Welcome, open-minded viewers, to another edition of Good People, Good Works. Today we feature the Young Spirit Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in the Bay Area region of Northern California, USA.

The Foundation assists teachers and schools in the US in creating “wisdom-based” curricula that promote furthering of self-development, exploring of spiritual identity, building of self awareness, and connecting with the community. The Foundation’s president Theodore Timpson has a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University, USA and a Master of Science in education from Bank Street College, USA.

He has worked with young people for most of his professional life and has been an elementary school teacher for many years. Mr. Timpson recently took time from his busy schedule to speak with our Supreme Master Television correspondent and now discusses why he started the Foundation.

Growing up, I always had a philosophical bent and I would look around and ask myself why people were doing what they were doing, what was seemed to be motivating them and I often felt that there was a sense of underlying confusion as to what people's purposes in life were. What is life? Why are we here? Where are we going? What is our purpose? How can we discover these things? And the schools didn't really address this.

As part of its mission to help constructively transform the current US education system, the Foundation sponsors conferences where innovative ideas for facilitating learning are explored and discussed.

We recently brought together a panel of speakers from several different organizations. One of them was representing a project called “Project Happiness,” which is designed to help high school students create a curriculum around happiness and what that means for them. And another organization that's bringing yoga into juvenile halls. And another organization that's doing mindfulness practice in public school classrooms as a way of improving student’s behavior and readiness to learn.

And so by organizing events like this, we feel that we're shining a light on some of the deeper questions about what's missing in our schools and we're trying to bring together a body of educators around that idea so that we can really advocate for something different.

The Young Spirit Foundation also co-sponsors events that bring together youth from around the Bay Area to help them better understand and appreciate the diversity of faiths and spiritual traditions around the world.

Part of our plan is to create a youth network. The main focus of this so far has been projects called, “Days of InterFaith Youth Service,” and these are opportunities for young people from a variety of different faith backgrounds and non-religious people as well to get together around a service project.

In May 2009, a Day of Interfaith Youth Service event took place at Half Moon Bay State Beach in California, USA where participants worked together on an eco-project.

Hi, my name is Marla Kolman Antebi, and I’m one of the organizers of “Friends in Faith,” which is an interfaith youth program, sponsored by the Interfaith Center at the Presidio, and we’ve collaborated with other organizers today to bring together youth from different faith traditions to engage in service together and then have a dialogue. So here we are at beautiful Half Moon Bay State Beach, and we’re going to spend the day doing some native plant restoration.

And my greatest hope is that the youth are inspired by the work they’re doing together to find what it is in their own faith traditions that motivates them to get involved in the world and make a difference… and find that other youth from different faith traditions and different backgrounds, share the same values.

So, basically today we bonded a lot with other people. And I’m new to Interfaith, so it was a really nice experience to hear the stories and see the different backgrounds that people are from. Then after we had a group discussion which was really inspiring because everyone talked about their different faiths and how their faiths have affected them, and I found that really fun and interesting and engaging. It helped me explain my faith also.

I learned a lot about different traditions during our service project and in the group discussion afterwards. I learned more about the Quaker tradition; I learned more about Unitarian Universalists and how the movement began. And I think it was very beautiful when each faith tradition or person in our group talked about the gift that their faith tradition brings.

So, looking at it from the Brahma Kumaris tradition, it was a sense that we’re all part of the same tree, even though each of the branches is unique in its own way, and has a unique gift to offer. There was also a sense from the Quaker tradition, the power of the collective, and the sense of collective wisdom and power. And from the Muslim participant, a sense of the moral compass that each religion brings; so I think those were great insights to discover and learn as a result of the day, so, it was a wonderful experience.

When we return, we will find out more about the mission of the Young Spirit Foundation. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

Hi, my name is Asad Haider. This is a great activity, because there’s a lot of student involvement; the kids here represent a lot of different areas and religions, and so, I do hope to meet new friends and also, gain experience from their religions as well.

Welcome back to Good People, Good Works, where we are profiling the Young Spirit Foundation which was founded by Mr. Theodore Timpson. The group is working to transform school curricula in the US so that students can better develop their inner spiritual qualities and explore their self identity. One of the Foundation’s pioneering initiatives is an afterschool program called “Math and Mindfulness.”

