The Training Institute

ROLE and FUNCTION OF the Training Institute

To build a better world requires an ever-growing pool of people capable of contributing to the accomplishment of the myriad tasks at hand.

In this connection, the concept of the “training institute” was introduced by the Universal House of Justice in the mid-1990s. Its purpose is to assist individuals to deepen their understanding of the Bahá’í teachings, and to gain the spiritual insights and practical skills they need to carry out the work of the community.

The nature of the training institute can be understood by imagining an ongoing conversation taking place among friends in thousands upon thousands of social spaces—neighbourhoods, villages, schools, universities, and workplaces—concerned with contributing to the advancement of civilization through the application of Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings. As the number of participants in the conversation grows, processes to achieve collective spiritual and material goals in each space are set in motion.

We may think of the work of the training institute, then, as maintaining a system of distance education to fuel and facilitate this evolving conversation. The principal elements of the system include the “study circle”, the tutor, and a set of materials, grounded in the Bahá’í writings, that express the spiritual insights and the knowledge gained in the process of translating Bahá’u’lláh’s teachings into reality. The materials help the individual enter into the discussion of what the Bahá’í community has learned through experience as it has tried to contribute to the advancement of civilization. More crucially, they seek to involve him or her in this process of learning and in the diffusion of relevant knowledge.

“…The board (of the training institute) and those with whom it closely collaborates in a region or country strive to enhance a number of related institutional capacities. They endeavour to formulate a clear vision of the progress of the educational processes, foster capacity to learn systematically and to disseminate the accruing knowledge, and support a healthy evolution of the institute’s organizational schemes at the cluster and regional levels. They also labour to raise capable human resources for the institute’s various purposes, manage effectively financial and material resources, and address pertinent administrative concerns, especially in relation to institute staff and statistics. The complexity of each of these issues naturally grows as the community-building process advances in an increasing number of clusters across a region.”

International Teaching Centre, Attaining a Higher Level of Functioning, 2017

Ordering Training Institute Materials

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