Being There

Photo courtesy of Water.org

Committed people are making real progress improving our world and helping others as they increase their own  gratification. Consequential action combined with well-chosen, human-based values can make a significant difference. Courageous achievements that help others around the globe for all time is wisdom in action. When Rosa Parks kept her bus seat and Martin Luther King Jr. organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott their actions created substantial, important, and lasting progress for all people. This is real progress.

Getting There

Becoming inspired to make a difference, committing to transcendent goals, and engaging with an organization like those listed below can help direct your courageous action toward making real progress. Get started, take wise and courageous action, and begin making real progress.

Recommended Study and Practice:

• Seek purpose in helping others:
  • Use your understanding and compassion to choose important actions that result in real progress.
• Participate in one of these, or similar, organizations:
• Meals on wheels—working to end senior hunger in the United States by 2020
• Wiser Earth—helping the global movement of people and organizations working toward social justice, indigenous rights, and environmental stewardship connect, collaborate, share knowledge, and build alliances.
• Habitat for Humanity—working to eliminate poverty housing and homelessness from the world and to make decent shelter a matter of conscience and action.
• Water.org—committed to providing safe drinking water and sanitation to people in developing countries.
• The Enough Project—helping to build a permanent constituency to prevent genocide and crimes against humanity.
• Wellspring Africa—committed to researching and promoting appropriate technology for water development in rural Africa.
• The Earth Policy Institute—dedicated to planning a sustainable future as well as providing a roadmap of how to get from here to there.
• The Acumen Fund, Kiva or some other well-rated Microfinance institution.
• Architecture for Humanity—Building a more sustainable future using the power of design.
• Engineers without borders—A Humanitarian Engineering Network for a Better World
  • Engineers Without Borders-USA—The US-based organization.
• Doctors without Borders—an international medical humanitarian organization working in more than 60 countries to assist people whose survival is threatened by violence, neglect, or catastrophe.

Recommended Reading:

Seek inspiration from these stories of individuals who have taken wise and courageous action to make real progress in improving our world:

• Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson
• Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World, by Tracy Kidder
• Strength in What Remains, by Tracy Kidder
• The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope, by William Kamkwamba  and Bryan Mealer

Moving On

Continue to make real progress as you work toward Wisdom.

Context:

The diagram shows the states that neighbor this one. This can help orient you to this state both horizontally, showing the emotion and cognition states at this level of development, and vertically showing the action levels before and after this one.