After her experience at the United Nations during the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001, Virginia Swain founded the Institute for Global Leadership to provide training and consultation for leaders and teams to adapt to the changed dynamics of a post-9/11 world. Through the Institute, Virginia develops Reconciliaton Leaders with personal, interpersonal, systemic, and global competencies in business, community, institutional, national, and world environments.
Through the Institute and the training of Reconciliation Leaders, we address every challenge with a peacebuilding process of reconciliation to empower people most affected by the challenge. A post-9/11 world requires people and institutions to serve the common good with a larger perspective, replacing the politics of self-interest. In the years since 2001, the Institute has flourished with two key initiatives to serve the common good and address the global problematique. In global service, the Institute offers:
- Training for vocationally called Reconciliation Leaders who facilitate the Peacebuilding Process of Reconciliation to Develop Political Will.
- Global Mediation and Reconciliation Service which provides people and nations the perspectives, tools, and techniques for multilateral approaches to challenges. Certified Reconciliation Leaders utilize these processes to reconcile protracted challenges around the world.
We address the needs articulated by the Commission on Global Governance for leaders “made strong by vision, sustained by ethics, and revealed by political courage that looks to the longer term and future generations for whom the present is held in trust.”
This leadership approach grows from participant leaders’ personal mission, skill building, and a commitment to be at peace in themselves and in service to others. Reconciliation Leaders are trained and coached to find balance among career, home life, and reflection time, using a methodology to deal with the high level of stress in their own and in other people’s lives. They are global citizens.
We use Dag Hammarskjöld’s Code of Ethics to train leaders. As 2nd Secretary General of the United Nations, Hammarskjöld defined global citizenship as part of his Code:
“Everybody today with part of his being belongs to one country, while with another part he has become a citizen of a world which no longer permits national isolation. Seen in this light, there could be no conflict between nationalism and internationalism, between the nation and the world. The question is not either the nation or the world, it is how to serve the world by service to our nation and how to serve the nation by service to the world.”