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Dec 9-12Enlightenment Retreat To Register, click here.
BERNIE ON THE ROAD
Sep 24-26, 2010 Zen Peacemakers founder Bernie Glassman will lead the workshop Bearing Witness to the Wholeness of Life at the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health.
Nov 9-19, 2010Becoming a Mensch: Service as Spiritual Practice at the Heidelberg University.
To view the Standing Committees of the Board, please click here.
By clicking on the Director's name you can see their full bio.
Founder, President and Spiritual Director: Roshi Bernie Glassman
Bernie Glassman is a world-renowned pioneer
in the American Zen Movement and a leading creative
figure in socially engaged Buddhism. He is the founder
and co-spiritual director of the Zen Peacemakers. He
has extended Dharma practice from the meditation
hall to the arenas of social service, business,
environmental stewardship and conflict resolution. He
has been honored with numerous ethics, service and
achievement awards.
Chairperson and Treasurer: Dharma Holder Chris Panos
Chris Panos, a Dharma Holder in the Zen Peacemakers,
is currently a founder and principal of Fundamental
Investment Advisors. Over the past 25 years, he has
founded several other successful businesses. Chris founded the Bay Area Peacemaker Circle, has been extensively involved with Tibetan refugees, and serves as Board President of Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco.
Eve Myonen Marko is a Founding Teacher of the Zen Peacemaker Order and currently the resident teacher at the Montague Farm Zendo, the Motherhouse Zendo of the Zen Peacemakers. With her husband and teacher, Roshi Bernie Glassman, she co-founded Peacemaker Circle International, which linked and trained spiritually-based social activists and peacemakers around the world. During that time she helped develop coalitions of Civil Society activists in Europe, the Middle East and Latin America. During the 1980s she worked in the Greyston Mandala, a Buddhist-inspired network of for-profits and not-for-profits in Yonkers, New York.
She was a long-time member of the Zen Community of New York, which founded the Greyston Mandala organizations in Yonkers, New York. She was critical in the organization’s progress and developed resources and funding for Greyston Family Inn and Greyston Foundation. Marko was also Executive Director for the Music For the World Foundation, which funds and advocates on behalf of music education programs in American schools.
Jim worked for 17 years at Father Flanagan’s Girls
and Boys Town, in Boys Town, Nebraska.
In 1990, Jim founded Girls and Boys Town of New
England. Jim has served as the Director of Child and
Adolescent Residential Services for McLean Hospital,
Director of Family-Based Services for the Northeast
Center for Youth and Families,
Executive Director
of the Kolbourne School, Senior Administrator at Alternative
Behavioral Services, and Vice President of Residential Services at
Brightside for Families and Children.
He has published numerous research articles, has presented at
national, regional and local human service conferences, and has
served on numerous child welfare, mental health and educational
boards.
Mirabai holds a unique background of organizational management, teaching, and spiritual practice. A founding board member of the Seva Foundation, an international public health organization, she directed the Seva Guatemala Project, which supports sustainable agriculture and integrated community development. Also at Seva, she co-developed Sustaining Compassion, Sustaining the Earth, a series of retreats and events for grassroots environmental activists on the interconnection of spirit and action. She is co-author, with Ram Dass, of Compassion in Action: Setting Out on the Path of Service, published by Random House.
Sheila Jinen Hixon is a Zen Teacher and a Founding
Multi-Faith Peacemaker in the Zen Peacemakers.
She has been a guiding force in the Zen Peacemakers
and has played a major role in the development and
planning for the House of One People in Montague
Massachusetts.
She serves on the board of Tricycle and her family’s charitable foundation.
Francisco "Paco" Genkoji Lugoviña is a Buddhist priest
and founder of the Hudson River Peacemaker Center
- House of One People in Yonkers.
Paco has launched several successful housing
development businesses since 1968. Paco served as
Chairman of the State of New York Mortgage Agency,
was Bank Regulator on the New York State Banking Board for nine years, and was Chairman of the National Hispanic Housing
Coalition. He is a founder of the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and
served on numerous business, philanthropic, arts and service
organization Boards.
Fleet Maull, M.A., Ph.D. candidate, was a senior student of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and is an ordained priest and Sensei (Zen Teacher) in the Zen Peacemakers. Fleet currently serves as the Director for Peacemaker Community Colorado and Co-Director of Colorado Peacemaker Institute.
Fleet is the founder of the Prison Dharma Network and the National Prison Hospice Association, which promote contemplative spirituality and compassionate end-of-life care for inmates. He is also an adjunct faculty member at Naropa University. In addition, he works as a management consultant and executive coach.
