Global Campus
The Global Campus is a network of local peace initiatives around the world who are creating educational centers for autonomous, decentralized communities of trust. Following the principles of the Healing Biotopes Plan, they work towards a post-capitalist world free of war.
Based on common ethical, social and environmental guidelines, the network focuses on new concepts for water, food and energy as well as for community, love and healing our collective trauma. To effectively contribute to a shift in planetary consciousness, these local holistic communities present solutions that serve as examples for peace-building and autonomy on a large scale. The Global Campus aims at initiating a global transition to a humane culture where we follow the principles of life itself.
Concept
We’re currently experiencing a historic situation in the collapse of the old patriarchal systems. Human evolution has reached a global dead end. We’ve lost the fundamental values of community, truth and solidarity through thousands of years of war, colonialism and capitalist globalization. The cruelty is so extreme on every continent that it’s often easier to turn a blind eye than to face it. We find ourselves submitting to the hypnosis of fear and violence.
During their international pilgrimages between 2004 and 2008, Sabine Lichtenfels and Benjamin von Mendelssohn developed the idea of a world university to support the emergence of a new culture, which became the Global Campus. In the gathering that took place in Tamera in 2006 between leaders of educational projects and peace centers from different countries, the idea of an international network sharing a common vision for humanity, common ethical values and common learning programs came to life.
The Global Campus’ guiding idea of “Grace” is to transform the human patterns of anger and hatred into compassion and solidarity by reclaiming the principles of community that were lost in the history of war. Creating communities of trust is at the heart of our political strategy because community is the basis of all life and carries the greatest power of transformation and healing.
Those collaborating with each other in the Global Campus see the necessity to respond to our planetary crisis by creating real-life models and applying the changes we want to see in our world in our own lives. We share the following goals and values:
- realigning the world we create with the world that has created us
- nonviolent cooperation with all fellow beings
- building communities of trust based on transparency, mutual support and responsible participation
- freeing love from fear: addressing sexuality and intimacy as core issues for societal healing
- raising children in trust
- regenerating nature and climate using principles of rainwater retention and permaculture
- withdrawing from the oil industry and implementing zero-carbon energy technologies
- establishing decentralized regional autonomy in water, food and energy
- creating an economy that serves ecology, based on reciprocity, communal sharing and giving.
By researching and studying this holistic vision for system change, we cooperatively develop the practical knowledge and strength needed to build effective local models and a worldwide field for change.
Projects Involved
We’re working to establish a strategic global alliance and want to collaborate with all groups, projects and movements that share the same goals and values and the vision laid out in the Healing Biotopes Plan.
Since 2006, the Global Campus has developed profound long term trust-based partnerships between projects in different parts of the world. Among these projects are:
Watch this 18-minute documentary about the Global Campus network (David Priego, 2011):
By building profound partnerships between projects from different cultures and between the Global North and South, we’ve learned to move beyond the conventional ideas of “development aid” i.e. beyond the “missionary” concept of separating those helping from those being helped. We see how much we Westerners can learn from our partners in the Global South in terms of practicing compassion, taking a stand for life, being determined for peace even in the most violent of situations and of maintaining hope and resilience when there seems to be no hope at all.
Learning
The Global Campus network holds educational gatherings in Tamera and other places. One important element of our philosophy is to understand local challenges within a global context and to grow planetary consciousness and solidarity. Getting to know the situation of other projects with similar challenges in different circumstances and building these planetary partnerships between different projects has been a vital element of our experience.
Show solidarity with peaceworkers worldwide!
Your contribution will enable students from less privileged backgrounds to study at Tamera.