Announcing Metta Mentors 2010

Congratulations to the 2010 mentee cohort! We have selected the participants for this year’s program, and look forward to another amazing year. Please check back next February if you are interested in applying with us for 2011. Thank you to all who applied, and to all who contribute to making the program a success. We really could not do it without you!

We are happy to announce the call for applications for the 2010 Metta Mentors Nonviolence Immersion Program. Yes, to all of you who have been asking: it’s time to apply!

Please use the bar to the right to navigate the Metta Mentors section of our website. There you can learn about this year’s program, get your questions answered, check out Metta Mentors photos and blog, and apply to be a part of our 2010 cohort. If you know anything about this program, you will know that last year’s program was an unqualified success. We hosted an amazing group of mentees, and our lives were changed, even as we hoped to be helping to change the lives of those who came to us. Many, many seeds were planted that we hope will blossom wildly this year as an even more transformative program!

Please help us to get the word out about this very special program. In order to reach others who might be interested in applying to Metta Mentors, please forward this information widely!

Contact us at mettamentors@mettacenter.org with questions or comments. Thank you!

Note: though we have secured enough funding to run the 2010 program at a bare-bones level, we are still seeking funding; the number of mentees that we can accept this year has yet to be determined as a result. For more information about donating to the program, see the Metta Mentors post on our home page.

Welcome to Metta Mentors, 2010

A few months ago some of us from Metta had the pleasure and privilege of participating in the deeply inspiring Gandhi-King Conference in Memphis, a three day convergence of folks from all over the country working to keep Dr. King’s dream of a nonviolent world alive. Throughout that event we heard the same urgent question raised by different voices: what happened to nonviolence after the era of the Civil Rights Movement ended? During that time, an entire nation had awakened to the transformative power of nonviolence. Can such a movement be mobilized today? Where would we even begin?

By the time the Civil Rights Movement erupted, the seeds of nonviolence had already been planted by the small organizations who nurtured young activists to become the nonviolent leadership of this country. Today the Metta Center for Nonviolence and its partner organizations are striving to continue this work, incubating the next generation of nonviolent leaders through our Metta Mentors Summer Program. The program, now entering its fourth year, pairs young (aged 18 to 35) changemakers with Bay Area nonprofits four days per week for social change work, bringing them together once a week for workshops grounding them in the principles and methods of transformative nonviolent action.

This year’s program will be proudly hosted at our new office (on Martin Luther King, Jr. Way, no less) which we have recently established as a nonviolence resource center for the Bay Area, giving this year’s ‘mentees’ even more access to Metta’s resources and deeper immersion into the nonviolence community than has been possible in previous years.

Funding for Metta Mentors 2010 has been an ongoing challenge due to the present economic conditions, but Metta has remained steadfast in our commitment to continue, uninterrupted, the momentum of this innovative program. So far we have secured enough funding to go forward with this year’s program at a minimal level, and we are working to bring in more support, as well as look for creative ways to be more efficient, to do more with less. We can and will do it! Sometimes we must find ourselves against a wall in order that our most creative energies can be drawn from within us. With this year’s Metta Mentors program, we will be stepping even further into our promise to live the nonviolence we teach at the center, by putting together a program that does the most possible good with fewer resources, reaches more people without compromising values, and touches the hearts of all involved with the program with a spirit of service, community, and mutual support.

Please browse our site to find out more about our program, share the information with anyone who you believe will be interested, and check back with us to keep yourself informed of developments with this year’s program.

Metta Center is contributing in many ways to building a nonviolent future. But it has become clear to us that in terms of contributing to the personal transformation of future leaders, movement building among nonviolence advocates, and the merging of the inner and outer traditions of nonviolence, Metta Mentors is our most concrete program for creating future nonviolent changemakers. This is a program that is contributing to movement building from the inside out. Dr. King’s dream of a nonviolent world still is alive, and Metta Mentors is one of the incubators for its next generation of leaders. Please help spread the word!

Here’s to another wonderful year!