Spirit in Action

North Carolina in 2017 is surely not the most welcoming place for a trans guy, yet it's where Liam Hooper is doing the work he's called to do. As Minister of Welcome & Beyond at Parkway UCC, Winston Salem, NC, Liam delivers a message of inclusion and strength to government, institutions, and individuals all around the state, rabble-rousing, preaching, and lecturing to make a difference.

Joe Luginbill is a prodigy and unstoppable dynamo. As Eau Claire's youngest ever elected official, he joined the school board at 20, powerfully influencing policies on transgender, homeless, sustainability issues, and much more. Strong, young, local, progressive officials are crucial in healing our nation, and Joe stands high among them.

Kim Callinan is Chief Program Officer of Compassion & Choices, an organization that works for and attempts to empower personal choice in end-of-life decisions. After Oregon approved the Death With Dignity Act in 1997, other states have continued and advanced the ways in which medical consumers were put in control of their own life decisions. The latest initiative by Compassion & Choices is Truth In Treatment.

Scott MacLeod is founder & president of World University and School (WUaS), an effort to make a high-quality, versatile, free education available to all who desire it, via the Internet. Drawing on wiki technology and with a tremendous supply creative commons-licensed open courseware from MIT & Yale, WUaS is launching its first 4-year class this fall. This project aims to make the education and learning available in a vast number of languages, eventually all languages from all countries - always free to the student.

It's time for a super-charged, profoundly-rooted, sustainable and transformative revolution, and Chris Moore-Backman has an inspired take on the needed way forward. He is the author The Gandhian Iceberg: A Nonviolence Manifesto for the Age of the Great Turning, loaded with thoughts, words, and images which will radically enrich the path of all who read it. Chris has a couple decades experience with nonviolent action and training, most recently with an emphasis on efforts to end the age of mass incarceration.

A vital part of improving the world is organizing people by getting the word out, which is the work of The Progressive Populist and its editor/founder, Jim Cullen. The populist movement and it's message prioritizing people over corporations has be transforming this country since the 1880's, and continues to do so today.

We care about & for that which we know, so B.J. Hollars leads us into Flock Together: A Love Affair with Extinct Birds. While captivating & enjoyable, B.J. also narrates a story that is deeply compelling in how we live in relationship to our world. He is founder of Chippewa Valley Writers Guildand associate professor of English at UW-Eau Claire.

Among his other books:

Students of higher education have valuable knowledge & skills to offer to organizations outside of school walls, and rural areas can provide real-life opportunity & experience to such students, while helping bridge the town-gown gap.

Ash Kyrie spent 18 months serving the USA as a Wisconsin National Guardsperson sent to Iraq, and it changed him. The road home to fullness includes time with other vets, support from family & community, and a long peace march in Japan, plus lots of subsequent Japanese connections. And art that helps bridge the gap from soldier to civilian, and war zone to back home.

Sarah (or Seres) Kyrie is living a life exploring the edge of the American cultural tides, and she captures the inner journey powerfully through her writing.