About Us
Source for Educational Empowerment and Community Development (SEED) was founded in 1996 to bring together Indigenous and Western ways of knowing. SEED is a 501c3 tax-exempt educational organization.
For its first seven years of existence, SEED operated exclusively as an open university, establishing a learning network of classes, seminars and workshops in northern New Mexico and beyond. An open university is about teachers teaching their life passion to students who want to be there; not for credit, but because they are genuinely interested in the course material and because it can make an immediate difference in their lives. Each semester, SEED offered more than one hundred different classes facilitated by approximately sixty instructors. Since 1996, over 10,000 students have participated in SEED programs.
From 1999 to 2003, SEED sponsored an annual summer camp for children, called SEEDlings. SEEDlings Summer Camp sought to bring to our future generations much of what we offer to adults. The camp emphasized environmental education, Native American practices and story-telling, mind-body disciplines, and the expressive arts. It was held in conjunction with Hummingbird Music Camp in the beautiful Jemez Mountains.
From 1999 until the present, SEED has sponsored the annual Language of Spirit Conference, featuring quantum physicists and Western scientists, Native American elders and linguists. The Language of Spirituality Conference is an international conference conducted primarily in a talking circle dialogue format, and has included moderator Leroy Little Bear, former Director of Native Studies at Harvard University, Nobel Laureate physicist Brian Josephson, as well as physicists Amit Goswami, William Tiller, Fred Alan Wolf, David Peat and Phillip Sakimoto, astronaut Edgar Mitchell, philosopher Ashok Gangadean, and Native American participants Linda Hogan, Nancy Maryboy, Gregory Cajete, Joseph Rael, and Paula Gunn Allen, among others. The history of the conference goes back to 1992, when Leroy Little Bear first approached David Bohm, and initiated a dialogue with Bohm, David Peat, Sagesh Youngblood Henderson, Dan Moonhawk Alford, and others, sponsored initially by the Fetzer Institute and then MIT. The 1992 dialogue coincided with the 500 th year since Columbus came to Turtle Island, and completed a cycle in which indigenous, wholistic thinking, once suppressed and disregarded, reemerged on equal footing with leading edge Western science. SEED agreed to sponsor these historic dialogues when funding sources ran dry, as they are the embodiment of our mission. Leroy Little Bear has been the moderator of all the dialogues.
As part of its transition to a degree granting graduate institute, SEED has sponsored conferences in each of the areas of proposed study. The Language of Spirit conference is a Science and Cosmology conference. SEED has also sponsored an Ecology Conferences (Oil and Water 2005): two Expressive Arts conferences (Art and Soul (2004) and the Talking Stick Film Festival (2008); and two healing conferences (Peace and Well-Being (2002) and Songs of the Earth (2005). SEED recently moved to a new location just one mile west of the UNM campus in order to facilitate collaboration with UNM by beginning to offer educational programs for credit in conjunction with NM’s largest educational institution. SEED also plans to initiate a BA completion program in conjunction with UNM or other accredited institution to facilitate the completion of four year bachelor’s degrees by Native and other students to provide a pathway for enrolling in SEED’s proposed MA program.
Address:
119 Quincy NE Suite W
Albuquerque, NM 87108
Phone:
505-792-2900
Fax:
505-265-4655
Email:
seed@seedgraduateinstitute.org
