Who is Sumedhas?
Sumedhas, Academy for Human Context, is an institution dedicated to the fostering of human processes. It is a (Section 25A, not for profit) research and educational body founded by behavioral scientists with diverse backgrounds and a shared discipline in the field.
Sumedhas aims to study living phenomena as these occur, and promote learning from experience in order to help generate convictions and the formation of new responses. This becomes the basis of creativity in processes of living and work.
Sumedhas aims to spread the movement of learning from living to individuals and groups of all ages, gender and calling, irrespective of caste, creed and color.
Sumedhas also aims to create opportunities for people to join in promoting their own learning. It hopes that such learning will generate a critical mass of people who will carry their wisdom to reshape their lives and spaces (organizations, families, institutions) around them and enhance qualities of humanness with conviction, and dignity.
Where do we work?
Work organizations and institutions such as family, education and community have undergone radical shifts and are continuing to change. Engaging with these shifts has meant dealing with stresses of isolation, loss of belonging and self-doubt. The human being has created for his/her self a situation of near crisis while generating desired outcomes by way of material securities, productivity and comforts.
At the individual level, both self-identity and social identity have become fraught with doubts and misgivings. These confusions are managed with claims of success, achievements and status. Meaningfulness and hope are becoming major casualties here.
Given the wide flux in values, relatedness, and individual lifestyles, work organizations become the recipient of accumulated barriers to creative output. These barriers join together while the creative impulses remain submerged within individuals. The world of relationships faces the pulls of reality and expectations become fraught with evaluation and disappointments.
All institutions of belonging (family and community) and faith (brotherhood, religion) today face the constant threat of disintegration, with feelings of cynicism, letdown and hurt. The spiritual and psychosocial needs of people are ignored or made esoteric, leaving the human being in an atmosphere of functionality, acquisition and manifest achievements.
We believe that the time is at hand for people to recalibrate their frames of relationships, self-worth, meaningfulness, productivity and spirit. It is time for new definitions, congruent with emergent realities that constantly confront each one of us. We believe this would help people discover dignity with compassion. It will provide them the energy and convictions to redesign their life space and search for freedom of expression both in task and affiliative systems.