On this page:
Mission Statement
Founders
History
Vision for Future

Mission Statement
Our mission is to connect, inform and promote the holistic community of the Washington, DC area.

We are creating an online community of spiritually minded people dedicated to living their lives more consciously, holistically, and naturally.Currently, WASN's website provides a free calendar of events for the entire spiritual community to use. WASN also sends out regular emails to its subscribers on events and issues that are happening in the DC area. And very soon we will have a Holistic Directory with a comprehensive listing of spiritual, holistic, and new age resources in the area.

Art Miller (Co-founder, Director)
Art is the Vice President of Copy Connection, a printing company in Silver Spring, MD. Just after the 9/11 tragedy, Art felt compelled to get more involved with activism and started a monthly series of dialogues called the "Peace Forum." Each month, he and other organizers invited prominent speakers to Washington, DC where they delivered messages of peace, hope and reconciliation. Art lives just north of Washington, DC in Silver Spring, MD. He can be contacted at art@copyconn.com

History of WASN

The Washington Area Spiritual Network (WASN) was created in 2000 by two activists, Art and Navin. When the two met, Art had already been thinking about ways to create spiritual community by connecting like-minded individuals over the Internet. Navin, being a professional web developer, gladly took on the task of designing the WASN website and developing the infrastructure that makes it run such as the databases, servers, and scripts. Within several months, the initial WASN website was released to the public and included a calendar of events, stories and articles, and a directory of spiritual organizations in the DC area. Over the subsequent months, traffic to the site steadily increased.

In 2002, Art and Navin had grand visions of creating a member-based organization with a monthly magazine called the "WASN Newsletter." The newsletter would be mailed to subscribers homes and distributed at hundreds of locations in the DC area such as health food stores, book stores, grocery stores, libraries, and community centers. They took on this task with great energy and enthusiasm. The title of the first newsletter was "Is War the Solution?" and the two activists went to Capitol Hill to collect statements from all political candidates running for office. They also wrote the articles for the newsletter, did the graphic design and layout, sold advertising, printed the newsletters, and finally drove through DC traffic to distribute the newsletters to dozens of locations.

It wasn't long before the two got totally exhausted and burnt out and decided that having a newsletter wasn't such a good idea after all! So they stopped producing the print newsletter and decided to enhance WASN's web features instead.

WASN currently has over 2100 members

Vision for Future

We are using Washington, DC as our "laboratory" to determine the most effective techniques for connecting people and catalyzing personal and societal transformation. Through experimentation and trial and error, we will develop a functional model that can be easily replicated in cities all over the United States and then the world. In the not too distant future, we would like to see other virtual communities using our ideas and technologies to create their own local versions of the Washington Area Spiritual Network. Perhaps you would like to bring the WASN concept to your city? Please contact Navin at nkulshresh@hotmail.com or Art at art@copyconn.com if interested.