Global Cohorts, Deep Listening, and Regenerative Imagination

by | Jan 14, 2026 | ASKing the World, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Global Citizenship, Language, Pedagogy

As a lifelong learner, I’ve come to see leadership development less as the acquisition of tools and more as the ongoing refinement of how we orient ourselves to the world. This perspective was sharpened through completing the Global Leadership Diploma at the University for Peace (UPEACE), a United Nations–mandated institution that brings together learners and practitioners from across the globe.

What made the diploma distinctive was not simply the curriculum, but the way learning unfolded: in sustained collaboration with a globally diverse cohort. Participants came from different regions, sectors, and lived realities, and that diversity was not incidental. It was the medium of learning itself.

Working in a global cohort changes how knowledge is formed. Ideas are no longer universal by default; they are contextual, contested, and enriched through dialogue. This requires a different posture—one grounded in listening. In many professional cultures, leadership is associated with speaking early and often. In global spaces, those habits can reinforce existing power dynamics. The diploma consistently asked me to slow down, listen more carefully, and attend to whose voices enter the conversation easily and whose require more space.

Listening, here, is not a soft skill. It is a leadership discipline.

Another core dimension of the program was lexicon building. Across the five courses, we were introduced to—and asked to interrogate—shared language around global citizenship, regeneration, positive leadership, systems change, and social sector finance. This was not about adopting jargon. It was about sharpening meaning. Words like empathy, power, regeneration, impact, and sustainability took on greater precision as they were tested against diverse contexts and experiences.

Language matters because it shapes what we can imagine and what we can act upon.

This emphasis on imagination was paired with a strong focus on regeneration. Rather than framing leadership around sustaining existing systems, the diploma emphasized restoring capacity—within people, communities, and institutions. Regenerative thinking asks different questions: How do systems replenish rather than deplete? How do organizations align economic realities with human and ecological well-being? How do we design work so people can remain in it long enough for transformation to occur?

The final course, focused on finance in the social sector, brought these questions into sharp relief. Fundraising and budgeting were treated not as persuasion exercises, but as acts of clarity and integrity—grounded in honest storytelling about what the work requires and why. This reinforced a central insight: storytelling is not an add-on to leadership; it is how meaning travels across difference.

Across the diploma, three capacities emerged as essential for global leadership today:

  • Orientation: the ability to situate one’s work within interconnected global, social, and ecological systems.
  • Imagination: the capacity to envision alternatives beyond existing models and metrics.
  • Transformation: the willingness to change underlying assumptions, not just surface strategies.

Global cohorts provide a necessary space where these capacities can be practiced together. They allow lifelong learners to continue building their lexicon, refining their stories, and deepening their listening in community.

As our understanding of global challenges grows more complex, leadership development must move beyond isolated expertise toward collective learning across borders. Experiences like the UPEACE Global Leadership Diploma demonstrate that when diverse cohorts are given time, structure, and trust, they can cultivate the orientation, imagination, and regenerative thinking our shared future demands.

To read my course by course reflections, click below.

Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Social Change

Global Citizenship Education

Regenerative Leadership

Positive Leadership

Tackling Finance in the Social Sector

 

CAMINANTE, No Hay Camino

by | Dec 18, 2025 | ASKing the World, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Global Citizenship, Language, Pedagogy, The CAMINANTE Project

 

Caminante, no hay camino — se hace camino al andar.
Traveler, there is no road. The road is made by walking.

As I complete Tackling Finance in the Social Impact Sector, the fifth and final course in the UPEACE Global Leadership Diploma, I find myself returning again and again to this line from Antonio Machado. Not because the course was poetic in tone, but because its methodology revealed something deeply human about funding and social change: there is no universal map of philanthropy—only practice, clarity, relationship, and motion. The road is made by walking.

