2014 Year of Jubilee

2014 was declared a Jubilee Year by the Board of Trustees to acknowledge and celebrate all the Mastery Foundation has accomplished in the 30 years of its existence. Since 1984. In that time, we have delivered more than 150 Making a Difference workshops to more than 3000 participants. We also created new initiatives to empower those struggling for reconciliation across religious divisions in Ireland and Israel, and we created the School for Leadership as a way to train new leaders who will take the Mastery Foundation into the future.

Below are some of the major accomplishments of the School in 2014:

• Each Regional Learning Group continued to deepen their work together as a community and strengthening their ability to use the distinctions they learned about working as a community in their own work.


• Held the third Three-Day Leadership Clinics for participants at a residential facility in each region. These clinics are designed to reinforce the learnings of the Five-Day Fundamentals in Transformational Leadership and address how to deal with challenges and breakdowns in the field. In this final year of the School the focus was on the participants' ability to transfer the distinctions of the Mastery Foundation to others.


• Produced two three-hour Leadership Dialogues for the participants, one on forgiveness and one on completion. These international conference calls are part of the curriculum of the school and are held during those quarters of the academic year when there is no residential offering.


• Presented two professionally-recorded audio offerings, one on enrollment and one on the created future. These audio offerings are part of the curriculum and become part of the library of more than 50 distinctions of the School that are being developed by the faculty.


• Continued to develop the Coaching Program as one of the core elements of the three-year curriculum. Each participant had a new coach assigned for the academic year, and each coach had access to a mentor to support their coaching of participants.


• In the autumn of 2014 the 14 members of the Second Cohort of the School for Leadership completed their work and celebrated their accomplishments together by international conference call. All Board Members, Sponsors, and School Builders were invited to join them for this call. The cohort members acknowledged each other, the volunteers, and the School for the profound difference this experience made for each of them and their work in their communities. Throughout this process the whole community also learned about and experienced the powerful distinction completion.


• Each Regional Learning Group also celebrated their graduation locally. In Israel and Northern Ireland the groups hosted a party for themselves, family members, and those who supported them in being in the School. The US group held their gathering through video conferencing.


• For the first time the January School Builder Meeting was held as an international conference call, which allowed 27 or our 40 School Builders to work together. This was a wonderful and effective way to begin the year and to keep the School moving forward.


• Twenty-five school builders came together in Cincinnati in August to work with long-time volunteer leader and supporter Peter Block. Many of our ideas about self-organizing groups and working in community are adapted from Peter's work.


• After the graduation of the Second Cohort we began a six-month period, called the Plette Bridge, of preparing for the beginning of the Third Cohort in May 2015. This work includes redesigning the enrollment process for the cohort and refining the structures and materials for the coaching program.


• The Faculty and Curriculum and Support Element has now created the full set of Leadership Dialogue Calls and Audio Offerings needed for the Third Cohort. For the first time since we began the School, they will be working out in front of what is needed rather than creating what is needed with looming deadlines.


• We continued to build the Apprentice Leader Program, which includes 13 of the original 18 participants in the first cohort of the School. During 2014 these graduates took on more and more accountability for the growth and success of Mastery's work in their regions. They organized gatherings of other graduates and supported most of the enrollment into local programs, many of which were led or co-led by local leaders. These gatherings both keep the conversation for transformation alive for all who participate in them and forward the training of apprentice program leaders.


• As with any ongoing effort, a considerable amount of time each year is devoted to maintaining and continuing to develop the programs and structures that keep things going. This includes procedures, manuals, and checklists; platforms that support our work together such as the wiki, email, and conference calls; and programs to train new coaches and community members.