Common Bond Institute

Our Style and Commitment

Cultivating compassion and a consciousness of peace through local capacity building for social healing and conflict transformation are seen as natural, effective antidotes to hardship and suffering, large group despair, and small group radical extremism. To this end, enabling societies to satisfy core human needs within their communities, effectively resolve and transform conflicts, and construct effective, holistic mechanisms for self determination, self esteem, and fundamental human dignity and worth that strengthen current and future generations, is the purpose of our work.

 

By design, our efforts are fundamentally collaborative for a larger impact. CBI works to actively form strategic alliances with organizations, groups, and individuals dedicated to nurturing global relationships as a whole in creating and promoting social healing and conflict transformation. We maintain an expanding global network of partner groups and organizations that cooperate in pulling the requisite pieces together to create and operate programs, while minimizing the drain on individual group resources.

 

Local capacity building:  For more than 3 decades CBI and it’s partner organizations have organized and conducted disaster health care field clinics and community-based psychosocial pilot service projects in communities devastated by war and violence. Central to this work is building a growing and sustainable local pool of psychosocial direct service providers to expand on and sustain these services through providing extensive skills training programs.

 

Intentional Community: Our conferences, are designed to be living laboratories for participating in deep, authentic community as a common ground of reference for exploring core themes and integrating formal learning. Creating an atmosphere of trust where individuals can engage in genuine, compassionate dialogue across stereotypes and fear-based beliefs is meant to promote carrying such a space into daily life to nurture a common wisdom, common sense of belonging, and common bond.

 

The character of our programs offers a microcosm of the larger, diverse, global community for a first hand experience of moving beyond artificial barriers and blind spots to the reality of what is both possible and practical. This purposeful use of intentional community is a central element of our work. It assumes the basic drive/ need for integration through inter-connectedness and belonging that can be nurtured to develop conscious intent toward harmony and peace in our relationships.

 

Personal empowerment, compassion, and the role of the individual in society at both the local and the global level in addressing the human condition are central to our commitment and our work. In acknowledgement of decades of dedication to this CBI and it’s founding director, Steve Olweean , are recipients of the 2011 Charlotte and Karl Bühler Award from the American Psychological Association for outstanding and lasting contribution to Humanistic Psychology internationally.