This article is reposted from LinkedIn, here.
Since 2019, Rose Castle Foundation has been doing something I think comes close to the human equivalent of letting a lawn grow back into a wildflower meadow.
Each year, in partnership with Dean Alison Boden at the Office of Religious Life at Princeton University, my talented and tireless colleagues Hannah Larn, Phoebe Dill, Canon Sarah Snyder and Robbie Leigh train a new cohort of students at this leading Ivy League campus.
Cohorts - deliberately selected from diverse traditions, worldviews and experiences - spend a week together training at Rose Castle during their Fall midterm break. After a brief stop in Liverpool, they return to campus as members of the ‘Princeton Rose Castle Society’. There, they keep the society thriving through dinners, dialogues, and mediations. Things that are real and driven by relationships - not just performance.
On Wednesday, Princeton published an article (see here) about our partnership and featured it on the front page of their website.
It’s a beautiful article showing the immediate impact through the society, and the longer term impact through the individual reconciling leaders, as they continue to grow in their careers to effect leadership and change.
These are seriously impressive people already carrying some very interesting life experiences, who stand a genuine chance of being the exact people who’ll help steer our planet through chaos and change in ten, twenty, thirty years’ time.
If it will take a rainforest-sized effort to tackle the issues humanity faces, our partnership with Princeton is one deeply rooted, branching tree that - just four years in - is already offering real signs of hope.