Kathe McKenna is Executive Director of Haley House, Boston, which has been serving the poor and indigent for 40 years. Haley House has a residential staff and provides free food at its South End soup kitchen, and operates low-income housing, a quality bakery and a café.
Mark began his career as an environmental lawyer specializing in the redevelopment of contaminated industrial sites in urban areas of the Northeast. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Mark founded the Council for Sustainable Development in Eastern Europe to create a peace dividend by converting former military technology to use in generating clean energy in the highly polluted former Soviet states.
Mark’s interest in renewable energy led him to found HES Energy in 1996. HES now procures more than $500 million in renewable fuel and electricity for 125 hospitals and affiliated universities in the United States. HES is a national leader in generating energy using “green gas."
Mark is the author of numerous books and articles and is a frequent lecturer on energy and environmental matters. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University with Honors in History, and of the University of Connecticut School of Law, where he was a member of the Law Review and received the Connecticut Law Tribune Prize for legal scholarship.
At Wesleyan University, Ari completed an interdisciplinary social studies program. He recruited for Teach For America, managed a team of canvassers campaigning to defeat George W. Bush in 2004 and directed a new residential academic summer camp for three summers. After teaching, Ari spent most of the next two years in South America, exploring Argentina. Returning to the United States, Ari attended and graduated from the Zen House Seminary and then completed his internship at the Haley House in Boston, where he helped introduce meditation practice to the community.
Christopher S. Queen, PhD is Lecturer on the Study of Religion and the Dean of Students and Alumni Relations for Continuing Education in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. He earned degrees in the history and phenomenology of religion from Oberlin College, Union Theological Seminary, and Boston University. His publications include Action Dharma: New Studies in Engaged Buddhism (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, with Charles Prebish and Damien Keown), Engaged Buddhism in the West (Wisdom, 2000); American Buddhism: Methods and Findings in Recent Scholarship (Curzon, 1999, with Duncan Ryuken Williams); and Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia (SUNY, 1996, with Sallie B. King). He is working on a book profiling the Indian Dalit ("untouchable") followers of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, who have converted to Buddhism since 1956, and a critical study of Ambedkar and the sources of socially engaged Buddhism.
Alan is a Soto Zen priest and teacher in the tradition of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. He was ordained by Sojun Mel Weitsman in 1989. Alan is Vice-Abbot of Berkeley Zen Center in California. From early 1991 through the end of 2001, Alan was Executive Director of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. Alan is one of the founders of Think Sangha, a group of Buddhist-activist intellectuals and writers. He continues to work as a social activist around national and international issues of peace, human rights, structural violence, and the development of a Socially Engaged Buddhism. In another realm, Alan has been a student and performer of American traditional music for nearly 40 years.
Joe is the founder and
current CEO of Meadowbrook Lane Capital, a socially responsible/sustainable investment bank
specializing in mission driven succession. Meadowbrook Lane recently
purchased the controlling interest in CSRwire. CSRwire
distributes corporate socially responsible news and reports.
Joe is one of the incorporators, founders, and
Board Member Emeritus of the Bank of Western Massachusetts.
Joe is also a founder of the Gasoline Alley Foundation, a
501(c)3 corporation designed to
teach inner-city and/or
underprivileged persons to be
successful entrepreneurs using
socially responsible/sustainable
business practices while
revitalizing inner city neighborhoods.
He is also a Board member of
the Social Venture Network,
Springfield Technical Community
College and the Security Group
among others. He is working on a
book called What I Learned
Hanging at the Corner, lessons
from a street kid turned
entrepreneur.
Jan Willis is Professor of Religion at Wesleyan University. One of the earliest American scholar-practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism, Willis has published numerous essays and articles on Buddhist meditation, hagiography, women and Buddhism, and Buddhism and race. Her latest book was Dreaming Me: An African American Woman’s Spiritual Journey (2001). Willis also is the author of The Diamond Light: An Introduction to Tibetan Buddhist Meditation (1972), On Knowing Reality: The Tattvartha Chapter of Asanga’s Bodhisattvabhumi (1979), Enlightened Beings: Life Stories from the Ganden Oral Tradition (1995); and the editor of Feminine Ground: Essays on Women and Tibet (1989). She has studied with Tibetan Buddhists in India, Nepal, Switzerland and the U.S. for four decades, and has taught courses in Buddhism for 32 years. In December 2000, Time magazine named Willis one of six “spiritual innovators for the new millennium.” In 2003, she was a recipient of Wesleyan University’s Binswanger Prize for Excellence in Teaching, and she was profiled in a 2005 Newsweek article about “Spirituality in America.”