(This is a little longer than a 'comment', but Trishna encouraged us to share- so here goes...!)
Thank you Trishna, for creating the opportunity for such an inspiring evening, hosting us with such warmth, and the write up. Meeting Jerry was especially significant, because I felt like it was a missing piece in the wider jigsaw of my experiences since arriving in Ahmedabad last October.
I was volunteering with a project called Nyayagrah, a community based movement for justice in the aftermath of the 2002 riots. My work involved asking about the experiences and personal journeys of ‘justice-workers’ who were running the project at the grassroots, through sharing long conversations with them, over 4 days each! At the same time, I was living and volunteering part time with Manav Sadna (MS). The learnings at MS of spiritual grounding, faith in process over outcome, and an individual’s power to create change through small acts of kindness, were so timely; providing support just as I needed it in Nyayagrah. Applying principles embodied at MS of ‘connecting with people from the heart’ and ‘serving with compassion’ helped me create a deeper rapport with the ‘justice-workers’ which was crucial to the success of my work.
I left India feeling empowered by my new-found conviction in the power to create change at an individual level through compassionate personal interactions. However, coming back to England reminded me of university lectures in development economics, DFID’s office at Whitehall, and I was struggling to reconcile them with my experience in India. Models of development and excel spreadsheets of funding to various NGOs seemed like another world from the organic growth of MS, even its antithesis when comparing the nature of personal interactions in them. Could they really both be parts of the same overall goal of preventing conflict and bettering people’s daily welfare?
Jerry was a living example that one can be a bridge between these worlds, so they aren’t really separate at all. As an individual, he embodies key values I saw being practiced at MS. Our meeting started off with a spiritual practice. He addressed us as a group, and personally, with a genuine warmth and familiarity. A core part of his way of creating change is through peer support, which is essentially transformation at an individual level through compassionate interactions. In addition though, he has been working at the macro scale; dealing with funding agencies, running an international NGO, and spearheading an international treaty. In retrospect, it seems a little obvious that all these different organisations and modes of tackling post conflict reconciliation have the same overall mission but are working at different levels, along a spectrum of the individual to the macro. However, it is rare to meet someone whose life and work as spanned that spectrum while maintaining an ability to sincerely connect with other individuals. Thank you, Jerry for the inspiring in others the possibility of being a connecting link between the levels of this spectrum, and embodying the overlap between the spiritual, individual, and macro.
On Apr 29, 2010 Nitika wrote:
(This is a little longer than a 'comment', but Trishna encouraged us to share- so here goes...!)
Thank you Trishna, for creating the opportunity for such an inspiring evening, hosting us with such warmth, and the write up. Meeting Jerry was especially significant, because I felt like it was a missing piece in the wider jigsaw of my experiences since arriving in Ahmedabad last October.
I was volunteering with a project called Nyayagrah, a community based movement for justice in the aftermath of the 2002 riots. My work involved asking about the experiences and personal journeys of ‘justice-workers’ who were running the project at the grassroots, through sharing long conversations with them, over 4 days each! At the same time, I was living and volunteering part time with Manav Sadna (MS). The learnings at MS of spiritual grounding, faith in process over outcome, and an individual’s power to create change through small acts of kindness, were so timely; providing support just as I needed it in Nyayagrah. Applying principles embodied at MS of ‘connecting with people from the heart’ and ‘serving with compassion’ helped me create a deeper rapport with the ‘justice-workers’ which was crucial to the success of my work.
I left India feeling empowered by my new-found conviction in the power to create change at an individual level through compassionate personal interactions. However, coming back to England reminded me of university lectures in development economics, DFID’s office at Whitehall, and I was struggling to reconcile them with my experience in India. Models of development and excel spreadsheets of funding to various NGOs seemed like another world from the organic growth of MS, even its antithesis when comparing the nature of personal interactions in them. Could they really both be parts of the same overall goal of preventing conflict and bettering people’s daily welfare?
Jerry was a living example that one can be a bridge between these worlds, so they aren’t really separate at all. As an individual, he embodies key values I saw being practiced at MS. Our meeting started off with a spiritual practice. He addressed us as a group, and personally, with a genuine warmth and familiarity. A core part of his way of creating change is through peer support, which is essentially transformation at an individual level through compassionate interactions. In addition though, he has been working at the macro scale; dealing with funding agencies, running an international NGO, and spearheading an international treaty. In retrospect, it seems a little obvious that all these different organisations and modes of tackling post conflict reconciliation have the same overall mission but are working at different levels, along a spectrum of the individual to the macro. However, it is rare to meet someone whose life and work as spanned that spectrum while maintaining an ability to sincerely connect with other individuals. Thank you, Jerry for the inspiring in others the possibility of being a connecting link between the levels of this spectrum, and embodying the overlap between the spiritual, individual, and macro.