Wednesday, April 6, 2011, 7 pm – people start arriving at Louise’s Phipps Senft home location in Roland Park. Her five children are roaming around making sure the last details are fixed before more guests arrive.
It is a night that Louise has set aside for Convergence – a bipartisan group in Washington DC on which she sits as a Board Member. Louise has joined Convergence part as because of her inner conviction that engagement is change and part because of her leadership skills that she has gained through years of mediation. Striving to incorporate policy making, politics and constituencies into a better quality process has brought Convergence members to Louise, a successful business woman who has promised and delivered for 18 years, a “better process … better outcome” to thousands of people in various settings.
In the same line of thought and having the same transformative philosophy behind it, she has decided to facilitate a dialogue between Convergence leaders and interested participants in Baltimore.
In a very informal, cordial setting revealing the true core of Louise Phipps Senft and Baltimore Mediation – surrounded by her family, flowers, love and unity – Louise has gathered about 60 very diverse people – by background, faith, ethnicity and age - trying to educate them about the international efforts Convergence has made to bridge the gap that the Muslim and the American societies have managed to create in-between them.
Beyond the scope of educating, another goal that was achieved by mere dialogue and listening, was that of bonding – relating people to one another, to Convergence and to an ideal of peace, health and prosperity that is part of Convergence’s mission.
Robert Fersh, President of Convergence, Aakif Ahmad, Vice-President, and Katharine Hoagland, Project Associate of the US-Muslim Engagement Initiative, spoke about their recent trip to Pakistan, in trying to convey the human, sensitive aspect of a nation that was perhaps misunderstood by the West. The scope was to contrast two societies opposable by culture and political system in order to underline the parts where actors such as Convergence can act as agents for change.
Convergence is not simply another non-profit, but one of the very influential voices of the civil society: together with the Consensus Building Institute and the Institute for Resource and Security Studies, Aakif Ahmad, a Pakistani by origin, and Robert Fersh, have managed to create the US-Muslim Engagement Program and to draft a report that is now in the hands of American leaders and decision-makers when it comes to foreign relations. It has managed to create such a wide wave of recognition mainly because the report itself presents the consensus of 34 American leaders in areas such as national security, conflict resolution, philanthropy, religion and education.
One of the pioneers in the field of conflict resolution, from a transformative approach, Louise Phipps Senft has decided to get involved not just as a Convergence member, but mainly as a leader of opinion in Baltimore, and as a key representative of the civil society. By organizing this reception her aim was to mirror on a lower scale the mission of Convergence, that of bringing people together - from very diverse professional areas, religious and cultural backgrounds, from different generations, and from very different areas of the globe - to have a dialogue about the very core of difference and consensus.
We hope that you have enjoyed this event and that it has inspired you to also become a link in the bridge between worlds!
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