20200428 | Building A Beloved Community | Puanani Burgess and Maya Soetoro

Join us for a series of virtual community events to explore the theme, Building a Beloved Community. This first event brings together two peacebuilders for conversation over a cup of tea -- Puanani Burgess, the process and design facilitator for Building a Beloved Community and Maya Soetoro, Associate Specialist at the Matsunaga Institute, and Co-Founder of the Institute for Climate and Peace and Ceeds of Peace. About Speakers: Puanani Burgess is a designer and facilitator for Building the Beloved Community, a community building and conflict transformation process that brings people face-to-face for ceremony, storytelling, and circles of trust and respect. As a community activist, she has been involved in the Native Hawaiian sovereignty movement for over 40 years participating in the Protect Kaho‘olawe ‘Ohana organization and movement and the struggles of West Beach Development and the Makua Valley Military Bombing practices on sacred land. She is a published poet, mother, aunty, and friend to many. She is also one of the founders of several non-profit organizations including the Wai‘anae Coast Community Mental Health Center, Ka‘ala Farm, Inc., Hoa ‘Āina O Makaha and the Pu‘a Foundation. Pua served on the boards of directors for YES! Magazine, Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation, Pacific Buddhist Academy and Hale Na’au Pono. She currently serves on the board of directors for The Kohala Center. Living Economies Forum and Feed The Hunger Foundation. She has served as the Myles and Zilphia Horton Chair for the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee and as a community scholar in residence at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Hawai'i. She is an ordained Zen Buddhist priest in the International Daihonzan Chozen-ji. Maya Soetoro is a co-founder and senior advisor at the Institute for Climate and Peace, a co-founder at Ceeds of Peace, and an Associate Specialist at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. She also serves as a consultant to the Obama Foundation, working closely with their international team to develop programming in the Pacific-Asia region. Prior to her work with the Obama Foundation, she was the Director of the Matsunaga Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa where, in addition to leading outreach and development initiatives, she also taught Leadership for Social Change, History of Peace Movements, Peace Education, and Conflict Management for Educators. She was awarded a master’s degree in Secondary Education from NYU's College of Education and a PhD in Multicultural Education from the University of Hawaiʻi. For many years, she worked at the University of Hawaiʻi College of Education where she taught Multicultural Education, Social Studies Methods, and Peace Education at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Maya has published a number of book contributions as well as a picture book entitled Ladder to the Moon and is currently under contract to write a Young Adult novel entitled Yellowwood. Co-Sponsors: Ceeds of Peace, Institute for Climate and Peace, and the Matsunaga Institute for Peace. Learn more about Peacebuilding LLC at https://beacons.ai/peacebuildingllc.