Read About Restorative Leadership in Action
Published Books
Engaging Classrooms and Communities Through Art: A Guide to Designing and Implementing Community-Based Art Education by Beth Krensky & Seana Lowe Steffen
At the same time that arts funding and programming in schools are declining, exciting community-based art programs have successfully been able to build community, foster change, and enrich children's lives. Engaging Classrooms and Communities through Art provides a comprehensive and accessible guide to the design and implementation of community-based art programs for educators, community leaders, and artists. The book combines case studies with diverse groups across the country that are using different media - including mural arts, dance, and video - with an informed introduction to the theory and history of community-based art. It is a perfect handbook for those looking to transform their communities through art.
Forthcoming Books
Restorative Leadership: How To Answer The 21st Century’s Call to Greatness (working title)
We Are The Tipping Point: How Women Are Guiding the Essential Leadership rEvolution
About the Book
We Are The Tipping Point: How Women Are Guiding the Essential Leadership (r)Evolution explores how to bring out the best of our diverse humanity to ensure a sustainable future by offering guidance and inspiration from globally resonant leadership. The book outlines our global change potential and introduces the concept of restorative leadership for healing and transforming the state of the world. By offering lived wisdom in a holistic and accessible format, featured heroines inspire holistic engagement with the sustainability imperative from business, development, ecology, and spirit realms. In We Are The Tipping Point, Dr. Steffen catalyzes an evolution in leadership that results in breakthrough progress toward global sustainability and collective wellbeing.
The collection of over 40 interviews includes heroines from around the world such as Her Excellency Gro Harlem Brundtland, Right Livelihood Award Winners Vandana Shiva and Frances Moore Lappe, UN Champion of the Earth Janine Benyus, Hilton Humanitarian Prize Winner Molly Melching, original Time Hero of the Planet Sylvia Earle, the late Nobel Laureate Dr. Elinor Ostrom and Ethical Markets futurist Hazel Henderson. The book also features notable conversations with Dr. Katharine Hayhoe, UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientist and star expert in The Years of Living Dangerously; Lorena Aguilar, Senior Advisor to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature; Atossa Soltani, founder and 20-year Executive Director of Amazon Watch; and Yola Carlough, former Director of Sustainability at Burt’s Bees and Ben And Jerry’s, and current leadership within the Benefit Corporation movement, among others.
The book will be published in 2016.
About the Work
In 2009, I took a life sabbatical to listen for how I was being called to contribute to the world - and in the first week, during a yogic meditation practice, the words “restorative leadership” came to me. I had never heard the term, and a Google search showed nothing.
I was exhilarated, nearly elevating off the ground with a sense of knowing without understanding – knowing that I was supposed to offer “restorative leadership” as a guiding framework for the 21st century without yet understanding what it meant, and sensing that the place to start was listening to leadership in sustainability having resonant impact. Over the years, my understanding has grown as my research has expanded to include women and men, organizations and communities demonstrating aspects of restorative leadership in action.
With the indicators before us: WWF, … UNIPCC, we know that we are at a tipping point… and we don’t yet understand how to tip the balance in favor of a thriving balance. So I offer everything that RLI has to support the We Are The Tipping Point campaign intended to inspire and empower restorative leadership for a sustainable future. May it serve you fulfilling your leadership potential – that innate capacity that each of us has to choose the influence of our individual actions and inactions on the web of life – on behalf of thriving life on Earth/ such that all life thrives (in balance).
Restorative leadership is a research-based guiding framework that has been discerned from decades of fieldwork and a multi-year study of individuals, organizations and communities having resonant impact for global sustainability and collective wellbeing.