We’re developing the Math and Mindfulness program as a way to connect curriculum with identity development. The idea that we learn when we feel like we know who we are. And really the biggest task of education is for us to figure out who we are. So the Math and Mindfulness program is just a beginning in that effort to connect curriculum with self development.

And what we’re trying to do is help students in an academic area, a basic one, math, which is very important for them. And to incorporate into the program, elements of mindfulness practice, relaxation, self awareness, awareness of one’s physical being as well as emotional being, the ability to calm ourselves using visualization as a way to focus the mind. And for math in particular, I think visualization is a key academic tool.

The Foundation is planning to set up a model high school in the Bay Area. We asked Mr. Timpson about the new institution’s guiding philosophy and what the curriculum will be like.

The model school is based on three core principles – meaning, relationship and self awareness. And to develop a sense of meaning we need more than just information, we need to find connections between different kinds of information, we need to see the purpose behind learning information and we need to apply it to a purpose.

In other words we need to make it meaningful in our lives. It’s not enough to sit in a classroom and read a book about something going on in the world. We need to ask ourselves, “In what way does this impact me?” and “In what way can I change it, if I want to change it or make it bigger?”

We have a plan in our curriculum to incorporate a program called the “Personal Journey.” And the Personal Journey is a very different approach to curriculum from the standard high school affair, which is divided into segments; you have your English class, your science class, your history class.

The Personal Journey is a cross disciplinary study that takes a central question like “How does life perpetuate itself?” and investigates that in every discipline, through history, through literature, and through science. And also becomes a self reflection. How does my life perpetuate itself? How do I want it to perpetuate itself? How does my identity progress from childhood to adolescence to adulthood?

And it also then takes that self reflection and brings it into some kind of service activity, an internship related to the study at hand. One might be doing work in a laboratory, one might be working with a social program, with refugees or immigrants, or one might be working with the homeless.

So the second principle is relationship. And that’s the idea that what’s going on in school is not just about the information that we’re learning or the subject that we’re studying. It’s about building relationships with the people that we’re studying with, with our peers, with our teachers, with the world around us and talking about those relationships and becoming more aware of those relationships and how they influence us and how they influence each other.

And then our third principal is self awareness. And as I said earlier, I feel that self awareness is really the biggest goal of education. We’re constantly trying to figure out who we are, “What am I trying to become in my life? What is the purpose of my life? How I am being informed by my community, by my culture, by my family? And where is my own sense of personal wellbeing in all of that?”

Through this development of self awareness everything else becomes possible; healthy relationships become possible, healthy intellectual growth becomes possible, healthy service to society becomes possible.

Mr. Timpson believes that we all are on a “wisdom journey” and that the educational system should support this journey with programs that help students cultivate the wisdom within themselves.

The wisdom journey is the idea that over the centuries, over the millennia, different cultures and traditions have collected huge storehouses of what wisdom is and how we can develop it. Philosophical traditions, religious traditions, cultural traditions - these we feel are very helpful for bringing students forward on their wisdom journeys throughout their lives.

We applaud Mr. Theodore Timpson and the Young Spirit Foundation for seeking to help students develop self awareness and a sense of connectedness with their communities and for sponsoring projects that promote interactions between young people of different faiths. We wish the Young Spirit Foundation the very best in its future endeavors.

For more details on the Young Spirit Foundation, please visit YoungSpirit.org

Cherished viewers, we have enjoyed your company on today’s edition of Good People, Good Works. Next is The World Around Us, after Noteworthy News. May the light of Heaven always shine brightly upon you.

The Mekong Basin is a very environmentally sensitive region in Southeast Asia centered on the mighty Mekong River. However its rich biodiversity is currently being severely threatened by climate change.

We have been doing some reforestation projects, but I would say what has been particularly important is our trying to protect and appropriately manage the forests that remain there.

We have something called the “Biodiversity Corridors” initiative which is a forest conservation and land management program for the hilly areas of the Mekong Basin.

Be sure to watch “Climate Change and the Fragile Mekong Basin” this Wednesday, March 3 on Planet Earth: Our Loving Home.