violence at all levels of our existence (inner, inter-personal, national, international). We support structures that will enable nonviolence to become an organizing principle in society, where peace is regarded as a basic human right.

 

Valuing the essential unity of humanity, and convinced that the Golden Rule, i.e., love your neighbor as yourself; do unto others as you would have them do unto you, is humanity's highest calling the world over, we recognize that Love expressed as goodwill is that which leads to right human relations as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and therefore, that this is the primary prerequisite to peace and creating a Culture of Peace. Initial areas of focus include:

 

       1)  Advance UN Department & Ministry of Peace Resolution Project

      2)  Participate in Week of Spirituality, Values and Global Concerns

      3)  Continue to support International Day of Peace efforts

      4)  Increase UN recognition of new 10/2 International Day of Nonviolence

      5)  Obtain official UN DPI approval for Culture of Peace Pocket Booklet

                  (make it available in its present form in NGO Resource Room)

     6)  Consider Ways to Participate in the Annual NGO/DPI Conference.

Contact:

Anne Creter - This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Eco-Spirituality

The aim of this subcommittee is to explore and promote an "eco-spirituality" that can address the current ecological challenge, and do so in a manner that can potentially overcome the fragmentary character of contemporary life. We define spirituality as a "way of perceiving" or way of being in the world. As such, an eco-spirituality ("eco" is from Greek oikos, "household") is rooted in an ecological vision or an ecological world view that is inclusive, interdependent, relational, communal, and holistic, with special concerns for (environmental) justice and for all life in the universe. Our objectives include:

* To articulate essential components of eco-spirituality that can be shared by all people of good will, including:

        -   Appreciation of the wonders of nature that is rooted in the awareness of its creativity, diversity, and its wholeness.

        -   Awareness that humans are an integral part of the interconnected web of all forms of life in the universe.

* To encourage the inclusion of eco-spirituality awareness into the various environmental programs, activities, and strategies at the UN.

 

Contact:

 

Michelle Kim, Ph.D. - This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

 

Health, Transformation & Spirituality

  Throughout the world and history, people have suffered physically, psycologically, ecologically, spiritually from trauma caused by war, genocide, famine, and natural and human-made disasters. Left unhealed, these global traumas have been passed from generation to generation as epidemics, repeating the cycles of violence and suffering.

 

  The mission of this Working Group is to assist individuals and communities in developing their optimal Biopsychosocial and Eco Spiritual health by effectively addressing these global epidemics.

 

We believe that we can assist the UN in understanding the roots of these global epidemics, healing their causes and offering ways of nurturing and strengthening our innate capacity for cooperation, caring and compassion, we can unlock our spiritual DNA potential. HTS is committed to identifying, integrating and applying the knowledge from science, psychology, philosophy and the spiritual traditions of the world, toward a refreshed worldview and a culture of peace.

 

"I have seen the secret beauty of our hearts, the person each one of us is in the eyes of the divine. If only we could see each other that way all the time there would be no more need for war, for hatred, for greed, for cruelty." - Thomas Merton  

 

Contact:

 

  Dr. Ani Kalayjian - This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Georgina Galanis  - This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it  

  

Sacred andTranscendental Arts

The Arts have the power to penetrate into the very depths of the soul. Their higher frequencies are invisible codes of communication between our bodies and the truth of the Universe. The Arts enrich our lives by inspiring us and raising our beings into higher states of vibrations, connecting us with our inner divine force. The mission of Working Group on Sacred Transcendental Arts aims to raise our inspirational level and awaken the forces of creativity and consciousness creating Peace, Love, Healing, Widsom, Light and Wholeness within us to Unite the World. Only then when we are able to manifest this state within will we be able to manifest Peace, Love, Healing, Wisdom, Light and Wholessness everywhere and have a global transformation in the world.

Contact:

"Saranagati" -  Sharon Hamilton - This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

 

 

Spiritual Council for Global Challenges

Dag Hammarskjold, the 2nd Secretary-General of the United Nations is often quoted as having said, "We can only succeed in achieving world peace if there is a spiritual renaissance on this planet." Our mission will focus on facilitating the creation of a Spiritual Council for Global Challenges at the United Nations with members of the UN community interested in promoting more universal values, ethics and spirituality in United Nations policies, programs and decision making.

Contact:

Audrey Kitagawa - This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Diane Williams - This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

 

Spiritual Dimensions of Science and Consciousness

Recognizing that a problem cannot be solved at the same level at which it was created and that a higher, more inclusive and synthetic consciousness is required; and, recognizing that violence and hatred are not eliminated by further violence and hatred, but by love, we understand that the spiritual dimension must be brought to bear on the global problems that the United Nations was created to solve. 

Further recognizing that "We the peoples of the United Nations [are]... determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom" (from the Preamble of the Charter of the United Nations), we realize that this larger freedom resides in the higher levels of consciousness possible to all who strive to attain them. That is, world transformation is the result of individual transformation. Thus, we encourage personal striving and the daily practice of chosen spiritual disciplines. The greater the number of individuals who strive to thus attain, the more likely we are to attain the planetary vision, as set forth within the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For this we work.

Contact:

Ida Urso Ph.D - This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Danilo Parmegiani - This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it  
  

  

Spiritual History of the United Nations

The mission of this subcommittee is to research the spiritual history of the United Nations.

Contact:

Tom Downes - This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Kathy Newburn - This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Laxmi Shah - This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Universal Ethics and Global Concerns

"To promote peaceful co-existence...it is necessary to extend inter-civilizational encounter to discourses about ethics." (UNU Workshop on "The Contribution of Ethics in the Dialogue of Civilizations", 24-25, May 2001) To this end, the working group on universal ethics and global concerns seeks to promote ethical conversations of the heart within the United Nations framework. These conversations are designed to promote converging awareness about human dignity, justice, freedom, equality, shared responsibility, care of the earth and non-violence. We will highlight all initiatives and strategies that promote both this discourse and convergence. We hold in respect diversity of ethical perspectives.

Promoting conversations includes research into UN documents, presentation of events, and active engagement in all that promotes ethical global engagement including coalition building. We seek to build a bibliography that will include ethical impact studies of institutional behavior.  Through networking, we intend to build civil society's ethical working relationship with the UN system.

Contact:

Martha Gallahue - This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Spirituality,Values and Business

Our mission is to empower business leaders to lead with authenticity, integrity and service to others and to help integrate the values and principles stated in the Charter of the United Nations and the Declaration of Human Rights into the business community. We will seek to work together with the UN Global Compact Initiative to uphold and promulgate a set of core values in the areas of human rights, labour standards and environmental practice.

We will create initiatives to raise awareness of our shared global responsibility for social, economic and spiritual betterment. This includes environmental sustainability, protection of international human rights, employee empowerment, improving the quality of life in the workplace and throughout the community. We believe businesses can use their influence, products and services to not only increase profitability but also to improve the quality for life for the global community.

For more information on our Joint Effort with Good Business  in support of the UN Global Compact, please visit http://www.icfgoodbusiness.org,

Contact:

Sharon Hamilton - This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it   
                                 This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

 
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