March 2023

If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.

-Fred Rogers

Sometimes or perhaps most of the times, I wonder if the work I do matters to anyone but me. I sweat, stress, and struggle to make these programs practical and accessible to everyone so that they can become powerful agents of transformation in our communities. But I come up short again and again in marketing our programs. It is a constant Sisyphean task to get everyone on board. I get everything designed and organized and then, I am pulling hair to get people to sign up. I feel like a prophet without an audience, or an audience with very limited income which in our capitalist society is the worst audience.

So how does one keep oneself and others on the team inspired and motivated to do the work without any concrete results? That is the million-dollar question in activism or teaching or mentoring, basically everything I do – the results are not so quite self-evident. This is a quandary when we write grant proposals because we need to specify the ways in which we measure success. It is unlike the for-profit world where people measure their success with exact profit margins. Look at the stock market where prices of stock rise or fall based on the earnings report. If we based our organization on this model, well we should have closed from day 1. Yet here we are in our 5th year, making small changes in our community by impacting one youth, one woman, one nonbinary person at a time. Small incremental changes that may add up to something, but something that may not be visible for a very long time.

This is why we must have a faith system – a belief system that will allow us to let go and trust the spirit, whisper, gut, or god(s) – which affirms that what we are doing is the right path for us in the present. It may not always seem like anything is working now, but this trust forces us to dare, to step forward when the world seems to be against us. It is not an easy process to surrender to this trust but in social activism, we need to learn to let go. Otherwise, we will give up before we give any work an opportunity to really grow. So how does one develop or know or understand this faith system? Well, you need to attend our program to find out. Important topics, important exploration, important discussions. We may say to ourselves that we do not have the time or money to participate but really, do we not have the time and money to invest in ourselves? We spend much of our energy and resources on things - coffee, shoes, clothes, and more things. This is where we have learned to prioritize everything but in our potential. Again, this is the reason why we must really be engaged in the Embodied Presence program. Now is the time. Join us.

 Sam Joo

CEO and Founder

Feb 28, 2023