Press Release: Re-Imagine America® Campaign Seeks Common Ground

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Re-Imagine America® Campaign Seeks Common Ground

Civility and Shared Values are Path Forward

Cleveland, Ohio — September 6, 2011 — September 11^th marks the launch of a national campaign to unite America around the core values shared  by Americans of all faiths and political parties.  The Re-Imagine America® campaign challenges students, leaders and Americans everywhere to foster civility and champion common ground.  Televised discussions, website resources and teacher-student involvement are cornerstones of the campaign to raise awareness of the values that connect us.

The program was developed by Purple America, a national initiative of Project Love® Remember the Children Foundation, a Cleveland-based character-building program that has trained more than 50,000 American teens and 2,000 educators to build a culture of kindness, caring and respect in their schools. Founder Stuart Muszynski says his work has taught him that to achieve collective goals, individuals need to engage each other civilly and with an appreciation of their shared values.

Muszynski, his wife Susan, a clinical psychologist, and their children travelled across the country conducting almost 1,000 videotaped, face-to-face interviews with people they encountered. The trip included stops at the 2008 Democratic and Republican National Conventions. 

Muszynski says that despite geographic, racial, political, economic and other differences, when asked about their values, Americans everywhere said similar things.  The 12 values that were repeated most often are: Equality, Faith, Family, Freedom, Love and Respect, Self-Expression, Doing the Right Thing, Community, Giving Back, the Good Life, Opportunity, and Success.

“We are more alike than we are different,” Muszynski says. “America’s values are neither red nor blue. They are secular and non-partisan. They belong to all of us.”

As a leader who trains educators and students to promote school cultures that diminish and prevent bullying, he recognized that to strengthen our nation we need to shift the national dialog from the issues that divide us to the values that connect us.  Purple America’s Re-Imagine America campaign was created to do just that.

The campaign kicks off Sept. 11, 2011, with television programming airing in major cities across the country. “All of us who lived through the 9/11 terrorist attacks on our country remember the sense of national unity we experienced in the weeks that followed,” Muszynski says. “There was no doubt then that we were all Americans.”

Through a partnership with the National Education Association, Purple America is inviting teachers across America to strengthen the nation through classroom discussions about the secular, non-partisan values that connect us as Americans.  Educators can access resources to build student interactions around America’s values at www.purpleamerica.us.

The Purple America website includes information about values systems, a blog and online conversation, as well as a pledge for those who choose to commit to honor the 12 shared values through their behavior and decision-making.  For more information, go to www.purpleamerica.us.

About Purple America®

Purple America is a national initiative of Project Love® Remember the Children Foundation, a character-building program that has trained more than 50,000 American teens and 2,000 educators to build a culture of kindness, caring and respect in their schools. Purple America’s mission is to unite America around twelve values, neither red nor blue, that form our common ground: Equality, Faith, Family, Freedom, Love and Respect, Self-Expression, Doing the Right Thing, Community, Giving Back, the Good Life, Opportunity and Success. Project Love is a non-profit, 501c3 organization.

CONTACT:

Paula DePasquale
Landau Public Relations
216.912.2857
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