Are you an audacious person?
The first definition of audacity depicts “a willingness to take surprisingly bold risks.”
Synonyms amplify this approach: I particularly like the characterization “exceptionally original without restriction to prior ideas, highly inventive, bold in defiance of convention.”
You might be legitimately concerned that folks embracing audacity could become arrogant, and could recklessly involve others in unrealistic ventures.
However, with genuine humanitarian values and respect for individuals, we have an urgent need for audacious people around the globe to address existential challenges that literally affect the fate of the earth, as well as our immediate quality of life, and our ability to shape better decades in the future.
I am encouraging faculty and student leaders at Hofstra to draw on effective experiences from our past to explore pathways for Building Global Generational Groups. You are enthusiastically invited to join the journeys.
To connect people anywhere is a challenge, even on one’s own campus, to say nothing of national and international affiliations. To foster connections that span age separations in societies is something that has rarely been attempted, truly an audacious endeavor.
At Hofstra, we have excellent platforms that help us in striving to build GGGs, going from local and regional to national and global. A quarter of a century ago, sociology Professor Cynthia Bogard launched Day of Dialogue. Each year since then we sponsor forums (reflecting a wide range of views) concerning issues facing our nation.
These concurrent sessions from morning into evening have given our students and community folks a chance to expand awareness on important topics and to consider their related roles as citizens.
In 2007, building on Day of Dialogue and on our Public Policy Institute (established with Kettering Foundation support and a continuing research association), Hofstra initiated its Center for Civic Engagement (Bogard was the first executive director and I was chairperson of the Advisory Board).
Our CCE expanded to include an Institute for Peace Studies in 2015; these key sectors can lead our GGG explorations. I am confident that there are excellent opportunities to build on Hofstra’s leadership experiences with: 1.) UCAM; 2.) Our Democracy Fellows’ 107 Issues Forums during the 2012 Presidential campaign; and 3.) Our Constitution Day Intergenerational Roundtable Forums.
You are invited: 4.) On Wednesday, April 10 at 11:15 to the 10th floor of the Hofstra Axinn Library to hear co-director of our Center for Civic Engagement, Professor Linda Longmire, discuss her creative international work: “Odyssey Model of Study Abroad.”
These four building block projects deserve more detail than column space permits, including our International Scene project for decades. Here are goals and activities to build Global Generation Groups.
1. Prepare student and faculty leaders who will make long term commitments to the GGG project.
2. Ongoing research and study of key issues to be considered with other groups: our two existential threats – nuclear war and climate/environmental security, as well as how to make democracy work more effectively.
3. Students will need to learn how to pass leadership torches to peers; the faculty is sustained on campus for shared leadership.
4. Connecting generations from high school students to elders on these key issues (we already demonstrated some of this on Long island).
5. Our Hofstra leaders need to guide deliberative interactions where folks will commit to “deep listening,” and to responding respectfully to each other. The quests for reliable knowledge as the basis for informed public judgment are major challenges of our times.
6. We will apply conflict resolution strategies learned from Public Agenda’s Daniel Yankelovich and, especially, from the late Hal Saunders, who had visited our campus to discuss his book, “A Public Peace Process: Sustained Dialogue to Transform Racial and Ethnic Conflicts.”
7. As our Hofstra and community groups become more adept at group interactions, we will help to form similar groups on campuses around the U.S. and indeed around the globe. That is, indeed, an audacious goal, but we know from United Campuses to Prevent Nuclear War, which Hofstra led during the 1980s, that we were able to actively engage 600 campuses.
8. Then, a truly distinctive feature, reaching out to engage folks of all ages to come together in ways that overcome generational separations. This has not been significantly attempted, but we have done it on our campus, and in public libraries. We are confident that we can model generational collaborations for others.
9. Hofstra has 30 years of experience of working with the Kettering Foundation and the National Issues Forums Institute to bring people of all ages together for deliberative forums that offer the prospect of sustained civic engagement.
10. A key objective will be to demonstrate that our Hofstra and Long Island groups can find common purposes and shared actions across age spectra. Linking efforts of our three largest population cohorts (Boomers, Millennials and Gen Z) can provide numbers that move governments and societies from transactional to transformational endeavors.
Please stay tuned.
