William Spear

Activist, Connector, Consultant, Designer, Educator/Teacher, Investor, Life mentor, Parent, Philanthropist, Potential employer, World traveler, Writer/Editor

Nearly 50 years ago, after starting a walk-in free clinic and suicide-prevention hot line in the middle of the 1960s, my work has been primarily focused on understanding the meaning of compassionate care, disaster relief, the relationship between diet and health, integrative medicine, vital design (feng shui), and end-of-life counseling. I’ve led trauma relief teams all over the world in response to disasters, an outreach called Second Response - and an initiative of the non-faith based "Fortunate Blessings Foundation" which I founded with my wife thirty years ago. We’ve been quietly building social-emotional resilience in communities around the world since 2004 where our primary focus known as PLAYshops have reached more than 250,000 children and continues to be an integral part of capacity building and resilience empowerment. We’ve trained more than 6,000 parents, teachers, disaster specialists and mental health professionals including on site collaboration with Doctors Without Borders, Mercy Corps, Save the Children, the International Red Cross, World Vision, Hope International and numerous others in remote mountain orphanages in rural Nepal, fishing villages in coastal Japan, Samoa, the Philippines and Sri Lanka, and inner city neighborhoods in Maryland, New York and Connecticut. Beginning in early 2015, we refocused our global, educational efforts to serve local communities in Connecticut and nearby states with strategic plans in place to expand across the region and nation. Currently, we offer four core programs based on our body-centered methodology. Our programs support those with whom we work directly while creating a ripple effect, ultimately forging broader communities built on shared resilience and individual empowerment. We lead PLAYshops in public and private schools in Connecticut and also conduct "Caring for the Caregiver" programs for various social service agencies in Connecticut as well as regular courses on Disaster Response Preparedness for Citizens Corps, Medical Corps and Community Emergency Response Teams through the Department of Homeland Security (FEMA). Much of my heart-to-heart work began after joining the Center for Living with Illness and Dying at Yale University Hospital in 1978. I led various support groups for men with “G.R.I.D.”, later called AIDS, as hundreds were stricken with the illness. Much of what I saw counseling men with AIDS and hundreds of cancer patients during the 70's also led me look more closely at the relationship between diet and disease. As a result, in the same year (1979) I married my wife, we opened one of the country's first tofu production companies, The Bridge, which today still provides tofu and other traditional foods throughout the NYC and East Coast marketplace. I counseled many people facing life-threatening illnesses who changed their diet and lifestyle in those early days of the natural foods movement before Whole Foods replaced dozens of local food coops. Despite their efforts, I witnessed far too many deaths and felt unable to be of service to patients in their struggle. I decided to pursue in-depth training in the mid 1980’s with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the foremost authority on the subject of end-of-life care, and later with Tibetan Lama Sogyal Rinpoche, who at the time was writing "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying." During the late 1980’s, I conducted dozens of seminars and workshops for hospice volunteers and caregivers in Europe and the U.S. on compassionate care at the end of life. In 1991, when war broke out in the former Yugoslavia, I made six separate visits to Bosnia-Herzegovina, Pula, Split, Zagreb and other sites in Croatia to work with victims of war, survivors of torture, refugees, dying children and others affected by the wars. More recently, as refugees began to pour out of Syria, Second Response has worked with the Croatian Ministry of Social Policy and Youth and the Croatian Red Cross focusing on the special needs of young refugees, caregivers and first responders. I also joined the board of MADRE to further work with refugees and women in developing countries. My blog on disaster response and working with trauma appears in the Huffington Post and brings attention to the unique needs of traumatized children. As a part of this effort, I wrote the guidebook "Helping Children Work Through Trauma", available for download in six different languages on our website. * * * In the midst of my disaster work throughout the 1990s, I put on another hat and conducted nearly a hundred seminars in the United Kingdom, Europe, Asia and Australia on the practice of feng shui. I served as the first honorary president of the International Feng Shui Society headquartered in London after my first book, Feng Shui Made Easy, became a best-seller. It is now translated into sixteen languages. In 1998, I founded the Silent Oceans Trust in order to bring the issue of ocean noise caused by low frequency sonar to the forefront.

Listening; learning; music; generosity; children's ability to recover from trauma; diet and health; integrative / collaborative medicine; puzzles.

Non-verbal, body-centered play in response to trauma rather than talk.

End of Life Care, Feng Shui, Integrative Medicine, Macrobiotics, Mentoring, Personal Transformation, Sustainable Design, Trauma Care, Urban Planning

First time, surely not the last.

Crossword puzzles, finding the key points, ping pong