America’s Soul Community

America’s Soul Community: A New American Leadership in a Chaotic Time

To RSVP for our monthly America’s Soul Community, contact Virginia Swain at virginiawoodswain@gmail.com. or cell/text at 508-245-6843.  Donations are welcome at https://gofund.me/39d02749

Quaker Virginia Swain, the founder of America’s Soul Community with Robert Kauffman, was in New York City during the attacks of 9/11 and had a dream that evening in which a Phoenix rose from the ashes of Ground Zero. The Phoenix identified itself as our collective soul and offered a message of hope to people who wished to heal themselves. Each person in America can recover, cultivate, and nourish their spiritual and moral essence. We found we could co-create a community to take us beyond individual and group egoism, and overcome the fear and mistrust that keeps us separate and isolated from each other and from the rest of the world.

After 17 years of careful reflection on her Phoenix experience and what America needs, Virginia created America’s Soul Community. She sees it as a vehicle for people to pool their wisdom and realize the hope for regeneration, rebirth, and resurrection, as symbolized by the Phoenix. In 2020, she created Our Global Soul Community, for the world’s needs, with Robert Kauffman and Sonrisa O’Toole. 

This is a time when familiar institutions, ways of thinking, and habits no longer seem to work very well in America. In such a chaotic nation, we need a more creative, kinder response. The future we need starts with our conversations with each other in America’s Soul Community.  In 2024, we joined the Braver Angels Network.

We must regain the collective spiritual and moral essence in American leaders. In resources provided by studies at the Fetzer institute, the link between spiritual development and the healing of our democracy is established. 

Our action research for America’s Soul Community Vision and Strategy shows how engaging in deep dialogue, reflection, and collaboration will:

Reduce fear, blame, projection and challenge division, racism, and oppression.
Increase love, inquiry, trust, respect, humility, inclusiveness, and connectedness.
Foster a just and sustainable America as a partner on the world stage.

These conversations require an emotionally safe environment to build trust, informed by deep listening. There, we can take on the important questions about our nation’s future and our role in creating that future by using Virginia Swain’s mentor, Dr. Elise Boulding‘s imaging process, a way to envision and make the future practical with an action plan. More about imaging at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YqxfdN3s6i3Feg1v6V-6NucySLfAvkDlGDxT2JpM5tg/edit?tab=t.0.

Imaging plays a key role in our Community, because we can’t reconcile a challenge unless we see it in our mind’s eye. It is our belief a challenge cannot be resolved at the level it was created. Using the imagination in a brainstorming process, Community members can envision a solution and then work backwards with a timeline and action plan to make the image actionable. Participants are invited to image their soul gifts as a means to a higher level of awareness– the challenge is then resolved beyond the level at which it was created, a way to show their commitment to healing America.