This course did something quietly radical. It took a process that often feels intimidating, opaque, or performative and made it simple—almost elegant. Fundraising was stripped of mystique. Instead of jargon or heroics, we were invited to do something far more grounded: tell the truth about our work. Name the problem clearly. Articulate the gap honestly. Build a budget rooted in reality rather than aspiration. Ask for what the work actually requires.

It felt like getting back to basics.

And yet, as I worked through the steps, a deeper discomfort surfaced—one I would be dishonest to ignore.

In the social sector, we often rely on a familiar vocabulary: innovation, scalability, impact metrics, sustainability. These words circulate endlessly, as if saying them enough times might produce a more just world. But beneath that language lies a quieter truth—one most practitioners know intimately and rarely say aloud:

If I had a living wage, I could do this work sustainably.

This is not a complaint. It is a structural observation. It is the foundation upon which all “impact” rests. It was the truth that shaped The CAMINANTE Project years ago, and it remains the truth shaping my work today with The Geographical Imaginations Expedition & Institute (The GIEI). Transformation requires practitioners who can remain in the work long enough for transformation to unfold.

The course clarified the how of fundraising. But it also sharpened my critique of the systems we are asked to fundraise within. Three tensions stand out.

First, scarcity is often treated as a measure of worth. In much of philanthropy, low overhead and minimal compensation are framed as moral discipline. But chronic under-resourcing does not build resilience—it erodes it. Austerity produces burnout, turnover, and fragility. Initiatives struggle to adapt, retain people, or weather complexity. Supporting the human capacity behind the work is not excess; it is foundational infrastructure.

Second, certainty is demanded in an uncertain world. Funding structures frequently ask practitioners to predict outcomes that cannot honestly be known in advance. Yet the most meaningful social change is emergent, relational, and iterative. Understanding develops through practice, not prediction. As Machado reminds us, al andar se hace camino—the path becomes visible only by walking it. When certainty is demanded too early, imagination narrows and learning is constrained.

Third, funding decisions are often distant from the lived realities of practice. Many are made far from classrooms, communities, and the daily tensions practitioners navigate. This distance tends to produce compliance rather than collaboration, reports instead of relationships, metrics instead of meaning. And yet, when funders engage with proximity, humility, and curiosity, something shifts. A shared language emerges. Trust deepens. The work becomes more honest—and more viable.

Actually, there is also a fourth tension I feel compelled to name.

There must exist hundreds—likely thousands—of thoughtful, rigorous, deeply ethical proposals that never receive real consideration, not because they lack merit, but because they seek to accomplish something that cannot yet be fully measured by our current metrics. Work that aims at shifts in mindset, meaning, belonging, imagination, or culture often fails to survive first-round filters. These proposals disappear quietly, not because they are weak, but because our tools for recognizing value remain incomplete.

This is not necessarily a failure of individual funders. It is a systemic limitation.

This reflection is my way of holding these tensions honestly. To do so even more, I chose a familiar form: a proposal. A one-page funding document. A hermit crab essay—a reflection written inside the very genre we are trained to master.

Sometimes the clearest way to reveal a system’s limits is to write from within its structure.

The hermit crab proposal linked here—What Does It Take to Fund Imagination?—is not a rejection of fundraising. It is an invitation to think more carefully about what we ask for, what we reward, and what we risk losing when we prioritize speed, certainty, and visibility over patience, trust, and the long play.

Because the road is made by walking.

With clarity and gratitude,
Kevin

Walking the Labyrinth

by | Sep 30, 2025 | ASKing the World, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Global Citizenship, Language, Mapping, Pedagogy, Potpourri, Public Geography

A Framework for Designing Inquiry-Based Expeditions

When we imagine planning an expedition, a project, or even a career step, it’s tempting to picture the path as a straight line: define the goal, create a plan, execute. But anyone who has actually walked such a journey knows it’s rarely so direct.

That’s why I turn to the metaphor of the labyrinth. Unlike a maze, a labyrinth isn’t about dead ends or wrong turns. There is only one path, and though it winds outward and inward, you always move toward the center. The gift of the labyrinth is that it reminds us: progress doesn’t mean walking straight ahead. Progress can mean circling back, pausing, or picking up new tools along the way.

