The Earth Corps Training: How Can I Serve?
The first concrete initiative of the ECGS is the Earth Corps Training, designed to help people who are living with the question "How can I serve?" We plan to offer a variety of formats, including one-hour lectures, weekend seminars, one week and one month residential intensives, and a year long college curriculum. Aside from the lectures, which will serve to inspire and inform, each offering will help participants:
- deepen their understanding of self,
- acquire knowledge and techniques to help them more effectively serve,
- and detect the alignment between self and calling, through which each can choose one amongst the thousands of environmental, educational, and other service organizations to work or volunteer for.
ECGS advisory board member Paul Hawken's WISER database will be used as a resource for identifying service and service-learning opportunities.
The week and month-long intensive trainings will introduce a diverse range of fee-paying and scholarship-supported participants to a variety of meditative traditions and encourage them to develop their own inner practice (for deep listening and decision-making). It will provide them an extended wilderness experience (to acquaint them more intimately with both inner and outer nature). It will acquaint them with the dynamics of ecological, social, political, and economic systems and with methods of systems transformation, in order to help them integrate within the communities they will serve and become agents of organic, sustainable change from within. And it will introduce them to the whole range of paid and unpaid global service and service-learning opportunities. Each participant will have (or be) a mentor and will be encouraged to develop deep bonds with fellow participants. Members of each training cohort will stay in contact during (and even after) their ECGS periods of service.
The year-long EC Training will cooperate with institutions of higher learning to incorporate the components outlined above into higher education students' graduation plans, on a for-credit basis. The week, month, and year-long Earth Corps Trainings will serve for many as a modern initiation or rite of passage into a whole new phase of their lives. College-aged participants will become contributing members of their communities, at home and abroad. Mid-life adults (especially those in need of a sabbatical) will find new meaning and purpose as engaged global citizens. Retirees, through service and mentoring, will find a path to becoming true 21st century elders.
Our next step is a 2-3 day design intensive for the Earth Corps Training. Among the intended participants are ECGS Advisors and/or Board members Gigi Coyle (former President of the Ojai Foundation and Director of the School of Lost Borders), Michael Meade (author, Men and the Water of Life, and story-teller, "The Branches of Mentoring, the Roots of Elders"), Orland Bishop (founder of the Shade Tree Foundation for inner-city youth), Richard Leider (most recent book, Claiming Your Place at the Fire), Frances Moore Lappe (author of Diet for a Small Planet and Hope’s Edge, and co-founder of the Small Planet Institute), Arthur Zajonc (Professor of Physics, Amherst College, and convener of dialogues between scientists and the Dalai Lama), and John Steiner and Margo King (organizers and philanthropists, active in transpartisan dialogues). Other intended participants include Peggy Taylor (Power of Hope youth camps), Joanna Macy (Buddhist scholar, Council of All Beings), Joseph Collins (co-author, How to Live Your Dream of Volunteering Overseas), Bill Drayton (founder of Ashoka), Marc Freedman (founder of Civic Ventures and the Purpose Prize), and Robert Gass (Rockwood Institute).