My name is Stephen Bross, I am finally publishing this website after sitting on the idea for a couple years, wrestling with the prospect launching such an expansive vision. 

I am a web developer and designer from Boulder, Colorado, a tabla player, former reggae drummer, artist, and a former postulant to the priesthood in the  Episcopal church. I am the co-founder of an eleven-year-old intentional co-op in Boulder, I host bi-weekly mystic Christ gatherings at my house, and officiate the occasional wedding. I’m formally trained as an architect (MArch, Yale ’95), I was a Rotary exchange student in India for a year after high school, and I’ve lived in France and Poland each for a year.

The spiritual paths, both Eastern and Middle Eastern (namely Christianity), have been my core adulthood interests, coupled with involvement in numerous political change efforts over the years –  local environmental protections, protecting voting rights and our intended representative democracy, participating in the Occupy movement, and women’s reproductive rights.

My frustration with many activist groups stems from my observation that too often there was so much focus on the issues and taking action but not as much awareness of what was happening in the group at the social emotional relational level. The result, which was especially striking in the Occupy movement, was folks’ unprocessed anger and trauma wound up getting projected on each other, and I witnessed in Boulder the movement largely self destruct. There was little awareness of social emotional skills, and not attention given to the values and principles that could help the group stay true to our highest capacities together and hold each other accountable to those universal guidelines for healthy collaborating and relating. Living in intentional community for fifteen years has taught me a lot about how agreements around values and principles is critical for harmonious living and collaborating.

I also noticed among my fellow activists that there was a disappointing lack of understanding of the history of effective social change movements and what made them successful.

Often I experienced burnout, after a surge of optimistic, energetic action I would stop political action for a while, sometime for years, before I got revved up again for another go. It was akin to diet yoyo-ing, and I noticed this trend was more the rule than the exception in activist groups.

After learning about exciting work being done by authors, and development and activist groups in the areas of alternative regenerative economics and agriculture, I found another surge of enthusiasm to engage in some way. With my background in web design and development, I felt the best way I could contribute to solving our planetary crises would be to combine the spiritual, social, political and historic lessons I’ve learned with technology that might help market these great ideas, educate and organize us into a sustainable, aware, compassionate, engaged community.

Walking the paths of Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, Taoism and Christianity over the course of 25 years has shown me the power of practice and wisdom to keep me active, open-hearted and centered in life. They continue to reveal to me the universal truth that runs through each of them that we are timeless presence, awareness learning to live this human experience every more fully and freely. In seeking to share my spiritual perspective, I want to include atheists in the conversation, because they have much ethical humanist wisdom to share as well. Spirituality is not about a belief system to me, it’s about how we behave in relationship to ourselves and each other, in alignment with our highest values and principles.

Thank you for reading my story and my hopes for this vision. There is so much I do not know, and my ignorance has kept me in perfectionism, dreaming and not acting. I offer this site as the product of my dreaming, and my invitation to discover fellow souls who feel inspired to join hands and walk this road together, The Power of Us!