Awakin Call

Margaret Wheatley began caring about the world's peoples in 1966, as a Peace Corps volunteer in post-war Korea. In many different roles-- speaker, teacher, consultant, advisor, formal leader--her work has deepened into an unshakable conviction that leaders must learn how to invoke people's inherent generosity, creativity and need for community. As this world tears us apart, sane leadership on behalf of the human spirit is the only way forward. She is co-founder and president of The Berkana Institute, an organizational consultant since 1973, a global citizen since her youth, and a prolific writer. She has authored nine books, from the classic Leadership and the New Science in 1992 to Who Do We Choose To Be: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity (2017). Her new work is a CD, The Warrior’s Songline, a journey into warriorship guided by voice and sound. Meg received her doctorate in Organizational Behavior from Harvard University in 1979, just as the field of OD was gaining ground. She has been honored for her ground-breaking work by many professional associations, universities and organizations. For the past five years, she has been training leaders and activists from 35 countries as Warriors for the Human Spirit, an in-depth training program and path of service supported by a robust global community. 

john a. powell is one of the foremost public intellectuals in the areas of civil rights, racism, ethnicity, housing and poverty.  He is currently Professor of Law, Professor of African American and Ethnic Studies, the Robert D. Haas Chancellor's Chair in Equity and Inclusion, and the Director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, all at UC Berkeley. These are only the most recent appointments in a distinguished career, and yet powell spells his name in lowercase based on the simple and humble idea that we are part of the universe, not over it.  He has introduced into the public lexicon the concepts of “othering and belonging”; the Haas Institute publishes a journal and hosts an annual conference expanding the scholarship around this concept.

The conversation will be moderated by Michelle Long and Nipun Mehta.

Michelle Long is founder of Jubilee Gift, a learning and investment platform supporting wealth holders and entrepreneurs in remembering the way of flow, trust, and belonging to Earth and each other - and in bringing that spriit into our financial transactions and economic structures. Jubilee Gift also supports the reclamation of sacred lands, and wisdom keepers from various backgrounds, all to bolster the spiritual ballast we are going to need to meet these changing times. Prior to Jubilee, she was the founding Executive Director of BALLE, a North American network of more than 125,000 local entrepreneurs, investors and philanthropists. 

Nipun Mehta is the founder of ServiceSpace, a global community at the intersection of technology, volunteerism and gift-economy. Most recently, ServiceSpace's pandemic response has showcased the unique beauty of its global ecosystem. Nipun has catalyzed a global social movement of community builders grounded in their localities and rooted in practices for cultivating love, nonviolence, selfless service, and compassion. The ecosystem has reached millions, attracted thousands of volunteers, and mushroomed into numerous community-based service projects as well as inspiring content portals. ServiceSpace harnesses the collective power of networks and our deeper interconnectedness to create a distributed social movement founded on small, local individual acts of kindness, generosity and service that ignite shifts in individual and collective consciousness. Nipun was honored as an "unsung hero of compassion" by the Dalai Lama, not long before former U.S. President Obama appointed him to a council for addressing poverty and inequality in the US. Yet the core of what strikes anyone who meets him is the way his life is an attempt to bring smiles in the world and silence in his heart: “I want to live simply, love purely, and give fearlessly. That's me.”