Ms Strong is President of the Manitou Institute, a non-profit charitable organization in Crestone, Colorado. She is an internationally recognized guest speaker and authority on ecumenical communities, sustainability and spiritually based environmental education. Ms Strong also founded Earth Origins Seeds, which is committed to the preservation of native seeds throughout the world and the Earth Restoration Corps, a leadership development program designed to train and educate youth in sustainability. Ms Strong's husband, Maurice Strong, is known as "father of the environment" and is President of the United Nations' Peace University.

Welcome everyone,

This is a very exciting day for us to welcome the latest colorful addition to our spiritual community here: Shinji Shumeikai, and Ms Koyama. We're very honored and happy to have you here. We're very excited. We all know what's going on in the world today. We're in serious trouble! Unless the human consciousness changes, it's very doubtful that we have much hope for the future.

So, with this tradition we hope to retrain a lot of people here and bring their country's profile way up; and also show their tradition's natural farming. Everybody knows what's going on with our food sources, and that we're in serious trouble there too. So Shinji Shumeikai has perfected a method of Natural Agriculture to guarantee that the next generation and generations after will have pure soils and pure food, because farming is a very significant aspect of what Shinji Shumeikai is bringing here.

Another one is, of course, to get enlightened through beautiful art and Jyorei, which is a method by which each of us can purify the spirit of our fellow man. So, Shinji Shumeikai is bringing great gifts to this sacred place. We are very grateful, and we are extremely happy to have you here! So far, and this is very unique, - we've never heard a bad thing about you! Everybody loves you! So, I welcome you from the depths of my heart; and the whole community is really happy to have you here.

So, let's do great work for the world! I know that Meishusama's great vision was that we have to help the whole world, not just one group of people but the whole world. So, welcome and thank you for coming, and thank you for designing and building this beautiful center. I think we're all going to be very happy with it.