Rebecca Belay Kassa
- Dec 16, 2020
- 2 min
top of page
.png)
January 2019 Newsletter
Creative Educators International Network and Earth Charter International:
A Common History and Now a Common Future
by Stephanie Tansey, Founder and President
Today I am announcing that CEIN's Board of Directors has approved a formal partnership with Earth Charter International. By sharing materials and principles, we aim to have an even more powerful impact on our planet and the life on it. Please read our ECI-CEIN joint announcement below.
The background setting for this announcement began in April 2018, when CEIN members traveled to Costa Rica for a conference at the Earth Charter Education Center on the Campus of the University of Peace. Our shared bonds with Earth Charter International were clear from the beginning. ECI Executive Director, Mirian Vilela, opened three days of learning and dialogue by inviting us to an outdoor experience just outside the indoor classroom of the Earth Charter Education Center. We were reminded in a powerful way how essential our connection to nature is in our work for peaceful sustainable communities. And in the process, we also created a deep, new understanding of how our two organizations could work together.
Step-by-step, from closed to open eyes, our hearts and minds tuned in to the sounds, scents, the shapes and colors, the movements and the feel of the semi-arid tropical forest that surrounds UPeace.
Earth Charter International and Creative Educators International Network Join Forces to Foster Value-Creating Education
San José, Costa Rica, January 2019
As the New Year just started, we welcome a new partnership between Earth Charter International and Creative Educators International Network (CEIN). With both organizations working in the field of education for peace and sustainability, and their dedication to communities and education for global citizenship, it's not surprising this collaboration now becomes official.
Through the partnership, members of CEIN will have access to the Earth Charter materials, which they can use to implement value-creating education in their communities, businesses, schools and universities. CEIN will use the principles of the Earth Charter for planning and creating training activities for its members.
CEIN Founder and President Stephanie Tansey shared, "Educating and learning is to live in a space of reciprocal acceptance, where there is legitimate respect for oneself and others and a special deep gratitude, appreciation and respect for the environment. CEIN recognizes itself directly in the Earth Charter principles. By collaborating with Earh Charter International, our members have the opportunity to use the Earth Charter and its pedagogical and global perspective to further develop our focus on sustainability in local communities."
"Partnering with CEIN, an organization committed to implementing value-creating education and the Earth Charter," said Earth Charter Executive Director Mirian Vilela, "makes it possible to reach educators around the world and help them in their professional development to support the transition to peace and sustainable ways of living."
For more information, contact:
Irma irma@earthcharter.org or Stephanie cein2030@gmail.com
About Earth Charter
The Earth Charter is an ethical framework for building a just, sustainable, and peaceful global society in the 21st century. It seeks to inspire a new sense of global interdependence and shared responsibility for the well-being of the human family, the greater community of life, and future generations. The Earth Charter provides a valuable educational instrument. It encourages to search for common ground in the midst of our diversity and to embrace a global ethic that is shared by an ever-growing number of people.
About CEIN
The CREATIVE EDUCATORS INTERNATIONAL NETWORK, Inc. (CEIN) is a non-profit NGO dedicated to inspiring educators who are implementing value-creating education in different ways. Through deepening understanding and empathy, CEIN is determined to lay the foundation for construction of a United Nations of Education.
The Earth Charter Education Center was Costa Rica's 1st LEED building for education.
Natural light pours into the earth Charter Education Center classroom where our dialogue with Mirian continued.
Conference participants presented their sustainable community educator projects in a classroom at UPeace.
A CEIN member takes a closer look at one of the many Earth Charter educational resources that Mirian shared.
See more ECI resources here.
Creative Educators International Network (CEIN) began to take form about 15 years ago when I recognized a shared need for a place where value-creating educators from around the world could gather and encourage each other. To my delight, other educators were enthusiastic about the idea, too. We joined together to build a tradition of dialogue during semiannual online CEIN Forums. The format of these forums was inspired by an Earth Charter education conference I attended in 2003 and the subsequent online summary activity that I was asked to conduct. This ongoing CEIN dialogue has grown along with each new member as we deepen, share and apply our understanding of value-creating education principles in our classrooms and communities.
The life principle that anyone can create value, including through meaningful dialogue, is a powerful idea that leads to individual and collective change for the better. Communities that are contributive in this way begin to thrive too. Dr. Daisaku Ikeda's annual Peace Proposal, which is submitted to the United Nations each year on January 26, showed us this new way to teach and lie together. This fundamental solidarity is responsible for what CEIN is today and what we want to share.
Today we are focused on building strong relationships in our communities, which currently span four regions - Europe, Brazil, Asia and the United States. We want to touch the life of people for the better and inspire them to join us as protagonists for change. We hope they will become sustainable community educators traveling with us on the road toward a United National of Education. Indeed, our four regions work out problems and find solutions together much like a United Nations of Education will need to do in the future.
We hope our old and new friends will follow the development of CEIN and ECI members by reading our experiences, struggles and development of clear evidence of changing communities in the new Community News section of our website. You'll find our newsletters there, as well.
Earth Charter Principles and CEIN Goals
CEIN goals and the Earth Charter principles resonate. We'd like to share some examples from time to time. This is the first EC principle.
I. Respect and Care for the Community of Life
1.Respect Earth and life in all its diversity.
a. Recognize that all beings are interdependent and every form of life has value regardless of its worth to human beings.
b. Affirm faith in the inherent dignity of all human beings and in the intellectual, artistic, ethical, and spiritual potential of humanity.
Here is a link to the complete Earth Charter text in fifty languages.
This ECI principle is similar to the value-creating education principle that Beauty, Benefit and Good are values that illuminate a clear pathway to create a world of beauty, where all can benefit, and at the same time creates a sense of well-being or good for ourselves. Everyone can create value and when we do, we become happier. CEIN and ECI already sense and know that we are deeply interconnected and we can grow a conscious faith in humanity.
We in CEIN are a community of life, so respect and care for this community can awaken in us a consciousness of how to live wisely in other communities, too.
See more Earth Charter resources on our Partners page.
Right, right to left, Stephanie Tansey, CEIN President; Mirian Vilela, ECI Executive Director; Gloriana Lara, then ECI Secretariat Executive Assistant.
Below, CEIN tree planting ceremony on the grounds of the University of Peace. This tree is dedicated to CEIN's vision of a United Nations of Education.
Left, Fatima Oliviera, left, (CEIN-USA), conference coordinator, and Viviane Lopez (CEIN-Brazil). They were conferring on translation to English before Viviane presented her community project: cleaning plastic from the Tarumã Mirim River in Amazonia.
Other Community News
bottom of page