Dear friends and supporters,
It’s my 60th birthday on Monday, July 15, and my high hope is to start off my seventh decade and the second half of 2019 with a bang, making an even bigger splash with our nonprofit Socrates Cafe and Democracy Cafe initiatives.
In the last two years alone, we have established over 40 new gatherings across the fruited plain of the U.S., as well as throughout Poland, Saudi Arabia (where it is taking off by leaps and bounds), in Bahrain, in India, Kyoto, and many other places besides.
We hope you agree that it is incredibly important to build on Democracy Cafe‘s singular efforts at this critical crossroads.
To that end, we aim, among other projects, to:
a) Continue with our transformative work with marginalized populations, including the bilingual Socrates Cafe at the palliative care program for end of life patients at UCLA Medical Center, and at a New England shelter for adolescents who were victims of abuse, and over time to replicate this elsewhere.
2) Hold experiential workshops for adults, adolescents and children, focusing initially on underserved communities in California, Maine, and South Dakota, as well as Mexico and hopefully also Harlem — all areas where there is considerable expressed interest.
3) To continue establishing groups (and provide facilitator workshops) in authoritarian societies, particularly in China and the Middle East, where our initiatives are ever more popular and expanding (the book ‘Socrates Cafe‘ has recently gone into a new printing in China and soon will be released in Arabic)
3) Develop and provide e-courses and establish a certification program to become bona fide Socrates Cafe facilitators steeped in the historical, scholarly and practical underpinnings of what this version of the Socratic Method cultivated and honed over nearly a quarter century is ideally all about.
Hope you’ll consider making a modest donation (or even an immodest one) as we continue doing all we can and must to make ours a world in which all can discover, develop and contribute those talents that make life most worth living for themselves and society at many scales — with an eye always towards those who will come after us, but also those who came before.
As someone with dual Greek-U.S. citizenship — my grandparents immigrated dirt-poor from the tiny volcanic island of Nisyros, Greece — I think often of the West’s first democracy, what led to its irreversible decline, and how to stem another oncoming wall of darkness. And as a dad with a 6-year-old and a soon to be 13-year-old, my aspiration is that they and all children around the globe equally have ample opportunity to make their mark in a world of promise and hope and understanding.
In the case of ancient Athens, a citizenry of enlightened generalists and public servant-minded inquirers, in which governance was from the bottom up, came to an end in the blink of an eye when ‘the people’ let down their guard and allowed demagogic oligarchs to hold sway. Polarization stemming from a blend of malignant narcissism and sanctimonious self-righteousness, the pursuit of material wealth as an end in itself, fast became all the rage.
To prevent that from happening today, we are redoubling our efforts to establish an abundant and thriving network the world over of ‘openists’ — people who understand that autonomy and social conscience are not at opposite ends of a continuum, but are interlaced; people who operate from the premise that no one has a monopoly on truths, but that they are hard-won and require ceaseless inquiry and experimentation in ways that that make our universe an ever more participatory one.
Thanks in advance for contributing to the cause. We rely solely on individual support.
With love, and in solidarity,
Chris
Philip Christopher Phillips, PhD
Founder and ED,
Democracy Cafe