The Humanity Project

Every nonprofit group in today’s world lives and dies by its mission statement. The Humanity Project is no different. Our mission statement provides a short introduction to the goals of this organization. If you don’t know anything about us, the mission statement (and related vision statement) is intended to give you the basic idea in a nutshell. So we’re pleased to unveil a new mission statement. If you look to the right of this blog post, you’ll see it: “To create and implement innovative programs that teach children and adults how to use cooperation and social connection for individual development and grassroots community improvement.” It is on every main page of this website. This new statement was crafted by our fine Board of Directors after a spirited debate and I thank them for their work. If you click above on the “About” page, you’ll also find our vision statement and more information about this group. We believe that society’s troubles in large part result from a complex collection of individual problems — and that those individual problems significantly involve our personal struggles to forge within each of us a sense of our own value as a human being. As the great psychologist and philosopher William James noted, we each feel a profound “craving to be appreciated.” This means we’re always jockeying for praise, approval, recognition with everyone else who’s fighting for the same things. But … when we look beyond these purely self-centered concerns, we can begin to see daily life in a fresh light. We each can learn to think of ourselves as an important part of something even greater, humanity. When we commit our efforts to improving life for others and ourselves at the same time, we no longer worry so much about winning praise, approval or recognition.  (This is a very doable thing — it’s what our philosophy of “shared value” is all about …) Instead, we’re focused on doing what we can every day to help improve life for other individuals AND ourselves. Win-win. Our new mission statement helps explain this approach in a brief, understandable way. Cooperation and social connection for individual development and grassroots community improvement. That’s the Humanity Project. We hope you’ll want to join our work.

Tags: grassroots community improvement, helping kids, helping others, human values, Humanity Project, improving society, individual development, shared value, The Humanity Project

This entry was posted by Bob Knotts on Tuesday, March 1st, 2011 at 11:33 am and is filed under Our Board Of Directors, Our Programs, Our Website, Sharing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.