A Necessary Interfaith Tool
Being Able to Empower Each Other
by Paul Chaffee
The digital tools that began raining down back in the eighties have been an enormous boon to religion and multifaith organizations and how we communicate. The joy in starting a Facebook page and getting a first website; the databases which organize our membership, programming, and finances; the Zoom technology bringing the world to our desktops live; indeed, the tools for creating a publication like TIO – all this and more have amplified the reach and capacity of religious and secular nonprofits globally.
Tough issues remain for us all. If your website never goes viral, drawing thousands rather than tens or hundreds of thousands, the proliferation of sites and ‘likes’ can make you feel unnoticed. Religious and interreligious groups these days tend to trumpet ‘Collaboration!’ – but the arena continues to be defined by smoke-stack enterprises, where cooperation, much less collaboration, is the exception, and where competing for members and funds can make groups wary of each other. We badly need new tools to open the collegial doors to working together effectively about the things we care about.
Building Trust and Getting Results by the Numbers
The Synergized Impact Network Exchange, known as SINE, represents a breakthrough at least as important as anything that’s come before – a new opportunity “to cocreate unprecedented unified action for a just, safe, and thriving world for all Life on Earth.” On its website, SINE describes itself as “a global alliance of social innovators committed to large-scale behavior change through collaborative learning, innovation, and unprecedented unified action.”
The project currently has 150 organizational members around the world, each of which pays $25 a month to participate in a ‘deep’ social network. The Facebook pages of members are all linked, so when a posting is put on one site, it goes to all the member FB pages. How the organizational members then interact and build relationships through social media is more complex than an article this size can summarize. But essentially, the network, besides providing weekly sessions to share your work and build mutually useful connections, is a huge multiplier creating new collaborative possibilities most of us have never imagined.
The combined social media reach of the 150 organizations is 2o million viewers. To put this into perspective, imagine a nonprofit announcing a special program via its website, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, in the process communicating with several thousand members. By creating a SINE “wave” across the system, several thousand can become 500,000 who may be interested in interacting with your project. The Golden Rule Day organizers, using SINE, extended its reach this past April 5 to one and a half million viewers logging in for a day-long, interactive, down-loaded celebration of the Golden Rule. But SINE is about much more than increasing your social media ‘reach.’
SINE interaction is self-organizing and friendly; leadership is shared; resources along with experienced colleagues become available to address your concerns. In all this interaction, SINE members commit to five guiding principles:
Brave. Kind. Fun. Results.
Building and maintaining trust by co-managing shared resources.
Co-producing “Synergized Impacts,” creating meaningful outcomes.
Caring and sharing for each other by amplifying each other’s work.
Walking in Beauty and Living the Loving Way.
From this perspective, SINE’s long-term goals include achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and launching a massive world peace ‘game’ by 2030. Those dreams, highly ambitious some might argue, are developed out of the emerging SINE-supported results, the metrics which record that progress, and the imagination of a gifted, results-oriented group of people within SINE’s deep network of networks. The current agenda includes a set of massive global interfaith celebrations – but that is another story.
Spiritually Grounded
Picture of the SINE Network on November 13, 2019 – Photo: SINE Network
Jon Ramer, the co-founder of SINE, exclaims, “Trust and results. That is what it is all about.” Ramer has spent most of his adult life, since leaving a professional music career following 9/11, developing large digital systems aimed at growing big constituencies for compassionate service. He was the major architect of the Compassion Games, a project of the Charter for Compassion, where cities compete with each other to demonstrate the survival of the kindest. The Compassion Games maintains an e-list with 175,000 addresses.
SINE’s spiritual grounding makes it much more than the next step in high tech for NGOs. Jon Ramer’s partner and co-founder is Chief Phil Lane Jr., an enrolled member of the Yankton Dakota and Chickasaw nations. For 46 years, Phil has worked with Indigenous peoples in North, Central and South America, Micronesia, Southeast Asia, India, Hawaii, and Africa. With elders from across North America, Phil co-founded the Four Worlds International Institute (FWII) in 1982. And he was an active participant in the founding of United Religions Initiative more than 20 years ago.
The Lane-Ramer partnership is based on deep respect and friendship, but together they live to exemplify something more – the coming together of the Eagle and the Condor, an ancient prophecy from Amazon Indigenous communities. According the Pachamama Alliance,
“The Eagle and the Condor prophecy of the Amazon speaks of human societies splitting into two paths – that of the Eagle, and that of the Condor. The path of the Condor is the path of heart, of intuition, and of the feminine. The path of the Eagle is the path of the mind, of the industrial, and of the masculine.
“The Eagle and Condor prophecy says that the 1490s would begin a 500-year period during which the Eagle people would become so powerful that they would virtually drive the Condor people out of existence. This can be seen in the conquering of the Americas and the killing and oppressing of the indigenous peoples in the subsequent 500 years – up to and including today.
“The prophecy says that during the next 500-year period, beginning in 1990, the potential would arise for the Eagle and the Condor to come together, to fly in the same sky, and to create a new level of consciousness for humanity. The prophecy only speaks of the potential, so it's up to us to activate this potential and ensure that a new consciousness is allowed to arise.”
The founders of SINE see themselves as a part of the prophecy. Ten years ago Jon and Phil published “Deep Social Networks and the Digital Fourth Way,” an extended paper detailing the spiritual, intellectual, and organizational grounding for SINE. (The other three “Ways” are: 1. to dominate the other, 2. to resist the other, and 3. to give in to each other.)
By contrast, the Fourth Way includes a list of 16 Guiding Principles for Building a Sustainable and Harmonious World. Below are the titles of principles, which they explain in the paper:
Human Beings Can Transform Their Worlds
Development Comes from Within
No Vision, No Development
Healing is a Necessary Part of Development
Interconnectedness
No Unity, No Development
No Participation, No Development
Justice
Spirit
Morals and Ethics
The Hurt of One is the Hurt of all; the Honor of One is the Honor of All
Authentic Development is Culturally Based
Learning
Sustainability
Move to the Positive
Be the Change You Want to See
Connecting, Amplifying, Empowering
In terms of process, SINE’s weekly ‘collaboratories’ and social-media cafes use a model called REFINE. It suggests an informal kind of agenda as people discuss the projects and campaigns they are organizing.
Reach
Engagement
Funding
Impact
Network
Exchange
Phil Lane and Jon Remer have been involved in creating and supporting other deep social networks, including the Compassionate Action Network, inspired by the Dalai Lama; the Four Worlds International Institute, serving Indigenous communities; and Wiser Earth, dedicated to a just and lasting peace.
I remember attending a workshop decades ago to teach several hundred computer newbies what a ‘link’ meant in computer-speak. Seemed a difficult notion then, too outlandish and unexpected to be accepted at face value. ‘Deep social networks’ is new language now for most of us, somewhat intimidating, but it will probably become common parlance in coming years. A variety of deep social networks will proliferate and invite your participation.
The cause for celebration is that this technology is being made available now to people everywhere who are preoccupied with healing the Earth and all living things. Even better, in its structure and practice it is integrating the wisdom of both the Eagle and the Condor, promoting the possibility that human beings can change our cultural behavior and, as one, promote a compassionate and effective approach to the manifold difficulties facing humankind.
Header Photo: Pixabay