Monday, August 31, 2009

Abundance in Service

By Liz Thompson

Lynne Twist is renowned for many things. She's an activist, author and speaker. But perhaps her greatest accomplishment is as a fundraiser. Recognized today as one of the world's most greatest humanitarians, she's raised over $150 million over the last 30 years to deal with mankind's biggest issues, including hunger.

The mission of Lynne's Soul of Money Institute is to educate, inspire, and empower people and organizations to align their financial resources with what they value most. Its work is based on her award-winning book, The Soul of Money. As Lynne sums it up, "Each of us experiences a lifelong tug-of-war between our money interests and the calling of our soul. When we're in the domain of soul we act with integrity."

She remembers learning, at five years old, that many children in the world were dying of hunger, and even more weren't getting enough to eat. "Why aren't the grownups fixing that?" Lynne wondered. Even at such a young age, Lynne still recalls thinking about how she could be someone who could fix a global problem like that. Beginning with that small moment of inspiration, the rest of her life would be lived from the 'domain of the soul'.

The opportunity presented itself years later when she became one of the first staff members of the Hunger Project, a remarkable labor of love born of a collaboration between Buckminster Fuller and Werner Erhard, who believed that to let millions of people die of hunger in a world awash with food was not a food or political issue, but an issue of human integrity. From there, her life really unfolded in a direction of contribution, transformation, social change and service that she'd never dreamed possible.

Along with her husband, Bill, and a group of nine others, Lynne traveled to South America in the '90s for an encounter with the Ecuadorian Achuar Indians. This indigenous people have kept themselves insulated from modern-world contact. With courage and foresight, though, they reached out to those they most feared, in order to be educated about the world closing in around them.

When the danger came, they would be ready to defend themselves. They also needed support to preserve the rainforests-not for just for men, but for the future of life itself. Out of that was born the Pachamama Alliance, joining together indigenous people from South America with visionary leaders in North America.

What can each of us as individuals do to address these challenges that we are all facing in today's world? Lynne teaches that the best way to predict the future is to create it. Make what you want to make happen. Be a creator of the future. We need to recognize that we have so much control over our own life that we didn't even recognize we had.

Trauma and tragedy will continue to befall us all. We have a choice: we can face calamities and shock with resignation, or we can see them as great catalysts by which we can effect a better future for humankind. The gift of serving, of giving of ourselves, to this end can accomplish so much good. - 22871

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