A disciple of the recently deceased Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne, who was informally revered as the Gandhi of Sri Lanka, Richard Flyer has dedicated his life to integrating embodied spirituality and the building of community-based ecosystems. A recent author, he synthesizes his learnings from five decades of global community-building explorations, outlining how a new culture of connection can be created from the bottom up through local communities. Noting that every crisis in the world is at its root a spiritual crisis, he says we must first cultivate "spiritual climate change" within ourselves and practice it daily "in the context of a down-to-earth, face-to-face, local community" rather than "trying to reform, fix, or tear down the systems by which society operates." He writes from his first-hand experiences with Sarvodaya Shramadana, a movement that has mobilized millions of poor across 15,000 villages in Sri Lanka.