Our Vision & Mission Expanded

Vision

Life As One Great Service to Each Other

The Sionito Group, to present its vision as a statement with meaning for a wide spectrum of residents and citizens within present Canadian society, has used the following quote for over 25 years as its guiding vision statement. It expresses the vision that in the end, “community” wins, “marginalization” as the expression of either intolerance or indifference, or both loses. It comes from the works of the Russian author Maxim Gorky.

I know there will come a time when people will take delight in one another, when each will be a star to the other, and when each will listen to his fellow as to music. The free people will walk upon the earth, people great in their freedom. They will walk with open hearts, and the heart of each will be pure of envy and greed, and therefore all people will be without malice, and there will be nothing to divorce the heart from reason.

Then life will be one great service to each other!… Then we shall live in truth and freedom and in beauty, and those will be accounted the best, who will the more widely embrace the world with their hearts, and whose love of it will be the most profound; those will be the best who will be the freest; for in them is the greatest beauty. Then life will be great, and the people who live that life will be great. (Mother)

Mission

What The World Needs Now Is More Community

The board and their managers exist to serve the owner(s) in an organization. However, in a non-profit corporation with no equity shareholders, who own the organization becomes a serious question of governance. In the field of churches and religion, Dan Hotchkiss of the Alban Institute states, “the owner of a congregation (social organization) is its mission, a social organization exists to serve its mission. The great management consultant Peter Drucker wrote that the core mission of all social-sector organizations is to “change lives.” He explained that the specific mission of a social organization is its answer to the question, “Whose lives do we intend to change and in what way?” At its most general level, the Sionito answer to changed lives is enriching a person’s “life-ability.” We purposely use the word “enriching” in several meanings as it provides the needed foil to the experience of impoverishment that most of our residents experience. Life-ability change, continuous life-ability enrichment is the goal of the mission.

In his book, Good to Great, Jim Collins argues that “good” is the enemy of “great.” The Sionito mission is to rise above the efforts of doing good works and being a well-meaning, good-hearted people towards the goal of being an organization that can intentionally facilitate and sustain fundamental change in any situation (individual or societal) that can be shown conclusively to be in need of change. Change does not occur easily, nor is it a simple concept to understand. It is our experience supported by research that enriched life-ability emerges from i) both the emotional and rational sensitivity that one’s life is supported and affirmed by a community and ii) that one’s life makes a meaningful contribution back into a community. Without this dual community identification, life is diminished and, in some cases, spirals into the realm of meaninglessness and self-destruction. If the sense of community suffers, so does the stability of mind. Change does not occur easily because community environments do not change easily. Life-ability enrichment is dependent on the interaction between mind and community. Our program, known as the Sionito Model, is focused on changing lives by changing this interaction interface between their community and their mindset. The Sionito mission is to change community-based environments. It is the concept we use to describe the multiplicity of changes our program elicits from individuals placed within an intentional, mutually supportive community. The mission statement that results is:

The Sionito Group contributes to the Canadian expression of civil society and social entrepreneurship by developing intentional, inclusive, compassionate communities of mutual support and encouragement to decrease the impact of impoverishment on and increase the life-ability of each member of that community.

Philosophical

Sionito sources its philosophy within the human rights aspirations of humanity. Sionito, as a CSO, stands against both the intolerance of bad people and the indifference of good people. The focus of Sionito is to be involved in our society, involved in producing intentional, targeted change. There are two large-scale fundamentally different methodologies for change; one is by authoritarian declaration, the other is by teleological motivation. One perspective pushes, the other pulls; one orders, the other persuades; one is bureaucratic in form, and the other is entrepreneurial. One perspective is a mechanistic lens focusing on constant deterministic relationships. The other is a relational lens focusing on evolutionary responses to a changing environment. It is the Sionito position that the overall cultural evolution experienced by human beings seems to be moving along a continuum from authoritarian forms of centralist society (fascism and communism) towards teleological forms (democracies, societal participation, free-market economies) of civil based open societies. Whether it is a societal paradigm, a social service program or an individual personality, they all can be read as to which of these two methodologies prevail or where they stand on the continuum between them. Since we will be examining a program approach that is eventually based on a recovery model, a predominately teleological socio-psycho motivation model, it is important from the outset to build a conceptual understanding that clearly states, beginning from the societal level and moving down towards the program particulars and then to the individual, how this most basic of theoretical dichotomies informs the Sionito program presented. The Sionito Model affirms that if we have a unified philosophical approach to life, we must develop the personality disposition that supports our professional involvements and further informs our overview of society. Only then will we be able to understand and be directed by the statement of Gandhi “Be the change that you want to see in the world.” He had an abounding faith that one person or a small group of people could actually do a great deal to change the suffering of others. The resultant end statement in terms of the Sionito program presented in this business case will be that a civil society is the societal equivalent of a mutual support recovery program, which is the equivalent of a self-energized, self-directed, “service to others” driven personality. A civil society requires personalities attracted by compassionate, empathetic civility.