New Book Announcement (November 15, 2013)
Media contact: Byron Belitsos
415/720-6508 • byron@originpress.com
By Daniel Raphael, Ph.D, with Byron Belitsos
Editorial contributions from Michael McCray, MD,
Marty Risacher, and Roxanne Andrews
Paperback: $12.95
eBook: $5.95
Origin Press/Celestia
120 pages
978-1-57983-011-3
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THE GREATER GOAL: SOCIAL SUSTAINABILITY
How citizen teams can design permanently sustainable institutions
Civilizations come and go on the face of the earth, and some rise to great heights, but all of them eventually fail. But what if we could build cultures and civilizations that thrive, not just for a few centuries, but into the far distant future? According to Healing a Broken World: The Grassroots Guide to a Socially Sustainable Future (Origin Press, 2013), we can now co-create such a world with the help of spiritual guidance.
The radical claim of this unprecedented manual is that if spiritualized citizens are given the right tools for creating new institutional designs—and if these designs are based on social sustainability principles—then we have a real hope of building an enlightened society that will never collapse.
Healing a Broken World is a brief guide for far-seeing citizens interested in long-term solutions, not short-term fixes provided by self-interested politicians and lobbyists. The core purpose of the book is to explain how to organize a social sustainability design team (SSDT). Each team’s design is made available worldwide for validation and deployment by other teams, along the lines of today’s “open source” movement.
Introducing the Core Values of Socially Sustainable Design
The core values are: qualityof life (life), equality, and growth. The authors, who work closely with celestial helpers, show that these three are the minimum set of principles necessary to support social sustainability in any human institution, provided that they appear simultaneously. Healing a Broken World argues that these three principles are synergetic, irreducible, and ultimately irrefutable.
“Social sustainability emerges,” says author Daniel Raphael “when citizens fully understand these three core values and consciously live to fulfill them through their social organizations, beginning with the family and extending to every sort of institution.”
Socially sustainable designs are scalable downwards to individuals and their families, or upwards to much larger institutions. Once created, documented, validated, and archived, such new designs can, by definition, be refined and replicated anywhere—in any culture or nation—by similarly trained local teams.
The Structured Work of the Social Design Teams
Social sustainability design work involves small, specialized, highly motivated teamswhose members carry out one of fouressential roles. Each team first chooses an institution that needs reform. Next, it engages in a disciplined inquiry process that leads them to a fullawareness of their assumptions and beliefs. Then, using these and other tools, the designteam writes a new template, incorporating into theirdesign those features that embody the three core values of social sustainability. Each design must provide for ways for measuring the outcome of its implementation.
Healing a Broken World also introduces the optional use of celestial guidance to support this vital work. The book’s original impulse comes from celestial sources related to The Urantia Book, which is believed to be an epochal revelation to humankind.
What Actually “Causes” Sustainability?
“Social sustainability is more inclusive than environmental sustainability,” said co-writer Byron Belitsos. “The approach of social sustainability looks to people themselves and the institutions we create as the basic resource for creating a sustainable civilization. Think of social sustainability as a cause and environmental sustainability and other worthy goals as an effect. The sphere of social sustainability is the primary agent of real change—that is, if our goal is to create a permanently thriving world.”
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