Zen Peacemakers: What We Do
The mission of the Zen Peacemakers is to make direct efforts to alleviate suffering in the world by working to:
Zen Peacemakers extend the vow to save all sentient beings from those currently coming into the meditation hall (zendo), to include the disenfranchised and poor, the homeless, displaced war veterans, immigrants and the formerly incarcerated.
Innovative training methods help practitioners cultivate an empathic commitment to social service by leading them into difficult and unknown spaces. Called "plunges", these practices include: Street Retreats, during which practitioners live with the homeless and practice begging, and Bearing Witness Retreats, during which participants immerse themselves in places of inconceivable human or environmental suffering, such as the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camps in Poland. Our service programs and businesses help people and communities take control of their own destinies and harvest the fruits of their own hard work. Programs managed by Zen Peacemakers provide supportive wrap-around services in a holistic, skillsbased approach. These have included vocational training, affordable permanent housing, and economic selfsufficiency through the provision of market-wage jobs. The Zen Peacemakers develop social enterprise businesses that integrate for profit and not-for-profit businesses, promoting a triple bottom line: profit, social transformation, and environmental stewardship. "When you realize the wholeness and interdependence of life, you have to take care of everyone, and to do that, you have to work with every ingredient of life." - Roshi Bernie Glassman, Founder
Our founder and Spiritual Director, Roshi Bernie Glassman, is internationally recognized as one of the pioneers and guiding spirits of socially engaged Buddhism. He has based his life's work on a commitment to service, born from his practice and mastery of the 2500-year-old tradition of Buddhist compassion and wisdom. Bernie created the Zen Peacemakers in 1980 to embody this commitment in a global network that integrates Zen practice, social service, and interfaith work to bring the experience of wholeness and interdependence into the context of daily life. Zen Peacemakers practice socially engaged Buddhism to transform individuals and communities, and have responded to some of the most difficult problems of our time - poverty, AIDS, homelessness, and a lack of skills necessary for employment.
The training of Zen Peacemakers is grounded in traditional Zen practice - meditation, retreats, liturgy, personal study-relationships with empowered teachers and the intimate recognition of mastery, which maintains the integrity of Zen lineages.
What characterizes the socially engaged practices of Zen Peacemakers is how they extend Dharma from the meditation hall to the worlds of business, social service, conflict resolution, and environmental stewardship. This work has engendered new models of practice, especially to address the needs of individuals and communities in disadvantaged areas. The Zen Peacemakers' way illuminates all life as a boundless meditation hall. Today, the Zen Peacemakers have a 34-acre campus in Montague, Massachusetts, as well as 54 affiliate centers, communities and circles worldwide.
Roshi Bernie Glassman worked with his teacher, Taizan Maezumi Roshi from 1963 to 1980, to build one of the most respected Zen training centers in the United States, the Zen Center of Los Angeles. When Bernie left, ZCLA comprised an entire city block in downtown Los Angeles and owned a second site, the Mountain Center, in Idyllwild, CA.
Roshi Bernie Glassman founded the Zen Peacemakers in 1980 to expand Zen practice into larger spheres of influence including, social service, business and ecology. From this effort grew the Greyston Foundation, a holistic network of community development companies and not-for-profits working in the inner city of Yonkers, New York. The mission set for Greyston was to free individuals from the cycle of poverty and public dependence. Bernie Roshi with Maezumi Roshi in Riverdal. Today Greyston provides facilities
and supportive services that include
permanent housing for formerly homeless
families, a childcare center, AIDS-related
medical services, housing, job training, One of the first "welfare to work" programs in the country, Greyston has an annual operating and capital budget of over $20 million, and has received numerous government grants at the federal, state, and local levels.
From 1996 to 2004, Zen Peacemakers initiated social services and peacemaking activities around the world. Zen Peacemakers fed, and continue to feed, hundreds of immigrants at a Paris soup kitchen every week. They supported nonviolence efforts in Palestine and brought Israelis and Palestinians together in Israel for peaceful coexistence projects. Peacemakers Poland established Nonviolent Communications Training and Practice in the public school system throughout the country and opened an AIDS hospice. Presently in the United States, Zen Peacemakers work for prison reform, provide hospice care, and offer a broad range of services to impoverished individuals, families and communities in our inner cities and rural areas. The Zen Peacemakers are developing three new service initiatives:
The Maezumi Institute initiated a five-month residential training program in socially engaged Buddhism in September 2008. The curriculum covers four areas of spiritual practice - Zen training, financial and managerial skills, service methods, and communications. Study at the Institute will be followed by a six-month residential service internship in a Zen House. Upon completion of requirements in the two phases of study, students will be eligible for either certification as a Socially Engaged Buddhist Mentor or for ordination as a Socially Engaged Buddhist Minister. The Harvard Divinity School (HDS) invited Roshi Bernie Glassman to serve as an adjunct faculty member and teach courses in the Buddhist Arts of Ministry beginning in the fall of 2007. HDS students may specialize in Buddhist ministry in the Masters of Divinity program at HDS, and then go on to receive further ministry training with the Zen Peacemakers Order, at the Maezumi Institute, to achieve Ordination as a Zen Peacemakers Minister. Christian students of many denominations have long sought ordination from religious institutions that recognize HDS training as part of their academic preparation for ministry, but the current HDS graduating class contains the first students who will go on to receive lay ordination from a Buddhist order.
"Zen Peacemakers have a groundbreaking project
to create Buddhist-inspired service centers in
impoverished areas of our society. Their program
to train practitioners in socially engaged Buddhism
to live and work with those communities is of
great interest to the Master's of Divinity program
at Harvard Divinity School. Students in this
program majoring in Buddhist ministry have been
connecting to the Zen Peacemakers' projects and
there is considerable excitement at the school for the
prospects that such collaboration holds
for the future."
Zen Houses are a new model of residential Zen service center and training site, devoted to socially engaged Buddhism. The Houses will be initiated by groups of Zen practitioners who choose to live among and serve the people who fall between the cracks of our society, and whose needs - economic, social and spiritual - often remain unmet. Zen Peacemakers will open the first Zen Houses early in 2009. They will be located in underserved urban and rural areas. Daily life in a Zen House will be regulated and focused on service in the projects sponsored by the house. Each Zen House will develop its own social service projects and structure its programs, schedules and staffing based on the needs of the community being served. The supervision and training of staff and interns at the House will be supplemented by advanced workshops and retreats offered at the Maezumi Institute. Services will be delivered from a holistic, dignitybased perspective. They will offer training that provides the skills and tools necessary to empower people to hold market-wage jobs and move toward economic self-sufficiency. Each House will also network with existing service agencies. The success of the Greyston Foundation in Yonkers was based on its holistic approach. The Zen Peacemakers are working to partner with other agencies to develop similar holistic approaches to help reduce homelessness, unemployment, poverty, and the recidivism of newly released inmates. This unique model integrates social service efforts and social enterprise businesses to create vocational training, support services, permanent housing and market-wage jobs for underserved populations. |