The Institute for Global Ethics Receives Grant from The Park Foundation

April 9, 2012 - PRLog -- ROCKPORT, Maine – The Institute for Global Ethics is pleased to announce a grant award from the PARK FOUNDATION, for the development of a Web-based program, Courage in Parenting™. This exciting new product will equip parents with the tools they need for raising, discussing, and resolving ethical issues facing their children, based on IGE’s three key conceptual frameworks:

1)   Knowing What’s Right: the role of shared values in separating right from wrong;
2)   Making Tough Choices: analyzing and resolving dilemmas when both sides are right; and
3)   Standing for Conscience: the courage to take action when values are put to the test.

“Here at the Institute, when we ask our friends and supporters, ’What can we do to make the world a more ethical place?’—their responses often include ‘a more ethical generation of future leaders’,” says Paula Mirk, Director of Education. She continues, “This means not only reaching school communities, but this must also mean reaching today’s parents.”  

A central resource for the Courage in Parenting™ program will be author Dr. Rushworth M. Kidder’s 2010 book, Good Kids Tough Choices: How Parents Can Help Their Children Do the Right Thing (JosseyBass).  The former president and founder of the Institute for Global Ethics, Dr. Kidder took steps to reach parents through conceptual frameworks and stories.    In his proposal to the Park Foundation, he wrote, “Mostly, parents need the language, tools, and determination to guide children through a world dense with bullying, sensuality, scams, corruption, and environmental degradation—all operating through seductive social media channels and biased quasi-media outlets that they themselves never encountered.”

To address the needs of today’s parents, the program will provide participants with enhanced:

•   Confidence in their ability to raise children of character, to articulate why ethics is so important, and to engage in deep and satisfying conversations about questions of character, integrity, and morality with the next generation.
•   Insights into age-appropriate patterns of thought, conceptual frameworks, and vivid examples that help kids see the importance of rejecting the wrong, valuing the right, making good choices, and standing for conscience.
•   Practices that help parents spot the question behind the question, frame the issue at hand in ethical terms, and begin dialogues in ways that kids find relevant and current rather than preachy or “old-fashioned.”

The Institute will be providing updates as this exciting new tool is developed and more information becomes available.

About the IGE
Founded in 1990, with offices in Rockport, Maine, New York City and London, the Institute for Global Ethics (www.globalethics.org) is an independent, nonsectarian, nonpartisan, 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting ethical action in a global context. IGE’s challenge is to explore the global common ground of values, elevate awareness of ethics, provide practical tools for making ethical decisions, and encourage practical action based on those decisions.