UNIVERSAL CARING:
From Service to Transformational Training
A review of "Better Than Money Can Buy: The New Volunteers"
compiled by Joseph Kilpatrick and Sanford Danzinger, M.D.
Center
for Purposeful Living (CPL)
Reviewed by Burton Danet, Ph.D., Co-Founder, A Better Community For All (ABC4All)
UNIVERSAL CARING RECIPE
INGREDIENTS
Start with a dedicated group of volunteers.
PREPARE THE MIX
Create the Human Service Alliance (HSA).
Add learning by doing.
COMBINE TO CREATE ANEW
Transition to transformational training.
YIELD
Caring and Loving.
Making a Difference in the lives of both volunteers and those they serve.
Application of
concepts to any local community in the world including the “Totally
Responsible Person (TRP).”
A model for the
world: Purposeful
Living.
The
mission of the Center for Purposeful Living is to:
(1) Stimulate and facilitate the expression of human goodness, and foster its recognition as an innate human quality in everyone.
(2) Research, document, demonstrate, and disseminate innovative and effective practices in the fields of voluntary service, education, and human organization and relations.
(3) Assist people to clarify their own sense of meaning and purpose, and to develop the skills and means to achieve them.
It is not easy to put into a few sentences or paragraphs what the Center for Purposeful Living (CPL), Winston-Salem, North Carolina represents. The above recipe and mission, having been honed over a period of many years, could not be more successful. The viable model for purposeful living has and will attract untold numbers of people who will want to serve their fellow human beings above and beyond any personal persuasions, whether they be religious, philosophical, ethical, cultural, scientific, academic vocational or avocational.
What can be learned just from reading “Better Than Money Can Buy?”
This is a timeless work. As an instructional model, the many and detailed lessons learned by a dedicated group of volunteers and those they serve speak volumes. It is not necessary to be present physically at the Center to learn about what it offers or what those experiences teach. The reading, alone, conveys enough of the spirit and the intentions so that what is represented in words can be assimilated and absorbed readily by those who are receptive.
The pages of this book are filled with Inspiration.
Just as the lives
of so many of the volunteers and the “guests” were affected so deeply and
positively from their “hands on” experiences with one another, so too, does
the reader absorb such life-experience-learned lessons.
The value of going from experience to utilizing the concepts
learned by doing to create a transformational training program, now the primary
focus of CPL, cannot be overestimated.
This “living laboratory” conveys to any student on the premises that here, at last, is a safe haven in which to come and spend a period of time – whether it be weeks, months a year or more – to redefine oneself and to focus on the creation of self-directed goals which offer clear direction in one’s life.
There is no brainwashing here.
What is here is a warm, loving, caring, receptive place where one can go and immediately feel comfortable. Once you have arrived, you are in a setting where trust reigns. Honesty and openness prevail. It is a place that embraces you -- wherever you may be in life.
Such acceptance is how you are greeted.
You travel your own journey in such a comfortable setting. There are many and varied resources available to assist you along the way. Some are of the classroom variety. Some are of participation in an on-site living/working laboratory where participating with a group brings home valuable lessons. Still others are the outcome of being in a place with others, not just yourself, who have come from anywhere on the globe, to be together, in one place and for one period of time. Even sitting in an outdoor classroom or tending to chores like cleaning bathrooms can contribute to a new perspective in living.
The outcome is a higher level of consciousness and self-determination which will prevail as your journey extends beyond the CPL.
But you do not forget CPL.
Instead you carry
CPL with all it represents wherever you go, and now you become The New
Volunteer – perhaps a teacher – perhaps you can call it becoming a
mentor of others – in the best sense of that word.
teacher: a personified abstraction that teaches; "books were his teachers"; "experience is a demanding teacher" http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery;jsessionid=f7nrpmslbg3oe?dsid=502&deid=914467666&sbid=lc01b&linktext=Meaning%20%232
The Center for Purposeful Living is a consummate Teacher.
CPL
students come away from their rigorous learning-and-service experiences with a
justified sense of competence, confidence, and purpose.
http://ufhg.org/data/publications/html/master/SUP-2001_4_9_113624.shtm
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Originally trained as a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, Dr. Burton Danet resides in California USA. The ABC4All Global Mentoring TEAM Project is located on the internet at http://projects.takingitglobal.org/abc4allglobalteam
Additional information is available on the internet at http://ABC4All.net/directory.html