Jessie Sutherland, Founder, Worldview, Strategies
By ADRIAN MACK
The theme was False and Genuine Reconciliation. In a room filled with people representing both sides of inter-generational violence, Jessie Sutherland’s improvised session with a group of grassroots and government leaders from Somalia had her posing the significance of both a nearby tree and the noisy incursion of a lawnmower. One minister was moved to declare, “We can’t just cut out our problems; we must root them out!” This is Sutherland’s genius at work.
As founder of Worldview Strategies and author of Worldview Skills: Transforming Conflict from the Inside Out, she is concerned with transforming relationships in our current era of dramatic social change through sensitivity to “higher” things. When the common human experience is lost in the roles we assume for ourselves, be it victim or oppressor, it’s art and nature that rescue and bind us.
“Really, my heart is in movement building and societal change,” she says. “But it’s also in awareness that it’s a parallel process of political and personal transformation.” Sutherland smiles and hands the tape recorder back, after an invigorating hour-long conversation that touched on Arnold Toynbee’s A Study Of History and Mary Clark’s work at determining the neurochemical nature of conflict.
We have discussed Sutherland’s extensive travel: Europe, North Africa, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Syria, Jordan, Turkey, West Africa, Peru, and specific examples of her work. “I feel like we’re in an era of symbolic illiteracy,” Sutherland says. “On this ‘other’ level, every moment is pregnant with significance. We must learn how to pay attention.”
photo by 
