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What does it mean to act for and from the whole?
How might our work be strengthened by paying attention to the whole as well as our own, specialized part of that whole?
Through our Whole Thinking Retreats, we help individual leaders from the environmental and social justice movements come together in community to consider these and more questions. Through our Whole Thinking Workshops, we help strengthen the work of organizations, coalitions and communities by helping them consider how their work relates to the larger picture of land and social change. The Bay Area Open Space Council is an example of an organization that has benefited from both programs.
Bettina Ring attended a Whole Thinking Retreat at Knoll Farm in 2005. That gathering helped her find her voice and, as she says, “get really clear about my truth.” Since then, she has “felt a constant urge to move toward wholeness and a passion for evolving [her] work.”
Through her leadership, the Bay Area Open Space Council (BAOSC) in San Francisco has been expanding the vision of its early leaders to take the work of conversation beyond acres saved to relationship, justice and connecting land and people. In her first year at BAOSC, she named the council’s annual conference “Building Whole Communities,” and there, began to “shape an agenda that introduced and built on the concepts of whole thinking.” At the same time, the council was launching its “Green Vision” collaborative with partner organizations in the Bay Area. Bettina invited Whole Communities to convene the Green Vision group in a Whole Thinking Workshop in early 2007. “It was amazing to me to see the shift that happened after that gathering,” she says. In the workshop, participants developed a draft statement of principles for their work together, informed by whole thinking, inclusiveness, and justice.
So successful was the workshop that Bettina invited us back to facilitate another one in early 2008 with an expanded group. Bettina paints a picture of a web of relationships growing stronger and more complex as time goes on. She points first to one organization and then to another in her area that is shifting its focus as a result of these gatherings. One participant joined another’s board and is now bringing the city’s voice to a regional organization; another participant invited Bettina to join her on a panel at the EcoCity World Summit to talk about building whole communities; another went back to pour energy into an urban park and garden initiative that brings diverse members of a community together. Not long after the second workshop, the BAOSC had a strategic planning meeting. “We had 100 percent participation from staff and board,” Bettina says, “and there has just been an amazing shift in thinking about how we do our work. We did a visioning exercise and it came out loud and clear that we want to focus on integrating land and water conservation with transportation, housing, health and education and making ‘nature within reach’—connecting land and people and ensuring that we’re reaching all people.”
