About Us
What is the Source School?
We are a school for positive social transformation — an environment to practice and learn how to become people and schools and communities that contribute to the realization of the highest future potential in all of us, for all of us. We create this environment in your school or district and online.
We all live in a vastly and deeply interconnected world. Tapping into the power inherent in that interconnection — nature and the universe, community and relationships, shared human ideals and values, and, for some, a divine being — is connecting to Source. Interestingly, we are most alive to who we are as individuals and our purpose in life when we feel the most connected to the world around us.
We start with an open mind to understanding issues and contexts and an open heart in gaining and holding multiple perspectives of the people involved. And then we bring an open will — a willingness to take a confident leap from past knowledge to active exploration of future possibilities.
The Source School is a place to practice and learn how to access and use this wisdom to create the future we envision, as individuals, together.
Why “Source?
What makes our work powerful is not our prior knowledge or our expertise, although those are important assets.
It is the open mind we bring to understanding the issues experienced by the community and the open heart we bring to co-sensing the system’s structures and impact and the design of responsive possible solutions.
And, perhaps most importantly, it is the open will we bring to the moment—the pause—in between listening/learning and designing/implementing possible solutions. The open will allows us to be open to what is emerging from what we don’t yet know (the future) to meet that which we do know (the past) at this moment in the now (the present). Otto Scharmer calls it “presencing,” and it is a connecting to a deep source of wisdom accessible to all.
Connecting to source allows us to hold all we know (the past) and open ourselves to understanding where our own paths as individuals in a community (our future) intersect with the situation at it stands, the landscape so to speak. What can we do here and now?
The Source School teams are dedicated to using this method of being and working to further the realization of our vision in meaningful, collaborative ways. We also know the importance of educational models that teach students how to access their own sources of wisdom, how to connect to “source.” People who can push the pause button before acting, to ensure their actions are responsive to the full situation and in alignment with their own emerging future, the realization of their own highest intentions, will lead more meaningful, satisfied, and impactful lives. Imagine a school that embodied this value and implicitly and explicitly taught how to do it and why it is important at every age level and in developmentally appropriate ways? That’s the Source School.
Philosophy of Systems
A human being is a dynamic system and also a member of a multiplicity of systems, for example the systems of education, economics, family, government, technology, and the environment. We are investigating and prototyping toward these systems working at their highest capacity for the greatest good. Our particular focus is education because we hold that continuous learning and transformation literacy is a basic condition of a humane society and because to realize the inclusive, innovative, and sustainable communities and economies we desire, and to create the preconditions for other systems to thrive, the way we understand and define education, learning, and school must shift.
Our world is in a state of increasingly rapid change and destabilization; our youth need the skills to continually transform themselves in response to this reality. We say the youth of today are our “hope.” Let’s not simply “hope.” Let’s give them the tools to transform the systems that created the state of the world today, and that starts with youth being able to see and understand themselves as powerful actors in those systems.