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Our Programs

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The world is changing rapidly, requiring all of us to draw on skills in leadership, relationship-building, collaboration, and communication. Our retreats and workshops are designed to build these skills, and to powerfully rejuvenate people who are working on the front lines of environmental and social change.

Center for Whole Communities’ programs bring together diverse leaders working in multiple disciplines and communities across the United States. Our curriculum enables participants to recognize, confront and explore differences, find commonalities, and to imagine their community whole. Environmental and social change leaders come to understand that their individual success is bound up in the success of others. What emerges from this work is stronger leadership, bolder visioning, and broader systemic change.

CWC’s programs include (please click on program title to follow link for more detail):

Whole Thinking Retreats: Each year, we offer fellowships to our Whole Thinking leadership development retreats. The week-long curriculum draws upon practices such as deepening connection to land, relationship building, working with and across difference, creativity, story, dialogue, and awareness practice.

Mission Retreats are a customized version of Whole Thinking Retreats created to meet the needs of client organizations, coalitions, and foundations to help them strengthen and expand their ability to enact broad social change.

Next Generation Retreats (NextGen) are a version of Whole Thinking Retreats that convene leaders (ages 20-35) from across the social and environmental change sectors to cross-pollinate and to find a collective voice that will help them step into leadership.

Urban Whole Thinking: Detroit. Following the curriculum and practices of a Knoll Farm-based Whole Thinking Retreat, this urban-based retreat will explore the work in the context of an urban environment.

Advanced Leadership Workshops: We offer one- to four-day Advanced Leadership Workshops, both at Knoll Farm and in communities across the country, to support our alumni/ae and other leaders as they seek to implement Whole Communities work in their home places. These workshops empower leaders to more effectively engage new constituencies, to hold dialogue among diverse partners, to seed organizational change, and to implement innovative new tools, new governance, and new models of success. Workshop offerings include Transformational Leadership, Finding the Story, Whole Funding, Whole Measures, and Conservation in a New Nation. Workshops are described in more detail here.

2042 Today: Young Leaders Re-Imagining Conservation: Increasingly, environmental change leaders are thinking about the exciting significance of 2042, the year when demographers predict that every metropolitan statistical area will be predominantly populated by people of color. In partnership with Center for Diversity and the Environment, we have developed an innovative leadership development program aimed at preparing young conservation leaders (35 and under) from all backgrounds and sectors to strengthen their collective work.

Whole Measures: Whole Measures is a values-based, community-oriented approach to planning, implementing and evaluating initiatives that foster healthy land and whole communities. This practical framework strengthens the ability of teams, partnerships, and coalitions to identify shared values and to build their work and evaluation metrics around those values. From this framework, and in collaboration with the Interaction Institute for Social Change, the Whole Measures Workshop was created. This workshop introduces the process design and practices to lead your organization, community, partners or stakeholders through values-based planning and evaluation.

Food and Farm Workshop Series Tools for a Changing World: The Food and Farm Workshops will cover a number of topics each season, all around the themes of learning how to reclaim the age-old and evolving arts of feeding ourselves from the source, taking care of the land, building the soil, using our hands, and nurturing our health through our knowledge and connection with plants.