A COLLABORATORY FOR THE CREATION OF SHAREABLE PROSPERITY
Ethical humans are frustrated by the enduring palpable disparity between the well-being enjoyed by affluent individuals and the well-being of others less fortunate in their places and times of birth, their generational inheritances, and their genders. This frustration is multiplied by the manifest difficulty in imagining that any one individual can do anything significant about the disparity. Great hopes for the outcomes of intentional individual actions that are directed at eliminating global disparities are invitations for discouragement, withdrawal and cynicism.
Tradition has followed a top-down approach for sharing wealth and abundance through charity, social welfare, and other such programs, hoping that it will ultimately uplift the most marginalized. Despite such efforts, the plight of these people remains mostly unchanged in all these years.
The time has come to follow Albert Einstein's advice: "No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it." We need research that contributes to a new paradigm of prosperity, a shareable prosperity, that is created collaboratively with those who live under extreme conditions such that all parties benefit concurrently from its inception. Such prosperity becomes sustainable when its creators acknowledge the ethical responsibility we have for the future of humanity.
WHAT WE DO
We are a collaboratory that is dedicated toward providing a social and intellectual framework for researchers who want to be involved in reducing disparities in well-being and to combine that involvement with realistic hopes for modest endeavors. Our collaboratory does this in two primary ways:
First, it develops and refines a methodology for research that is both scientifically rigorous and profoundly collaborative. The method seeks to mobilize knowledge to serve men, women, and children living in extremely impoverished conditions through active collaboration with those people. And it seeks to do this in ways that build bases for sustained inquiry by those men, women and children. Scholars who are embedded in these communities in this way secure ethical confirmation in the small, local gains that are possible.
Second, it creates a community of scholars that supports young scholars in their research and in their search for an ethical identity for that research. It encourages a value base for scholarship, a recognition that scholarship is a collaborative effort involving a community of trust that augments individual ambition. And it seeks to help scholars define themselves in ways that ground their commitment to working with others less on hopes for huge consequences than on the scholars' senses of themselves.
OUR APPROACH
Since 1997, we have chosen to investigate and prototype the institutional affordances that allow these aforementioned practices to thrive in a research environment. A few of these include:
• Frequent dialogue that fosters collaborative inquiries between ecologies of three scholars who are invested in each other as researchers and as people
• Funding to support invited scholars who wish to explore research that extends beyond the purview of their departments
• A network of long-term collaborative relationships with communities in global field sites such as the urban poor in Ahmedabad, India and African refugees in Dayton, Ohio
• A virtual collaborative environment, employing Internet communication technology, that helps collaborations with global partners flourish
• A multigenerational community of interdisciplinary scholars who are invested in guiding the newest scholars in the research center
These and other aspects of KGC work together to create a research center that is unique within Stanford and other academic institutions.
THE IMPACT OF OUR WORK
KGC scholars are beginning to see the creation of shareable prosperity in communities around the globe, and they codify this work into dissertations, publications, and ongoing projects that boldly push the boundaries of their fields. Some examples of this kind of scholarship include:
• A senior research scholar passionate about ending violence against women aligns her psychiatry research on trauma with her practice of martial arts. She now teaches women and girls how to prevent interpersonal violence through self-defense and empowerment and also studies the impact of these classes on their self-esteem, efficacy, and confidence.
• A doctoral student who wants to support local entrepreneurship in developing world communities brings together his background in engineering design theory with his practice in improvisational theater. He now coaches young entrepreneurs in India and Nigeria and studies how moment-to-moment interpersonal interactions among them lead to sustainable ventures.
• A senior scholar committed to creating a more sustainable world for future generations applies his expertise in creating real-time, collaborative, verdant environments. He invites small groups of individuals located around the globe to come together virtually and reflect on their practices for living sustainably so that they can nurture environments for sustaining themselves and those they influence. The first participants in these sessions are mothers and teachers, due to the immense influence they have on the next generation. He studies visual representations of the self-narratives of the participants that can be limiting, and how new narratives of self-sustainability can be experienced and adopted after participation in this process.
• A post-doctoral scholar who wants to foster connections between mythic and modern cultures bridges her lifelong desire to teach with a background in mechanical engineering. She is currently designing a curriculum that trains young engineers to collaborate with pre-literate communities to build technologies that foster sustainable prosperity. She also studies how both parties can continue to learn when confronted with discontinuous circumstances.
• A doctoral student who envisions workplaces that are more like families combines the field of decision analysis, the practice of emotion coding, and the discipline of design research. He helps design interactions between people in organizations and studies the effect of high-quality interactions on quantitative outcomes such as sales and profit.
• A master's student who wishes to eliminate feelings of isolation amongst displaced persons joins together research in public health with a talent for gardening and a desire toward building community. She now creates garden clinics for bringing together African refugees and the local community of Dayton, Ohio, and studies the effect of these clinics on narratives of social support and social belonging.
OUR VISION FOR THE FUTURE
There is a dormant abundance in the world that can be unleashed through the collaborative efforts of people who live their lives with an ethic of care. We want to help build a future for many generations to come where this abundance is shareable with every man, woman, and child independent of their conditions at birth.
Warmly,
The Scholars at KGC
To read more about shareable prosperity, see KGC's online booklet.