Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemoration
Monday, January 17, day and evening
Templeton Student Center, Agnes Flanagan Chapel

It Takes Every Voice to Create CommUNITY.

Workshop for faculty: Dr. Jordan Jaiya John, facilitator
Workshop for students/staff: facilitator TBA
10:30 a.m., locations TBA

Reality Check

Do you think Lewis & Clark College is one homogenous lump of students with more or less the same ethnic and cultural background? Come to this program; you're likely to find yourself surprised by how diverse the College really is.

Jordan Jaiya John

It Takes Every Voice to Create CommUNITY.

3 p.m., Agnes Flanagan Chapel

Jaiya John is the founder and Executive Director of Soul Water Rising, an educational mission devoted to improving human relations, combating prejudice, and fostering spiritual growth. For over a decade he has traveled the nation as a professional speaker, poet, author and youth mentor. Jaiya’s passionate, poetic presentations combine spiritual and social science insights. This work is truly his mission, ministry and life. He has appeared on CNN, B.E.T., Fox Television and National Public Radio. He authored the award-winning memoir, Black Baby White Hands: A View from the Crib. Jaiya also spent four years as a professor of social psychology at Howard University, and has been an editor & creative writing coach, and a foster and adoptive family consultant. Jaiya also worked as a diversity consultant and trainer of public school educators, and taught English as a second language in Katmandu, Nepal. In addition, he served as associate director for the National Center on Permanency for African American Children, in Washington, DC.

Jaiya was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Immediately placed in foster care and eventually adopted, Jaiya lived as an African American in a predominately Caucasian American environment. This childhood branded in him a burning passion for giving his life to improve the way human beings relate to each other. Jaiya graduated in psychology at Lewis & Clark College in 1989, and earned his doctorate from the University of California, Santa Cruz in social psychology. He lived and studied during 1988 in the nation of Nepal, where his research on Tibetan medicine instilled within him an appreciation for holistic concepts of physical, emotional and spiritual health.

Being of not only African but Seminole, Blackfoot and Cherokee descent; and having grown up in the midst of the Southwest’s American Indian and Latino communities, Jaiya has an appreciation for the spiritual and communal passions that spring from these worlds. This spirit he ingrains in his own beliefs and messages about our social world. Jaiya believes that in every moment of life, each of us is a teacher and a student. He is faithful to his purpose: fostering relations among humankind living in a world where we have learned to let the differences in our divine nature divide us.

Chapel Celebration

7 p.m., Agnes Flanagan Chapel

A program of selected readings by members of the Lewis & Clark College community, singing, and a candlelight vigil.

For more information, visit http://www.lclark. edu/cgi-bin/shownews. cgi?1105637880.0