Catherine Cadden
Peaceable Revolution Through Education
Start a Peaceable Revolution by starting a school, creating a culture of empathy in a current school, or cultivating a compassionate classroom. Learn what it takes to change the world – willingness to make empathic connection the basis of our actions. Education has the potential to restructure our society for the betterment of human culture and the planet we inhabit.
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Catherine Cadden’s work is to advance a consciousness of interdependence among all peoples, for generations to come, through cultivating the physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual maturity of the Seventh Generation, and those who directly affect the Seventh Generation.
Since 1987, she has worked in U.S. public schools, Montessori, and Waldorf classrooms, witnessing firsthand the devastating effects of the educational system, both mainstream and ‘alternative’: racism, materialism, apathy, alienation, and violence. Having studied the power of social change through the philosophies and movements of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1997, she opened the doors of TEMBA, a K–8 academic school founded on empathy, self-responsibility, and the tenets of nonviolence. In its eleven years of operation as a true multi-age, multi-ethnic, and multi-class classroom, TEMBA became a beacon of hope for the communities that it served, a place where parents, students, and teachers thrived. TEMBA graduates went on to become leaders in their high schools and colleges, initiating outdoor education programs, creating coalitions between youth and police, and resolving peer conflicts – all while making the highest marks in their academic endeavors.
Catherine has brought trainings in Nonviolent Communication, TEMBA teaching methods, social change organizing, and alternatives to violence to peoples of all ages in Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Japan, India, Quebec, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Catherine continues the work she started with TEMBA through Play in the Wild!, an organization she co-founded that offers international programs to youth and families.
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