Charter

Background

Since 1983, the Mastery Foundation has existed to empower individuals and communities in their ministries, in the reconciliation and healing of divisions, and in creating new conversations and possibilities for the future, a future that would not otherwise happen.

During that time, we have had the privilege of working with thousands of religious and grassroots community leaders. Through our programs, we have provided them with distinctions and education that increase in value and power with time and practice. Hundreds of participants have reported back to us the difference they have made as a result. They have reported the impact on their own leadership and in their work with others. They have requested more.

The following are the outcomes and results most often reported by participants in our work and programs:

• Experiences that both transform the individual and leave them with access to passing that transformation on to others
• The ability to confront and set aside resignation about the way it is in their communities and to then create new possibilities and enroll others in doing the same
• The courage to cross historical boundaries and prejudices to invent new partnerships, even at the risk of first alienating their own constituencies
• A shift in focus from what divides them to discovering their deeper shared concerns and ways of fulfilling those concerns in which everyone wins
• The confidence, tools, and support to initiate successful projects and conversations leading to results that would not have happened otherwise
• The power to regain and renew their commitment and to find new ways to be effective, even when the possibilities they stand for seem impossible
• Recognition of the existence and potency of a network of those already committed to reconciliation
• Freedom from the constraints of identity the past has given so that they are able to stay present and empowered in the face of fear, discomfort, beliefs, history, or narrative

The School for Leadership

The Board of Trustees, benefactors, volunteers, and partners of the Mastery Foundation, now having a concern for providing greater access to this education on a larger scale and having a commitment to doing so far beyond the years of their tenure, are creating the School for Leadership as an empowering structure that allows for the fulfillment of that concern and that possibility.

The School for Leadership is a living, adaptive structure that can both house and multiply the work and results begun by the founding generation of the Mastery Foundation, surpassing the difference already made through its transformational programs and networks of common commitment.

Like many schools, the School for Leadership provides instruction in a specialized field. Additionally, the School for Leadership brings together grassroots community and religious leaders who share a commitment to transformation and reconciliation, and provides a place for their continuing empowerment and education. It offers participants the chance to learn, apply, and build on a unique body of distinctions that are proven to make a powerful and lasting difference. It gives them access to the practice of transformational, grassroots leadership and to the ability to transfer that leadership to others.

School

By school, we mean a gathering of people who share a commitment to mastering a set of distinctions.

Distinctions are ideas, models, and principles one creates for oneself (rather than accepting or merely understanding) which reorganize what one already knows and give one powerful access to new possibilities.

Leader

The work of a leader is the future. The kind of future the Mastery Foundation is concerned with is a future of new possibilities, empowerment, and reconciliation.

For us, a leader is distinguished by the presence of these essential qualities, properties, and characteristics:

• Compassion for and acceptance of our interdependence and our shared human condition
• The ability to relate to others and understand the world from their perspective
• A stand for the creation and fulfillment of new possibilities
• The generation of actions and results consistent with those possibilities
• An accountability for the whole and not just for one part or area
• The practice of integrity that begins with giving and honoring your word

Leaders create a space or environment in which leadership in others can emerge and flourish. They awaken themselves and others to make a difference, even in the presence of fear, uncertainty, and resistance.

Leadership

We are concerned with leadership not as a position, but as the ability to relate to, convene, and engage others in creating and fulfilling new possibilities.

We recognize leadership as constituted in listening and speaking through both words and actions and practiced through the creation and application of distinctions and conversation.

We affirm leadership to be an inherent capacity within human beings to initiate and sustain conversations and actions through which things happen that otherwise would not have happened.

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