People often become doctors because they want to heal people, and by extension, heal the world. Wendy Sternberg left her successful internal medicine practice in Evanston Illinois because she decided she could better heal the world through Genesis at the Crossroads (GATC), an organization she founded.

GATC mission “is to bridge cultures in conflict through the arts and to create innovative arts-education programs around the world.”

Wendy just spent the several months in Thailand as part of the very exclusive Rotary Peace and Conflict Studies at Chulalongkorn University. Wendy’s work was just written about in the Bangkok Post. Here they describe her best-known program.

The GATC’s most distinguished project to date is the Genesis World Music Ensemble, or the Saffron Caravan, which brings together music artists from the Middle East, North Africa and the Americas to revisit, reinvent and link musical traditions. The organisation began uniting musicians from cultures in conflict in 2004 with the pairing of a Jewish-Moroccan and a Muslim-Moroccan musicians. The artists had never been introduced to one another before, and together they performed with a band comprising musicians from nine different nationalities. Their performance served as a finale to GATC’s two-day ethnic music festival. The group later travelled to Los Angeles, New York and Washington, D.C. Later in 2005, GATC’s Israeli-Palestinian performance became a part of the United Nations’ 60th Anniversary celebration.

At See3 we have the pleasure of collaborating with Wendy to help her find a way to document and distribute video from her upcoming concert tour of Egypt and Jordan. We are also excited about how Wendy is expanding the work of GATC:

“Another humanitarian programme that incorporates arts education is Armed Them with Instruments, which encourages adults and children from the US to donate musical instruments to the children in North African and Middle Eastern countries. This programme also aims to take vulnerable youth off the streets by providing them opportunities to study music at conservatories.”

Some of us feel trapped in our professions and wonder, can we really change the world? Wendy Sternberg answers the question with a resounding Yes!