[cs_content][cs_section parallax=”false” style=”margin: 0px;padding: 45px 0px;border-style: solid;border-width: 0px 0px 0px 6px;border-color: #125193;box-shadow: 2px 2px 34px rgba(0,0,0,0.2) !important;”][cs_row inner_container=”true” marginless_columns=”false” style=”margin: 0px auto;padding: 0px;”][cs_column fade=”false” fade_animation=”in” fade_animation_offset=”45px” fade_duration=”750″ type=”1/1″ style=”padding: 0px;”][x_custom_headline level=”h2″ looks_like=”h2″ accent=”false”]Visionary Education[/x_custom_headline][x_line style=”border-top-width: 1px;”][cs_text class=”contained-paragraph”]Now well into the new millennium, we are ready for a visionary context as simple and robust as the one that came before us. This generation of youth is ready for an education that can prepare them for an unknown future, a future that we cannot envision yet, a future that the educators of today may not be around to see.
This generation of teens is facing both peril and possibility. We hear plenty about climate change, global economic instability, increasing wealth gap and poverty levels, violence, addiction, mental illness. While the Inner Strength Foundation works to address and alleviate the legitimate fears and traumas created by those harsh influences, our focus is on fostering potential, catalyzing creativity, increasing well being and joy.
The youth of today have untapped creativity, vision, and energy to imagine the impossible and transform it into the possible.
We see it as our mission, honor, and responsibility to infuse today’s education system with this practical and visionary approach. We see it as our privilege, as educators, parents, role models, employers, to give adolescents robust tools that will enable them to lead happy, fulfilling, and purposeful lives.[/cs_text][x_custom_headline level=”h2″ looks_like=”h2″ accent=”false”]Visionary Foundations[/x_custom_headline][x_line style=”border-top-width: 1px;”][cs_text class=”contained-paragraph”]It was no accident that the Inner Strength Foundation was founded in Philadelphia. The principles that guided the construction of this city in the promising new world of 1650, are time-honored principles that foster inner strength for outer stability. These principles and perspectives spark the freedom to dream and stretch to capture the higher potentials of our human spirit. Most importantly, this city’s illustrious history evidences the value of truly reaching to bring those higher potentials into being in our world.[/cs_text][/cs_column][/cs_row][cs_row inner_container=”true” marginless_columns=”false” style=”margin: 0px auto;padding: 0px;”][cs_column fade=”false” fade_animation=”in” fade_animation_offset=”45px” fade_duration=”750″ type=”1/1″ style=”padding: 0px;”][x_custom_headline level=”h2″ looks_like=”h2″ accent=”false”]Visionary City[/x_custom_headline][x_line style=”border-top-width: 1px;”][cs_text class=”contained-paragraph”]
Philadelphia was founded on visionary ideals. In the late 1600s William Penn mapped a grid for the city that interrupted the main thoroughfares with five parks. Why? So the business of commerce would not overtake the business of conversation and community. His ideals of peace and nonviolence, religious freedom, gender and racial equality and fraternity, and care for the environment sounds like a contemporary agenda. The basis for his principles? The silence of the heart, discovering stillness within and allowing that inner stillness to fill our minds with brotherly love and govern our actions.
One hundred years later, our nation’s founders paced Philadelphia’s center city streets, debating and collaborating to envision a structure for a new nation, one that could last and grow, that planted roots in the best of the past and reached its branches towards the open sky. Freedom, equality, the pursuit of meaning, purpose, and happiness guided their vision.[/cs_text][/cs_column][/cs_row][/cs_section][/cs_content]