Sunday, October 28 through Sunday, November 4th, 2007
WELCOME EVERYONE! We deeply appreciate your taking time out to attend and participate in our 1st General Meeting! We are so happy that the Soka Educators International Network (SEIN) is growing and you are with us today to help plan our future. SEIN was created to encourage all Soka Educators and now you are really encouraging us - as it should be with the Mystic Law!!
Like the tree that is our model, we have been growing steadily but surely. We first started in 2003 with a quarterly newsletter which we sent out to less than fifty people. Since then, five years later, we have grown to over 130 in our network. The newsletter is now being archived at Soka University in Japan, is on the SGI-USA Culture Department Website, and is being translated into Portuguese in Brazil.
In November 2005, we started our on-line SEIN Forums and we were asked to have the forums more often so we began having them twice a year. We have grown from ten people to over twenty-five participants and from the work of one person to a team of planners and action committees. We are becoming a truly international community and have instant translation capability.
Out of the forums grew the desire to create change together. We currently have four on-going project committees:
The SEIN Website Committee headed by Constance Haig with David Tansey is now under construction. This website will be a way for Soka Educators to share lesson plans, read our Dialogue Primer, see and download our Disarmament Exhibition, have our on-line Forums, General Meetings and Newsletter Chats. Eventually, we hope to create information which will be available to Soka Educators for teaching disarmament education in classrooms throughout the world. To watch the development of our future website go to:
http://www.getbackonyourfeet.org/constance/node
- The Disarmament Exhibition Committee is headed by Terry Ellis with Dave Koranda, Michel Nader, Kwabena Siaka, and Olivier Urbain. The goal of this committee is to provide ongoing "news" about nuclear disarmament activities, research, and information from around the world. The committee will also provide educational tools that can be adapted for use in classrooms, libraries, and communities and an exhibition for downloading and use in small spaces with PowerPoint capability.
The Dialogue Primer Committee is headed by Ann Iseda with Constance Haig, Dennis Merimsky, and Stephanie Tansey. As we write the Dialogue Primer we hope to create something that helps us better understand one another both in the SGI and in our communities. We are just beginning to formulate a plan for writing such a primer and ask that all of you consider how you, too, might contribute to this project.
Now we are ready for advice and questions from our SEIN Community. Click below at end of this post on COMMENTS to leave your feedback, ideas or suggestions!
If you need help logging in please contact: Constance Haig at haig.constance@orbital.com
You will be getting a summary of our meeting. It will act like Final Encouragement for all of us!
Don't forget! Our next Online Forum will be from Sunday, November 18 through Sunday, December 16, 2007. The theme will be: “The 2007 Peace Proposal and Soka Education, Restoring the Human Connection: The First Step to Global Peace.” We look forward to another deep and wonderful dialogue! See you online!
Thanks to everyone who has volunteered to be on the committees and to all of you for your support!
Stephanie Tansey (US living in Nigeria) and rest of the SEIN Planning Team: Terry Ellis (US), Constance Haig (US), Ann Iseda (US), Michel Nader (Brazil), Jill Rees (UK living in Nigeria), and Kwabena Siaka (US.)
