Message From The Center
Dear Friends,
 
From all of us at the Ikeda Center, we want to share our warmest wishes and deepest appreciation! Wherever you are in the world, we hope that this holiday season finds you in good health and high spirits. While we all continued to face many complex and difficult challenges in 2021, we also saw signs of hope and possibility.

In this holiday e-newsletter, we share highlights from the last twelve months, including many of the ways we found hope this year. We kicked things off in 2021 by resuming Dialogue Nights virtually, followed by the launch of new programs such as Indigo Talks and the Global Citizens Seminar series. In April, we celebrated the release of our newest publication, Hope and Joy in Education: Engaging Daisaku Ikeda Across Curriculum and Context. We also launched a new podcast series exploring the transformative power of dialogue. To read more about our highlights from the year, please see the links below.
 
Looking ahead to 2022, we are eager to increase our efforts to foster cultures of peace through hope-filled dialogue, together with you all.

Thank you for all of your tremendous support this past year.  

Our warmest regards,
 
Ikeda Center Staff

Event Updates: Ikeda Forum,
Dialogue Nights, and Indigo Talks
Ikeda Forum
On Saturday, December 11th, we held our 17th Annual Ikeda Forum, "Becoming Wide Awake To Our Wisdom, Courage, and Compassion: Global Citizenship as Action and Identity". A total of 246 participants from 27 countries joined us! The event featured an insightful intergenerational discussion with Dr. Awad Ibrahim of the University of Ottawa, Dr. Jason Goulah of DePaul University, and emerging scholars Meylin Gonzales, Seonmi Jin, Archish Mittal, and Handrio Nurhan.

Click here to read an in-depth article on the event. Please stay tuned for a video replay link soon!
Dialogue Nights
Launched in 2017 and inspired by Daisaku Ikeda's belief in the infinite potential of youth to be agents of change in their local communities, Dialogue Nights aims to bring hope to young people through the transformative power of dialogue. Although we put a pause on in person gatherings since March of 2020 due to the pandemic, we were pleased to resume Dialogue Nights virtually this year. We hosted four inspiring events on timely topics including Authoring a New Chapter, Unpacking COVID-19, Self-Love, and Embracing Vulnerability.

Take a look at all of our Dialogue Nights write-ups here!
Our Inaugural Indigo Talk with Dr. Francyne Huckaby
In July 2021, we launched a new lecture series called Indigo Talks! Named after the Buddhist expression “from the indigo, an even deeper blue,” the lecture series features renowned intellectuals in dialogue with enduring works by Daisaku Ikeda. Our inaugural lecture featured Dr. Francyne Huckaby of Texas Christian University who gave a talk titled "Two Bundles of Reeds: (In)evitable Pain, (Im)possible Promise."

Read a write-up on our inaugural Indigo Talk with Dr. Huckaby,

The Dialogue Studio Podcast
Also launched this year is our new podcast series, the Dialogue Studio. This podcast explores the transformational practice of dialogue and why it is important, especially in this current moment. In these episodes, host Lillian I talks with individuals from all walks of life who share about what dialogue means to them and how they are practicing it in their daily lives. The episodes we have released so far feature our youth and scholar friends sharing their reflections on a dialogue project we organized in 2019 and a conversation with our Executive Director.

Listen to all of our episodes through our podcast page,

Hope and Joy in Education
Another big highlight of our year was the release of our newest book, Hope and Joy in Education: Engaging Daisaku Ikeda across Context and Curriculum, a multi-author volume published in association with Teachers College Press. We celebrated with a book launch event in April featuring the editors, Isabel Nuñez and Jason Goulah, as well as a book talk in the fall hosted by Gutman Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Education Fellows Program
Established in 2007, the Education Fellows Program aims to advance research and scholarship on the internationally growing field of Ikeda/Soka studies in education. Each two year cycle, the program supports doctoral dissertations in the field of Ikeda/Soka studies in education, including its relation to the philosophy and practice of education more generally. This fall, our current fellows presented on their dissertation research during a mid-program virtual seminar. We applaud them for all of their hard work and progress! Our next call for proposals will open in the summer of 2022. To learn more about the program, please visit our website.
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