About

Vision

By integrating sailing expeditions with values-driven programs, The Vela Foundation unleashes humanity's capacity to engage consciously with the course of its own evolution.

Our ultimate goal is to conduct multi-year globe-spanning voyages with a substantial fleet of sailing vessels. We and our participants will develop programs across the arts, sciences, and humanities. We'll collaborate with crews large and small, permanent fellows, and visiting geniuses. The programs borne upon our voyages will help to bring about an emerging human civilization rooted in kindness, wisdom, and grace.

Our activities will consist of clearly defined in-house programming, as well as programs conceived by leaders from outside the organization. In coordinating the latter, we'll integrate strategic leadership in program approval and oversight with vast participant leeway in program genesis and execution. Some participants may also choose to expand existing programs, or to conduct multiple programs in parallel. Thus, while certain programs will be pursued by a single boat, others will encompass the entire fleet or portions thereof.

With this hybrid approach to programming, we'll merge focus with flexibility, passion with institutional stability, and sparkling curiosity with long-term thinking. The style and content of our programs will disturb broken systems of thought and action, launch provocative questions at unexamined aspects of reality, and advance wild possibilities for our life on this planet and beyond.

Values

We have formulated our value set specifically to define and animate a comprehensive, internally coherent institutional worldview. The completeness of this framework liberates us to pursue programming across the broadest possible range of disciplines.

Kindness, Wisdom, and Grace

Our choice of these values is informed by Plato's notion of the Form of the Good and the Transcendentals, as subsequently developed by Emerson, Wilber, and others. The philosophical notions of goodness, truth, and beauty form an extraordinary symbol set in the realm of letters, but can appear lofty and unapproachable when they turn up on an action plan. We have therefore chosen to cast them in more tangible terms as kindness, wisdom, and grace, which in turn determine the qualities of lived experience we aim to bring forth.

Legally

We're a 501(c)(3) organization, incorporated in New York. Our disclosures are available on Guidestar.