The video’s message is summed up by its closing statement: Embracing vulnerability through service as leaders, empowering people and communities to create meaningful change. As Sisters grow their ministry in leadership for change, they ask fundamental questions that concern the global development community at every level. How can we transform the notion of leadership so that it centres the most vulnerable – and not the strongest – at the heart of our work? And what vulnerabilities of our own must we embrace, on this journey of transformation?
UISG’s Executive Secretary, Sister Patricia Murray, says: “Somehow, within the exercise of leadership today, I feel called to help create a global sisterhood where, as Sisters from many different congregations, from different cultures and contexts, we can respond together to the geographic and existential peripheries of our world.
There is a hunger and thirst in people for meaning and purpose, for peace and reconciliation, for community and mutual respect. This calls me, as a leader, to nurture those small mustard seeds where new life is emerging – such as empathy and openness to the other, mutual respect and enrichment, encountering and welcoming the stranger, understanding and celebrating difference.
When we join together across the multiplicity of divisions that exist in our various parts of the world and nurture these capacities, life begins to flourish, especially in places of great need.”