Our History
Let’s begin with the present:
Today, Center for Whole Communities is a leadership development organization focused on strengthening change efforts by creating relationships between sectors, disciplines and individual leaders.
The core principles of whole communities work – building healthy relationship between people in support of healthy relationships with the earth, is grounded in systems-thinking, in ecology, and in traditional land-based cultures.
As an organization of people sharing perspectives on leadership, we strive to walk our talk and to model the practices and changes we ask others to consider making. We operate on a co-director model of shared leadership and are making a perpetual effort to become an intercultural organization. We are currently based on a working farm in Vermont, our organizational homeplace, while running programs in nine states and networking 1,000 alumni in 48 states. Our core program, the Whole Thinking Program, provides a six-day intensive personal learning and professional development experience to hundreds of leaders from very different environmental and social justice fields. We then provide a suite of follow-up workshops – in working across difference, in the power of story, in measuring what matters most, in transformational leadership, to support the ability of these alumni to create change in their own organizations and communities.
Our vision and strategies for the future include:
- With multiple home places in addition to Knoll Farm, we can provide an experience of what different land means to different people.
- Center for Whole Communities is led by people from the whole spectrum of race and diverse economic backgrounds.
- Our alumni have grown to 5,000 and are networked together to raise money, shape politics, and to create new alliances that transcend old definitions of movements and who’s in and who’s out.
- Our faculty has doubled in size and engages weekly with our alumni as consultants, thinking partners and facilitators on efforts like food justice, climate change, social entrepreneurship, and land-based community development.
- The core principles of Whole Communities work – building healthy relationships between people in support of healthy relationships with the Earth – becomes a central organizing principle of sustainability, of social justice, of environmentalism, and of the new economics.
Here’s the lineage of our work, and how we have described its origins:
The work of Center for Whole Communities began on the shoulders of many influential and courageous lives of the past half century. Our sense of justice and public service was taught to us by the life work of Chuck Matthei. Our commitment to equity and compassion has been inspired by Vine Deloria and Van Jones and through being witness to the truth of our own journeys. Our understanding of the collaboration between heart and mind is regularly rekindled by our memory of Dana Meadows. Our comprehension of how the land heals people, and of how people heal the land, was taught to us by Helen and Scott Nearing. Our belief in the power of right livelihood and democracy has been shaped by Bill Coperthwaite. Our faith in inspiration and beauty comes from Paul Winter. Our belief in the power of story comes from Thomas Berry and Arundhati Roy. Our faith in the transformative power of the land has been guided by Jeanette Armstrong, Linda Hogan and Wendell Berry. Our commitment to peace in this world through the love of one place comes to us from Gary Snyder.
Where the work started:
Center for Whole Communities’ work began in 2001 at a single place, Knoll Farm, and in the dreams and vision of two people: Peter Forbes and Helen Whybrow. The legal organization was founded three years later in 2004 by eight people: Peter Forbes, Helen Whybrow, Gil Livingston, John Elder, Danyelle Ohara, Torri Estrada, Diana Wright and Scott Chaskey.
The work began at Knoll Farm not because a farm in Vermont was the right place to launch the mission but because it was an exceptional place that was made affordable to the founders. It was an extraordinary place to begin, and which quickly became a soul place for the work.
The Vermont Land Trust had conserved this historic property, which had been farmed for over two centuries, so that it would not be subdivided and developed. But conservation alone would not keep Knoll Farm healthy. It needed a new vision, and sometimes a story finds the storyteller. In the Mad River Valley, a community of small farms, big mountains and deep woods has yielded to a landscape that struggles to hold it all together: population growth, paved roads, major subdivisions, tourism, vacation homes, and differences of opinion. As a humble response to this American story, Peter Forbes and Helen Whybrow, our co-founders, wanted to do more than just farm. They want to bring as many people as they could to Knoll Farm, to experience what it is to grow one's own food, to find the strength in one another to live in service to their own ideals and vision, and to re-kindle their purpose and passion.
In 2001, Peter and Helen invested every penny they had and bought Knoll Farm. In 2002 they launched Center for Whole Communities and began the first season of Whole Thinking Retreats that summer.
The first grant came from the Merck Family Fund of Boston, which enabled twenty leaders, some of whom devoted their lives to wilderness and others who loved working landscapes, to find common ground and shared courage. Scott Russell Sanders, Wendy Johnson, and John Elder were the early teachers who believed in the vision and lent us their good will and great skill. Their partnership, along with a founding board of directors of nine, launched Center for Whole Communities.
Our first staff member was Cara Robechek and critical early support came from Ann Day, Tom Johnson, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and Panta Rhea Foundation. We experimented with educational formats and types of retreats and settled into the Whole Thinking Retreat as our primary curriculum: by year three we were awarding almost fifty fellowships annually. That year we also launched our other two programs -- the Whole Thinking Workshops and Whole Measures -- and Peter and Helen started getting paid.
In year four, we added two more staff and convened our first retreat away from Knoll Farm, at the Penn Center in South Carolina. We adopted an organizational statement on race, power and privilege
and began an intentional transition in governance from the founding board to a governing board, thereby opening the control of the organization and expanding its reach.
The vision for our work continues to grow more solid and mature as it is shaped by our faculty and alumni. To ensure that these two groups have a strong hand in co-creating the organization, we began regular faculty retreats and alumni gatherings to deepen our collective work. Much of this journey has been from the individual –our founders- to the collective – our board, faculty and alumni.
In 2009, Ginny McGinn of New Mexico moved with her family to Vermont to become the organization’s deputy director. Within a year, Ginny was made co-director as we made the shift t a shared leadership model.