For anyone embarking on an inquiry-driven expedition — whether it’s a research project, a service-learning program, or a self-designed summer of exploration — the labyrinth can serve as both metaphor and method.

Step 1: Glimpse the Center

Every journey starts with a vision, even if it’s fleeting. Write one sentence that captures your central purpose. For example:
 “If my expedition does one thing well, it is…”

This is your north star, your “center.” Don’t worry if it feels fuzzy — clarity comes later.

Step 2: The Turn Outward

The labyrinth doesn’t take you straight to the middle; it pushes you outward first. That’s the part of the journey where doubt, unknowns, and questions surface. Ask yourself:

  • What don’t I know yet?
  • What feels unclear or intimidating?

Naming these uncertainties is not weakness — it’s the work. By acknowledging what’s missing, you create space to learn.

Step 3: Gather Your Tools

We rarely walk alone. Along the path, you’ll need tools — intellectual, relational, and practical — to carry inward. I like to divide them into four categories:

  • Conversations: mentors, peers, or communities to learn from
  • Concepts/Values: the principles that keep you aligned
  • Methods: research, mapping, storytelling, or observation techniques
  • Practices: reflection, rest, journaling, creative rituals that sustain you

Choose three to five. These will be your companions.

Step 4: Twists and Crossroads

No journey unfolds without barriers. Some are practical (time, funding, logistics). Others are external expectations — from family, institutions, or even society’s ideas about what you “should” do.

The regenerative approach isn’t to push through at all costs but to prepare alternate routes that still honor your purpose. Write a few if/then scenarios:

  • If not this location, then that one.
  • If not formal internship, then independent research or service.

Flexibility builds resilience.

Step 5: Return to the Center

Finally, revisit your original vision. With your tools, your unknowns, and your alternate paths in mind, rewrite it. Make it sharper, more grounded, more alive. You’re not back where you started — you’re back with new eyes.

Why the Labyrinth Matters

The labyrinth exercise is not about perfection. It’s about alignment. In regenerative leadership, we learn that when our values and our actions line up, our work nourishes us instead of depleting us. The labyrinth is a reminder that the path is rarely straight — but it is always meaningful.

So the next time you begin planning your inquiry-based expedition, don’t draw a checklist. Draw a labyrinth. Glimpse your center, name your unknowns, gather your tools, prepare your alternate routes, and walk with curiosity.

Because the truth is, the twists are not distractions from the journey — the twists are the journey.

For a short film exploring the labyrinth as guide, click here.

Living, Learning, and Leading in Granada

by | Aug 9, 2025 | ASKing the World, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Global Citizenship, Language, Pedagogy, Spain

This summer, I had the privilege of co-leading The Experiment in International Living’s Leadership Institute: Spanish Language & Community Engagement in Spain, a program that brought together 16 high school students from the U.S. and 18 from Spain for an unforgettable journey in Granada.

From the start, this program was built on four pillars: peer-to-peer exchange, language immersion, social change, and community service. In practice, that meant living together in a residencia during the week, staying with host families on weekends, sharing meals, navigating city streets, and constantly learning from one another — not only through organized activities, but through countless small moments of connection.

Building Connections Across Cultures

U.S. and Spanish high school students lived, learned, and led together — exploring each other’s cultures, building friendships, and practicing cross-cultural competency through real-life connections. The peer-to-peer aspect of the program was its heartbeat: informal conversations in the residencia, shared laughter during meals, and moments of mutual curiosity helped bridge languages and perspectives.

Language immersion came alive not only in the classroom but in the market, on walking tours, during late-night group conversations, and through family life in Granada. Students had to navigate both linguistic challenges and cultural nuances — gaining skills they’ll carry for a lifetime.

