Episode 26: Mike Seymour

Meetings With Remarkable Educators

Mike Seymour, M.S., has been associated with K-12 education since 1990, most recently in his role as President of The Heritage Institute. Mike is also the founder and Director of a non-profit sponsored by The Heritage Institute, Youth for a New World, which engages youth in global issues and local solutions.

Earlier Mike was a consultant and trainer to schools, school districts and Educational Service Districts on such diverse subjects as leadership, visioning and planning and at-risk students. Mike has been board member, Chairman of the Board and volunteer Executive Director of Community for Youth, a highly innovative and successful mentoring program for disadvantaged students in three of Seattle’s most low-performing high schools. Mike authored a text—Educating for Humanity: Rethinking the Purposes of Education--calling on a new vision for education, showing how important the stakes are today for an integral education realizing the interconnectedness of the world. Mike's Awakening Self blog speaks about the important historic shift humanity is going through in our times, and how awakening into a new consciousness is a global phenomenon.

Mike recently published the biography of a courageous Burundian peacemaker, Prosper Ndabishuriye, who helped change the destiny of his nation during the horrific ethnic violence between Hutus and Tutsis in the 1990's. Mike’s recently published book, If You’re Going to Kill them, You Just Kill Us First, tells Prosper’s heroic story and Mike’s role in the peace-making work.

As part of Mike's long-standing support of environmental sustainability, he attended in July 2013 a Climate Leaders training by the Climate Reality Project founded by former Senator and Vice-President Al Gore, and has offered workshops on climate change. Mike is author of the course Climate Change for Teachers & Kids, now taught by Charity Staudenraus, and offers climate change presentations in his home region.

\Mike was also a facilitator and trainer for the Pachamama Alliance’s symposium titled Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream, with a mission to help foster “an environmentally sustainable, socially just and spiritually fulfilling human presence on Earth” as trhe foremost need of our times.

Mike has a special interest in open, democratic forms of education that allow students to engage in real-world issues. Mike has a B.S. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University and an M.S. in Marriage & Family Therapy from Seattle Pacific University.

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