Over the past six months, we have organized a NM chapter of SI (encompassing the entire state of NM, but centered around Albuquerque and Santa Fe, two population centers and long-time centers of conscious aging/sage-ing activity). We have had several meetings with various existing groups to explain the concept of SI chapters, to get their buy-in and to develop our own unique NM chapter. This report is to describe our history, our process and our current status as a chapter. We hope this information may help or encourage other chapters. We will give more information on the new chapter later.

We may be relatively unique here in New Mexico in that our work in sage-ing, and our organization of a group that embraces sage-ing principles, is already ten years old. Beginning in 2002, a small group (6-8) of interested individuals in Albuquerque and Santa Fe began meeting together to network and to explore the challenges and opportunities of the second half of life. At that time, I was the only person in the group with sage-ing experience, as a recently- graduated CSL of the Spiritual Eldering Institute. After a year or so, we named ourselves the Conscious Aging Network of New Mexico (CAN-NM), and while not identical in aims and interests with SEI (and now SI), we were very compatible (just a lot smaller!).

Our goals initially were to get to create a community of like-minded persons and to support one another in our individual work with persons in the second half of life. Some of us were professionals (social workers, aging care specialists, coaches, etc.) Others had a more informal connection with aging through volunteer service or other interests (such as me). What drew us together was we all wanted to help people realize their best selves as they approached and traversed their elder years. Building on our individual interests, we fairly rapidly began to explore what we could also do together to increase our impact on this elder population. Here is a partial listing of our projects and activities in these early years:

  1. In our first couple of years, we brought in two recognized speakers to present a program for the general public (The Tao of Aging, with David Chernikoff and Drew Leder). Its success (with a lot of publicity, hard work, crossing of fingers and good fortune by our small group) gave us a degree of recognition in the community and made money for our very-young organization that underwrote many subsequent activities.More recently, we have brought Richard Leider to Albuquerque to present a day-long workshop on Purpose, and to consult with our group on sage-ing/CA issues.
  2. We volunteered as members of the Planning Committee for the NM Conference on Aging (an annual meeting sponsored by the state which draws ~1500 persons/year,some professionals and the majority from the general public). As advocates for CA, we were able to choose or support the choice of several keynote speakers with a CA focus, including Rick Moody, Richard Leider and William Thomas over a several-year period. These three are now all members of SI’s Council of Honored Sages, but initially grew to know us at least partially through their NM keynote participation (and associated meetings/dinner discussions we arranged with CAN-NM members). As Planning Committee members, we also were able to establish a “conscious aging” track for the conference, which for many years has resulted in 10 to 20 workshops each year on CA topics, facilitated by CAN-NM group members and others.
  3. We supported the formation and ongoing activity of NM Wisdom Circles (which have different local names) in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Los Alamos and Silver City. Actually, the Circles in Los Alamos and Santa Fe even pre-dated CAN-NM (and SI) by several years, but we were able to give them organizational support at times, and there was overlap of some Circle members with CAN-NM. The Silver City group was formed by a sage-ing enthusiast, but disbanded when the organizer relocated (leaders with energy and commitment are necessary for ongoing success!). The Albuquerque Elder Circle has been going strong for over 9 years, regularly drawing 15-20 persons to its monthly meetings. Its members are mostly, but not all, persons who have attended one or more sage-ing/CA events in the past.
  4. We created and maintained a web presence through the www.can-nm.org website, which provides general CA information, publicizes upcoming events, displays articles and poems by our members and gives information on developing and maintaining Elder Circles. It is somewhat like our SI website, but not nearly as comprehensive in its offerings.
  5. We developed and maintained an interest list based on those who have attended any of our activities (talks, workshops, classes, conferences, etc.) or otherwise expressed interest (through our website presence). We make a point of requesting email addresses at each event we sponsor, and over ten years, that has developed into a 500+ name email list. We use this to publicize upcoming CA events in NM, and will use it in the near future to discuss our new SI chapter formation and to direct the public to the SI website and to our free membership offering. We currently have over 30 SI members in New Mexico (pretty good for a relatively small population state!), and we intend and anticipate growing our NM presence and membership even more in the future!
  6. We organized periodic special workshops on CA topics (e.g., Death and Dying, Community, Purpose, etc.) to present to the general public to introduce them to CA ideas.
  7. The Promise: This is a summary of the activities CAN-NM has been involved in over the past ten years. We hope this history may be instructive to others working to form SI chapters, since it illustrates a range of possibilities for effective local advocacy of sage-ing/conscious aging ideasand activities. You may, of course, find some activities that do not fit or would not work in your location, and you will doubtless also envision other possibilities that could bear fruit where you are. Nonetheless, this may give you some ideas for fueling your own SI chapter development over time, with one important difference. Even if you start small, as we did, you now have the energy, resources, ideas and influence of Sage-ing International and other SI chapters supporting you, which we did not until recently. So for you, as well as for us in the future, the sky’s the limit!