Dialogue as a Tool for Leadership

On our final full day together, we culminated in a youth-led round robin of dialogues. Six stations invited mixed U.S. and Spanish groups to explore:

  • Youth Voice & Social Change

  • Mental Health, Pressure & Coping

  • Creativity, Identity & Expression

  • Global Citizenship

  • Cultural Missteps & What We Learn from Them

  • Friendship & Connection Across Differences

It was inspiring to watch participants not only share their own perspectives but listen deeply to those of their peers. These conversations modeled the kind of engaged, respectful dialogue that is too often missing in our world — and reminded me that leadership can be built one conversation at a time.

Bringing It Home

The program doesn’t end in Spain. Each U.S. participant will now return home with ideas for Community-Based Initiatives — projects rooted in their local communities but informed by their time in Granada. Whether it’s starting a club, organizing an event, or launching a campaign, they’ll bring forward the empathy, global awareness, and problem-solving skills they cultivated here.

As for me — from the U.S. but living in Spain full-time — I am afforded a unique window into the cultural exchange happening between our students. I often told the group that we, as leaders, were also on our own Experiment exchange — learning alongside them and building bridges in real time.

Granada gave us more than a backdrop. It gave us a shared space to live out the ideals of The Experiment: connecting deeply, thinking critically, and leading with heart.

Not a Pilgrimage: A “Visit” to the Capilla Real

by | Jul 13, 2025 | ASKing the World, Hagiography, Language, Mapping, Political Geography, Spain

Granada, Spain — July 12, 2025

On July 12, I visited the Capilla Real in Granada—the final resting place of Isabel and Ferdinand, the so-called Catholic Monarchs. As someone from the Americas (having lived extensively in both the north and south), I arrived not as a passive tourist but as a participant in a longer, more complicated performance of memory and power. The encounter felt layered, conflicted, and deeply political.

To think through this space, I turn to the work of Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks, whose concept of “theatre/archaeology” invites us to consider how sites are not just static remnants of the past, but staged events, constructed through layers of material, narrative, and embodied experience. The Capilla Real is not just a crypt; it is a scripted space—a performative apparatus where empire, religion, and heritage rehearse themselves daily.

I wanted to ask: What is being remembered here? And what is being made to disappear?

What is being memorialized—and what is being forgotten?

The Capilla Real monumentalizes the Catholic Monarchs as founders of modern Spain—unifiers of kingdoms and “champions” of Christianity. Yet what is absent from this narrative? The expelled Jewish communities, the forcibly converted Muslims, the erased plurality of late medieval Granada.

What does the architecture tell us? Its late Gothic grandeur stands in symbolic contrast to the nearby Alhambra. The site doesn’t just remember a royal couple—it stages a victory of Christendom.

Ask the site: Who gets to be buried with marble and gold? Who was exiled in silence?

What does it mean to come from the Americas to this tomb?

To stand here, as someone from the Americas, is to feel the afterlives of 1492 humming in the walls. Colonization, extraction, forced conversion, genocide. These are not footnotes; they are structural echoes.

But I visited not on October 12—the official “discovery” date—but July 12: my own day of encounter. This reframes the act. It refuses the commemorative choreography and inserts presence in place of celebration.

Ask yourself: What is my role in this story? Observer? Descendant? Witness? Disruptor?

How is the site performing itself to me?

The Capilla Real is deeply choreographed. Light filters carefully across stone. The tombs are elevated, silent, inaccessible. Reverence is built into the room.

Where are visitors positioned? What are we allowed to see, and how? What narrative are we meant to accept?

Ask the architecture: Who choreographed your gestures? Who wrote your script?

What traces and residues resist the dominant story?

What if we look beyond the polished surfaces? Cracks in stone. Uneven wear on the floor. The proximity of Moorish Granada just outside. Are these material residues that refuse to perform the official memory?

What might be uncovered if we listened for unofficial histories—graffiti, whispered anecdotes, contested memories?

Ask the material: What are you hiding beneath your polish?

What would a counter-monument look like here?

