Community at Summa: Social Justice and Sustainable Relationships

People whose integrity has not been damaged in childhood, who were protected, respected, and treated with honesty, will be—both in their youth and in adulthood—intelligent, responsive, empathetic, and highly sensitive.–Alice Miller, For Your Own Good

The culture at Summa Institute supports social justice and sustainable relationships by providing the cornerstones of respect, integrity, connection, and relationship. Through the use of NLR, we insure the healthy personal and communal development of our students.

As they grow, these children become skillful in making decisions that serve their own well-being and the well-being of others. There is no more important and powerful way to create social justice in our community than by helping our children to become healthy, engaged, compassionate, and fulfilled adults.

NLR enhances the child’s contributions to society at each stage of life. It provides teachers and parents with the understanding and tools to optimize the development of these contributions. Children then know themselves as socially valuable and competent and they live social justice as an everyday reality. Relationships with children that honor their social contributions create optimal conditions for an eminently wise social system to naturally unfold.

Social justice is a necessary and inevitable outcome of nurturing the student’s developmental imperatives.

At Summa Institute, sustainable human relationships are a core value that informs every interaction, every program, and every relationship. Sustainable human relationships create mutual well-being. It is then natural and inevitable that those who enjoy such relationships will extend sustainability to all aspects of their lives, including the larger community.

Summa Institute is the home of sustainable human relationships—an interconnected matrix of education, professional development, and research that inspires sustainable human relationships for children, families, and communities in Portland and the Northwest.

Be sure to check out the other links in this section for more on the Consciousness of children and Social Justice.