I'm a scatterbrain! When I read this several threads came to mind and I'm not at all sure how to braid them together or even if it's worthwhile or relevant to this discussion.

Louis Raths was a student of John Dewey and a long time professor of Education at New York University. He is credited with formulation of Values Clarification. The Book Values And Teaching lays out Raths' ideas.

"Persons have experiences; they grow and learn. Out of experiences may come certain general guides to behavior. These guides tend to give direction to life and may be called values. Our values show what we tend to do with our limited time and energy."

So Rath's and his collegues were less concerned with values as they were the processes of valuing; i.e. what are the most effective processes for obtaining values.

From the best I can tell Values Clarification in schools had a short life span because the views seemed anti-traditional or hippysh*t. Naturally, I think Raths' approach appeals to me ;-)

So the process of valuing came first to mind. Then I thought of a vignette in Ruth Benedict's "Patterns of Culture:

"A Chief of the Digger Indians, as the Californians call them, talked to me a great deal about the ways of his people in the old days..."

"One day, without transition, Ramon broke in upon his descriptions of grinding mesquite and preparing acorn soup. 'In the beginning,' he said, 'God gave to every people a cup, a cup of clay, and from this cup they drank their life.'..."They all dipped in the water,' he continued, 'but their cups were different. Our cup is broken now. It has passed away.'"

"...[H]e had in mind the loss of something that had value equal to that of life itself, the whole fabric of his people's standards and beliefs. There were other cups of living left, and they held perhaps the same water, but the loss was irreparable. It was no matter of tinkering with an addition here. lopping off something there. The modeling had been fundamental, it was somehow all of a piece. It had been their own."

One of the central problems with ideas about values is the intersection of values and culture.

Benedict's book is probably regarded as a "classic." Published in 1934 and remarkably accessible, the book, or at least certain categorizations about the book, are offered to today's students as "what not to think." Culture is a much disputed construct. But where I find Benedict so worthwhile is her central questioning about the relationship between individual human beings and the culture in which they live. The critics of Benedict seem to downplay Benedict's insight into the mutableness of culture and her steady commitment to promoting peace among peoples.

So I'm a fan of two old-fashioned approaches to the sorts of problems you're thinking about.

On the one hand I view the formulation of values not as a process of inculcation, something poured (or knocked) into them from the outside, but rather a process of reasoning as an "inside job." Mary Catherine Bateson wrote a book "Composing a Life" and that expresses what I'm talking about. People live their lives in a "culture" whatever that is. And while culture seems to be "somehow all of one piece" cultures adapt and change, and in some sense are composed, but not at the level of any individual in that culture.

I see the Acholi cup not as "passed away" as Benedict's interlocutor spoke of his culture, but the cup needs repairing. The kids of Opok Farms are a part of that cup. Their repair is essential to it. The formation of values is a part of the repair of the wider culture, but also the broader acts of restoration are part of their lives too.

The way we do our lives here in the USA is a faulty cup. The image that comes to mind is trying to drink from the bucket a steam shovel. But even within this broken culture, the lives of people all over the world affect us.

Especially looking at change and adaptation, it seems that valuing and culture are at different levels. And a "global consciousness" for lack of a better term to describe the sorts of human adaptation we need to do together is at yet another level.

I've babbled too long already, so I'll just point to two articles you may find interesting: The first Regarding a New Humanism by Salvador Paniker. The Second Time Loops by Paul Davies (There's something shorter I read within the last day or so by him, but I can't find it).

In sum it seems your project, and the related project of Peter Hurst deal with the relationship of three related creations: values on an individual level, cultural repair, and Global or Planetary consciousness. What's important is understanding the relationships. In understanding them--how they work together--the differences of logical type or level are important to keep straight. I also think that the assumptions about our three fates: past, present, future, may need to be altered--the reason I linked to Paniker's and Davies articles. Relentlessly shallow as my analysis is, I imagine the universe in creation--certainly our understanding of it--rather than "created."