To Plant Seeds of Transformation and Growth

We understand that real learning doesn’t only happen in your head, it happens in your heart.  We understand that while sometimes personal revolution happens in an instant, most of the time seeds for that change were planted long before the real flowering begins.  We are here to seed that transformation with learning experiences and wisdom from teachers and sage guides whose insights will get under your skin and convince you to keep walking for the sake of your bright and hopeful future. Our instructors are knowledgeable in their respective fields, but more importantly, they are ordinary men and women who have allowed themselves to be transformed by the truth they have discovered.

To Cultivate Sage Wisdom

We believe that teachers become sages when they become cracked open by the truth of what they now know, enabling them to embrace a whole new experience of what it means to be human. We are here to listen to our teachers, to look for the stories and places where their work is alive and vibrant because they know it from the inside out. It is from this deep listening space that our classes are created. It is from this place of honest trust that our teachers present their work not as experts, but as human beings made wise by all the ways that work has significantly restructured their understanding of the world.

We acknowledge that while many of our teachers are accomplished academics, professors or writers, many are sages we have encountered from around the world. They are cooks, carpenters, refugees, taxi drivers, farmers, housewives and students whose ordinary lives contain deep hard-won understanding. Each one of these sages has been faced with an obstacle requiring the kind of courage, compassion or trust none of us signs up for but from which we can all be inspired to grow. We understand voices from east and west, rich and poor, right and left, must be represented for our collective learning to be complete.

While we value the wisdom of the individual and also the group, we are aware that in every era sages emerge with insights that naturally help people deepen and grow. We are here to honor those sages and to create a space for them to share and learn from being on the journey alongside students who value what they know.

To Collaborate with Emerging Leaders in Our Hopeful World

Too often, we are forced to choose between doing what’s needed to help ourselves or sacrificing in order to act on behalf of others. We are dreaming of a new world where the “we” is strong enough to hold “you” and “me,” where the systems and structures naturally provide ample opportunity for human beings to care and be cared for at the same time. In a humble move towards this end, we maintain deep relationships with emerging thought leaders in Rwanda and Nepal. These thought leaders are former refugees, genocide survivors, innovators, survivors of civil war and idealists devoted to the world at large.

Ten percent of the total revenue from Hopeful World Publishing is invested in the projects and plans of these emerging leaders. We do this as an acknowledgement that the “we” we speak of encompasses voices from every corner of our hopeful world. We do this in solidarity and partnership, understanding that the personal, practical and political solutions we crave come from our collaborative efforts to create a shared future that is honest and whole.