Sharing From the Heart is a monthly initiative where young people from China and the United States come together around the pressing ecological, cultural, and spiritual issues of our time. Through sharing thoughts, personal stories, and actions in local settings, Chinese and American youth will begin building cross-cultural bonds to support a vision of a new, ecological civilization.
In this edition of the Living Earth Youth Dialogues, we will be hosting a special community conversation to celebrate half a year of our Living Earth Youth Dialogue program! Since this topic has generated considerable interest in our previous events, we decided it would be good to have a whole event focused on discussing career paths and livelihood for young people interested in pursuing ecological civilization and ethical living. In this conversation, youth dialogue organizers Vivian Song and Jared Morningstar will discuss this topic along with Ying Liang, founder of Schumi Learning Garden. As always, there will be plenty of time for community discussion.
SPEAKERS: Ying Liang, Vivian Song, and Jared Morningstar, and Ying Liang
Ying Liang has been workign on the front line of holistic learning and eco-community in China since graduating from Schumacher College (UK) with MA in Economics for Transition. In 2018, she co-founded Schumi Learning Garden in a traditional Hakka village which has now become one of the pioneers in demonstrating alternative ways of rural revitalization. Since 2021, she has reoriented herself from leading the on-site centre to orchestrating and facilitating long-term online courses in the themes of re-wilding human nature and regenerative economics, together with teachers who have taught at Schumacher College, as well as being a collaborator of other education initiatives and a consultant and mentor of eco-communities.
Vivian Song is an independent consultant and a network builder based between New York and China. Combining her specialisms in research journalism, urban studies, and community building, Xinlin has been weaving community networks within China and beyond since 2009. Trained as a teacher, after a 3-year urban study into 16 emerging second-tier Chinese cities, she became a returning student of the lively urban culture worldwide. She collaborated with designers, photographers, filmmakers making reports from the streets. Since 2018, she joined AMO’s global research initiative studying the countryside’s future and visited more than 20 Chinese villages, where exciting transformation is taking place. With a strong belief in “diversity in culture but unity in nature,” her work focuses on forming cross-sector Glocal collaborations to create meaningful dialogues that ignite social change. She is currently working with ecologists, economists, and educators to create learning experiences for communities in China’s ecological hotspots.
Jared Morningstar is a writer and educator with academic interests in philosophy of religion, Islamic studies, comparative religion, metamodern spirituality, and interfaith dialogue whose work in these areas seeks to offer robust responses to issues of inter-religious conflict, contemporary nihilism, and the “meaning crisis” among other things. Jared works for the Center for Process Studies and the Cobb Institute where he helps promote process-relational thinking and living. Jared holds BAs in Religion and Scandinavian Studies from Gustavus Adolphus College, where he graduated in the spring of 2018.
WHEN
United States
Friday, May 5, 2023
6:00-7:30pm PDT
China
Saturday, May 6, 2023
9:00-10:30am