EKKLESIA’S DIRECTOR, Simon Barrow, is among the speakers at an online roundtable discussion being hosted tonight (Wednesday 7 June 2023) by the Edinburgh International Centre for Spirituality and Peace.
The full title of the event is ‘Intergenerational Leadership: Honouring the Ancestors, Nurturing the Present, Seeding the Future’.
The other contributors are Dr Gameli Tordzro, a tradition bearer, educator, artistic researcher, director/performer and farmer from Ghana; Dr Nadine Andrews, visiting researcher at the Pentland Centre for Sustainability in Business at Lancaster University and former chair of Climate Psychology Alliance Scotland; Claudia Goncalves, co-founder Youth Vision Charity and the Edinburgh Shamanic Centre; and Adzovi Sika, Outreach and Digital Coordinator at the Ghanaian NGO Adanu.
Simon Barrow comments: “My own experience of leadership is within church organisations, political life and the formation of NGOs – and through adult education and consultancy to organisations in change. I will offer a few comments on the growing technocratically-driven rhetoric of ‘intergenerational leadership’ within business and education, and suggest some virtues and practices which can root it more solidly in listening, learning and relating, building from concrete communal experience.
“I will also signpost forms of enabling and spiritually intelligent leadership in the face of the major interrelated and existential global challenges we face right now: climate change and the destruction of the biosphere; a predatory rentier economy based on addictive consumption, extraction and debt; war and conflict culminating in the use of WMDs, and threats posed by AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) without safeguards.