If we were to build a counter-monument in this space, what form would it take? Would it honor the Indigenous peoples of the Americas? The forcibly silenced voices of Sephardic Jews or Andalusian Muslims?

Would it be performative? Ephemeral? Sonic? Could we interrupt this royal narrative with something more plural, contested, and alive?

Ask history: Who else demands to be remembered here?

A Presence That Interrupts

Standing in the Capilla Real, I did not come to venerate. I came to witness. To mark presence. To speak into a silence that has lasted too long.

I stood before the crypt of Isabel and Ferdinand—the monarchs who set in motion the Reconquista and the conquest of the so-called “New World.” Their bodies rest beneath carved stone, sealed in royal dignity. But outside those tombs, across oceans and centuries, the legacies of their decisions are unburied, unfinished, and still resisted.

And so I said, quietly—perhaps to them, perhaps to myself:

Do you know that peoples in the Americas have resisted your conquest and colonization for over 500 years?

That resistance is not metaphor. It is not memory. It is alive.

Pearson and Shanks remind us that archaeology is not merely about ruins, but about performance, disruption, and presence. In that spirit, I offer these questions—not to find answers, but to refuse silence.

To Isabel and Ferdinand: 

  • When you cast your crowns toward heaven, did you see what fell to earth in your name?
  • What prayers passed your lips as you signed the expulsions—were they for mercy, or for dominion?
  • Did you dream of gold or of glory—or did you simply fear a world not shaped in your image?
  • When you imagined the Indies, did you imagine us—the ones who would inherit both wound and wonder?
  • Did you know your empire would splinter—yet still echo in our languages, our borders, our gods?
  • What does empire sound like when it speaks back to you—not in Latin, but in Nahuatl, Aymara, K’iche’, Guaraní, Garífuna?
  • Can you hear the music now? The fusion of drums and strings, tongues and prayers, born of resistance and necessity?
  • Did you know that seeds carried in your ships would take root in every kitchen, every story, every body? What about the diseases?
  • Did you build a world, or did you scatter one?
  • And when I stand here—an inheritor of what you set in motion—do you see a subject, a stranger, or a question?

This visit was not a pilgrimage.
It was an intervention.
And the performance isn’t over.

Or, in the Guarani…..

Ko jevy ndaha’éi peteĩ ñemomba’e rehegua guata.
Ha’e kuri peteĩ jehasaha.
Ha pe ñoha’ãguasu ndopevéi gueteri.

Mapping Global Competence: A Journey Through Difference, Dialogue, and Action

by | Jun 6, 2025 | ASKing the World, Geo Storytelling, Geographical Imaginations, Language, Mapping, Pedagogy

 

Education must move beyond content delivery and toward cultivating globally competent learners. The Global Competence Certificate program offers a path not only toward deeper understanding of others, but also of oneself. This course is a carefully structured encounter with difference that challenges assumptions, encourages perspective-taking, and builds capacity for action.

Structured around reflective modules and live facilitated dialogues, the course maps a journey that begins with self-awareness and ends with a commitment to transformation. Along the way, participants explore cultural frameworks, value dimensions, conflict styles, inequality, and sustainability, all the while asking essential questions: Who am I in relation to others? How do systems shape interactions? What is my responsibility as an educator and citizen?

Keywords

Cultural Dimensions: Frameworks that place cultural values along continuums (e.g., hierarchy vs. egalitarianism, individualism vs. collectivism) and help explain how different societies prioritize relationships, time, authority, and communication.

Conflict Styles: Based on Dr. Mitchell Hammer’s framework, these styles identify communication as either direct or indirect and emotional expression as either expressive or restrained, giving insight into how cultural differences shape conflict resolution.

Microaggressions: Subtle, often unconscious behaviors or comments that communicate derogatory or dismissive messages to people based on marginalized identities, reinforcing systemic bias and exclusion.

Mainstream and Margin: Social positioning concepts that explore how power and privilege function in institutions and communities, often revealing how certain identities and voices are centered while others are silenced or overlooked.

