Greetings!
We live in a moment of extreme uncertainty, anxiety, and fragility. Yet even with the interlocking challenges of our time, I nevertheless experience a deep sense of hope in regard to the profound changes manifesting in so many places and communities. Hope, as we know from Václav Havel, is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. That is the spirit I am experiencing in many corners of our community now.
We have witnessed this spirit of hope and action-confidence in our final u-lab session of this year when Ilkim, a 12 year old girl from Turkey, shared her story of participating in u-lab 2022 and is now joining u-lab 2x with a group of young change-makers she has co-inspired. We see this spirit in listening to Ericka, an environmentalist from Mexico, as she and her team grew their sustainability education initiative in u-lab 2x. We experience the same spirit of hope and confidence in our collaboration with Commonland, supporting local change-makers in transforming degraded landscapes into thriving ecosystems. And we find it in our work with leaders from United Nations Humanitarian Country Teams who are responding to crisis situations in their countries while advancing the sustainable development goals.
We see the spirit of hope and action activated in so many of the 200,000 people who have come through our free and openly accessible programs over the years. The change-makers and teams we have supported come to us out of a deep intuition that humanity can do better, with an inner knowing that we do not have to be trapped by our current reality, and a conviction that the future can be different if each one of us takes action to make it so. Any one of the initiatives we have helped to catalyze may be small, but if we add up all the new thinking, new action, new relationships, new collaborations, new seeds and joint initiatives, we begin to perceive a growing wave of positive change drawing us forward into a better future.
There are many ways to be part of this positive wave. Take action in your local community. Join one of our courses to acquire the skills, networks, and experience to lead transformational change. And for those of you who can, we invite you to support the Presencing Institute financially here. Our signature programs are offered for free. All Theory U methods and practices are available in the creative commons. We believe deeply that the tools of transformation should be widely available to anyone who needs them, regardless of their ability to pay.
We can only make these vital and effective resources available for free through the support of people who deeply care about the future. With each contribution, we can facilitate the growth, learning, and innovation of change-makers around the globe. How many of us does it take to rise to the occasion? How many change-makers can you support?
From the deepest part of heart, I offer you my gratitude for your partnership, trust, and support. We also share here our Annual Report 2022. Thank you for being with us on this collective journey to a better future.
Sincerely,
