About

About Mosaic Multicultural Foundation

Mosaic Multicultural Foundation is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. As a network of artists, healers, social activists, and community builders. Mosaic formed to create cross-cultural alliances, creative mentoring relationships, and educational projects. Mosaic actively seeks to encourage greater understanding between people with diverse and divergent backgrounds and experiences. Projects include mentoring youth and developing elders, finding common ground between those in opposition, and shaping community events that unite people of various cultural and spiritual backgrounds. Mosaic means putting essential pieces together; shaping new social forms from separate, divided, even estranged parts. The creative process of finding, fitting, and weaving together divergent, yet necessary elements of a diverse culture involves making new social fabrics from existing ethnic, spiritual, psychological, and political threads.

For more than two decades, Mosaic has created unifying events and innovative projects that support and educate at-risk youth, refugees, combat veterans, and communities under stress. Mosaic’s mission is to create networks of artists, community activists, healers, and spiritual teachers who can work in innovative ways to develop cross-cultural alliances, mentoring relationships, and forms of community healing. Mosaic seeks to inspire political awareness through community activities and creative ceremonies that reconnect people to meaningful traditions and sacred ecologies of place, while offering opportunities for personal growth, spiritual awakening, and leadership development.

Mosaic projects address contemporary issues by combining traditional ideas and practices with fresh insights to reveal where new cultural shapes can be conceived and developed. Mosaic seeks to find dynamic remedies for the alienation, spiritual dislocation, and personal isolation that increasingly characterize modern life for youth and elders alike. Whether it be educated youth considering the dangers of global warming and climate change, less privileged ones who feel the bite of poverty and the growing disparity between rich and poor, or those exposed to the increased threats of violence and extremism—modern youth grow up amidst threats of natural disaster and nightmares of violence and terrorism. In the midst of radical changes in nature and the rattling of cultural institutions the point may be to turn again to valuable practices of individual mentoring and methods of cultural healing that can produce “moments of wholeness” amidst great uncertainty and radical changes.

About Mosaic's Projects

Mosaic Community projects and presentations offer a variety of community building programs and evening events that introduce Mosaic's unique way of combining ancient stories, contemporary thought, and poetry to a wide variety of cultural and ecological issues. These original and compelling events inspire community members to network with each other and develop projects suited to local needs and global concerns.

Voices of Youth, Voices of Community involves diverse and often severely "at-risk" youth in weeklong workshops that lead to community presentations. Current projects involve gang-affiliated youth, "homeless" youth, refugees, tribal youth, high school and college students in dozens of communities throughout the country. Youth are invited and assisted in the creation of an artistic forum for their own expression while at the same time developing relationships with local mentors and elders.

Participants become able to transform personal struggles and traumas into creative expression and art. The result is a surprising array of poems and statements, which reveal the hidden intelligence, imagination, purpose, and dreams of youthful participants. The Voices process offers inspiration and a deep sense of empowerment for youth, while becoming a training ground for local mentors. Voices of Youth projects serve to develop ongoing mentoring organizations attuned to the exact issues of a given community.

The Koures Symposium is an advanced component in the Mosaic strategy for developing potent community based projects that involve youth, mentors, and elders. The ancient Greek word koures combines the sense of youthful imagination that remains common to young men (kouros) and young women (kore), but also depicts the inner imagination and spark of life that keeps the elders "young at heart." The symposium uses a residential retreat format to create a focused learning community that engages diverse youth as well as younger and older mentors. Koures retreats involve a faculty of accomplished leaders, authors, teachers, and agents of social change to deliver complex and in-depth material to youth coming from a wide variety of social, ethnic, and educational backgrounds.

Voices of Veterans, Voices of War began when Vietnam era veterans participating in Mosaic mentoring events proposed that the Mosaic's Creative Mentoring process would be helpful to Vets1

soldiers returning from current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Older veterans help younger ones find their "civilian feet" again and rejoin their communities as valuable, functioning members. In the retreat phase, veterans returning from the current wars work with veterans of previous wars as well as specialists who treat battle trauma and Post Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD). Spouses and family members of vets can also participate and receive help dealing with "secondary PTSD" issues.

The deeply moving and revelatory personal stories of veterans are converted into poetry and narratives that help make sense of otherwise bewildering and tragic experiences. The public ceremonies that occur after the retreats allow fellow citizens to become compassionate witnesses to the stories of war and the necessity of creating a conscious and genuine return for veterans.

Creative Mentoring workshops offer orientation to and training in the core ideas and purposes of "creative mentoring" through which people discover, clarify, and develop what they have to offer youth and their communities in the way of teaching, guiding, and mentoring others. The length of workshops varies depending on the amount of mentor training being undertaken. Typical outcomes of these intensive trainings include an increased awareness of inner resources for both individuals and groups, an understanding of the spiritual components of mentoring, and an introduction to the practices of "genius to genius" mentoring.

Mendo1

Youth and Mentor Conferences involve diverse youth and mentors in extended residential programs held at remote nature camps. These conferences provide radical forums in which youth and mentors encounter potent ideas and traditional practices from a wide variety of cultures. The array of practices include meditation, chanting, music, and dance; lively lectures, honest discourse, and "conflict sessions." The ways of practice invite the intensity of youth, develop the arts of mentoring, and present the use of ceremonies for creating genuine experiences of community.

Each conference brings together a diverse faculty of artists, activists, and healers who offer practices as well as ideas that can be used as a basis for long-term mentoring and community building projects. Key personnel from the extended community of Mosaic collaborating and partnering organizations send both novices and leaders to these creative conferences.

Ecstatic Voices offers a series of events that celebrate the many ways in which the human soul searches for mystical experiences and understanding. While focusing upon mystical tales from around the world and an array of ecstatic poetry many cultures, Ecstatic Voices also involves a variety of musical traditions.

In troubled times, ancient peoples turned to the poets and mystics to find solace, understanding, and inspiration. Those old "knowers" knew that during dark times the soul is nearby. For the soul finds its way by touching darkness and releasing the hidden light. "Allow dark times to season you," says Hafiz.

In response to the dramatic events now changing the face of the world, the unifying and healing aspects of poetry and song become more valuable for orienting and guiding both personal and community life. What cannot be settled politically or clarified mentally can often be carried by songs and rhythms that can lift the burdens that trouble the heart.

Michael Meade