Stretch Collaboration: A method of working across differences that calls for curiosity, humility, experimentation, and the recognition that we are part of the very problems we seek to solve (Kahane).

Global Goals (SDGs): The United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals that form an action-oriented framework for tackling interconnected global challenges like poverty, climate change, gender equality, and education.

WOOP: A research-backed self-regulation strategy (by Gabriele Oettingen) that helps people achieve goals by mentally contrasting their wishes with likely obstacles and developing implementation intentions.

Globally Competent Teaching: A pedagogical stance integrating intercultural sensitivity, inquiry, systems thinking, and action-based learning to prepare students to thrive in and improve a diverse, interconnected world.

Polarization: The sharpening of divisions within society that leads to entrenched “us vs. them” dynamics, often fueled by confirmation bias and zero-sum thinking.

Pluralism: The philosophical and practical commitment to engaging multiple perspectives and values in decision-making, rather than assimilating or eliminating difference.

From Reflection to Action

What distinguishes this course is its recursive rhythm: reflect, discuss, apply. The early modules ask participants to situate themselves along cultural continuums. Are you more high-context or low-context in your communication? Do you navigate conflict with a preference for accommodation or discussion? These inquiries are not merely academic; they serve as mirrors and windows—allowing one to better understand self and others, recognize implicit bias, and shift behavior toward inclusivity.

As the course moves into themes of inequality and marginalization, it invites educators to name the ways power operates within their communities. Through exercises around spiritual diversity, microaggressions, and mainstream vs. margin, participants confront both privilege and exclusion. It is a journey of discomfort, empathy, and eventually, solidarity. This segment feels particularly critical today, as educational spaces must contend with their own roles in perpetuating systemic inequities.

The Power of Dialogue 

Live sessions form the emotional and intellectual core of the program. With expert facilitation, these dialogues move beyond “sharing” and into the realm of co-construction of meaning. They allow for vulnerability, cultural exchange, and collective problem-solving. In these spaces, the ethos of educational theorists like Paulo Freire—learning as dialogue, as praxis—feels very much alive.

These conversations are not tidy. They mirror real-world complexity. But through guided inquiry and storytelling, participants engage difference with openness, building the skills to do the same in their own classrooms. These moments are reminders that inclusion is not only about curriculum design—it’s about human interaction.

Linking to Theory

While the course avoids academic jargon, its foundation aligns with thinkers like Martha Nussbaum, whose concept of “narrative imagination” calls us to see the world through others’ eyes as an ethical imperative. Similarly, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s work on cosmopolitanism—valuing universal dignity while respecting local diversity—animates much of the program’s spirit.

In modules addressing polarization and conflict, participants indirectly wrestle with insights from social psychology and intercultural communication theory. Yet the learning remains grounded in practice, helping educators make theory tangible in the classroom.

Big Questions That Linger

  • What does it mean to “know” another culture? What are the ethical limits of such knowing?
  • How can we foster global understanding without lapsing into tokenism or reinforcing savior narratives?
  • In an age of disinformation and polarization, what role does education play in cultivating epistemic humility and discernment?
  • How do educators sustain inclusive practices when faced with resistance from institutions or communities?
  • What does civic responsibility look like in a world of overlapping crises—climate, migration, inequality?

A Personal Cartography

By the end of the course, participants are not handed a map—they are asked to draw their own. From initial self-assessment to final action planning using tools like WOOP, the program scaffolds a transformation in awareness, pedagogy, and presence.

The course is not a checklist. It is a compass. It fosters dispositions—curiosity, humility, resilience—that are essential for teaching and leading in a global age. Through sustained reflection, brave conversation, and inspired action, participants emerge with more than insight—they leave with intention.

For educators committed to justice, inclusion, and global citizenship, this course offers both a challenge and a gift. It reminds us that global competence is not a final destination. It is a way of being—with others, for others, and always becoming.