SI-NM Chapter: During the past six months, we have formed a NM chapter of SI. It took a bit of time because we already had a lot of CA organizational experience and activity in NM to consider and possibly to integrate. When the chapter option became a focus for SI last year, we began locally to discuss the opportunities this might afford our existing CAN-NM organization in the future. We also wanted to talk with our Elder Circles about SI’s related Wisdom Circle concept and possible opportunities there. The bottom line was, approximately 20 CAN-NM members (all active members of the group) were supportive and voted last fall to become a NM chapter of SI. Many of us were already SI members, and other CAN-NM members have now agreed to become SI members to support this broader sage-ing movement. Along with other SI members from NM who were not previously part of CAN-NM, we have now begun to reinvent ourselves, keeping the best parts of the old organization but allowing ourselves to create a new future as a SI chapter as well. This last weekend, we had a day-long retreat that brought together 21 of our CAN-NM and SI members to begin to envision our joint future as a new SI chapter. It is a work in progress, and probably always will be, and it is exciting! Embracing change, after all, is one of our sage-ing precepts. We have agreed to meet monthly to continue our growth and development.

Wisdom Circles: Some or all of the Elder/Wisdom Circles in New Mexico may eventually join the consortium of SI Wisdom Circles, but having been in operation for from 9 to nearly 20 years already, they are not ready to adopt all the recommendations and guidance given in the recently-developed Wisdom Circle pamphlet (even though they and I realize it is guidance, not gospel). They take a broader view of the needs of their members, which are not necessarily limited to learning about sage-ing principles. So they sometimes also talk about grand- parenting, health issues, down-sizing, how much is enough, care-giving and a myriad of other topics that may only be tangentially related to sage-ing (see our CAN-NM website for a list of 80 or so topics addressed in recent years by the Los Alamos Circle!). To me, as a SI advocate and the current NM chapter convener, the important thing is that they are helping their elder members create and maintain a wonderful community while providing them with the opportunity to engage with topics of importance to them. They are self-directed groups, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. It may well be that as we help to create other Wisdom Circles in NM, the new groups may have a structure more like has been envisioned by SI’s Wisdom Circle creators. Or perhaps not—it t should be their choice.

Service Projects: Regarding service projects in New Mexico, I believe that CAN-NM has historically been a service organization, at least in the sense that we have for many years served an educational function by bringing CA thought and conversations to the general public here. Other more specific service opportunities may come in the future. There does seem to be some interest within the SI-NM group in inter-generational themes, so that may be a direction that we will explore in the future.

Future Activities for SI-NM: At a minimum, we will continue to grow as individuals on our own sage- ing path within a supportive community of like-minded individuals, our SI-NM chapter. At the same time, we hope to continue to raise the consciousness of our elders as well as our policy makers and elder-related professionals to the current reality and the future promise of a more enlightened view of living and finding meaning in the second half of life.