Shared values and a deep listening to each other generate a closeness and a connection that fosters true community, even more so when the listening is across "divides" that the larger culture frequently leaves un-bridged.  Certainly this is potent across generations.

Building all the grassroots bridges we can imagine across every scientific and social discipline, and across every gap of thinking and interest and experience-- this will generate life-sustaining solutions to pending energy, water, equity and food crises most powerfully.

Bridges to all the "edge" and spiritual disciplines we can discover will root and grow local communities that are vibrantly alive. 

Community-building and bridging is foundational to much of the work of Phoenixes Rising, including:

- to live as simply as possible, with a gentle and compact footprint, so that we are each able from a place of having "enough" to have more space for the conversations and work that count

- to convene ongoing multi-cultural and inter-generational listening council circles

- to craft and offer cross-generational and co-incident "coming of age" and "claiming elderhood" rites of passage for those circles, organically seeding long-term mentoring and inspired relationships between initiated elders and initiated "youngers", who will naturally and in unimagined ways expand these circles ever more widely in their larger communities

“When we seek for connection, we restore the world to wholeness.  Our seemingly separate lives become meaningful as we discover how truly necessary we are to each other.”

—  Margaret Wheatley

"We stand at a critical moment in Earth's history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and promise.  To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny.  We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace.  Towards this end, it is imperative that we, the peoples of the Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations."

from the Earth Charter