From Tolerance to Appreciation

MARILYN TURKOVICH is the current Executive Director of the Charter for Compassion, which provides an umbrella for people to engage in collaborative partnerships worldwide. In December 2019, she spoke with MEGHANA ANAND about the organization, its partners, and the work done through the Charter in different countries. Marilyn is an educationist-author and writes about world religions and cultures, bringing out their diverse and uniting threads.

- MEGHANA ANAND

Q: How did it all begin, your work with the Charter for Compassion?

Well, I think it all started when I was a child from a hyphenated American family, in this case Croatian-American. I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood and experienced diversity first hand, through friendships and neighbors, and that kind of sparked how I felt about the world and the people in it. And that look of diversity continued, even when I went to college. The beginning part of my life was in Pennsylvania, in the eastern, middle Atlantic region of the US, and then I went to college in the South and experienced a whole other group of people. And to a certain extent I marched into a new part of history because Martin Luther King at that time was really centered on his work in the South and was involved in programs in the Kentucky area where I too was involved. So, that’s how it all started.

I went into education and went to Chicago, which was the hotbed of the Civil Rights Movement in the in the north at the time. As a matter of fact, MLK moved to Chicago for a while, so I got very involved with that. Maybe it was serendipitous, but there was also a bit of madness and planning attached to it as well.

Q: You have written a lot of educational content, books, curricula. Would you like to talk about that part of your work?