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Center for Whole Communities

Center for Whole Communities

A Healthy, Whole, Just Future for All Communities, Everywhere

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Search Results for: whole measures

CWC’s greatest strength is that we are a collaborative of skilled, loving and fierce facilitators, with decades of experience doing transformative leadership development and system change work. 

Our Purpose:

Center for Whole Communities exists to cultivate transformative leadership that weaves together and strengthens movements for justice and the environment.

Our leadership practices and frameworks build capacity at the individual, organizational, and community level to deepen awareness, embrace differences, and value relationships, making change possible.

Our Vision: A Healthy, Whole, Just Future for All Communities, Everywhere:

Center for Whole Communities believes that vibrant and equitable communities stem from healthy relationships to ourselves, each other, and where we live.

  • We envision a future where our movements for change are rooted in relationship, reciprocity, authenticity, and beauty.
  • We aspire to live at a pace that honors our shared humanity and aligns with the rhythms of nature.
  • We promote whole systems built on a foundation of justice, fairness, economic vitality, and accountability through strategies and governing structures that bring us closer together, not divide us.
  • We believe transformation begins in our hearts, minds, and actions, and comes from a place of joy and creativity.

It begins with you, and me – and it’s about all of us.

Our Theory of Change:

The social and ecological fragmentation that exists in America today is directly played out in our organizations, our communities, and our movements for change. Yet there is an enduring wholeness that exists alongside the challenges we face, revealing pathways across these divides.

We acknowledge the limitations of language as we attempt to honor the many aspects of difference and intersectionality we embody. We see the wholeness of our identities, and seek to heal the divisions we experience based on ongoing, systemic dynamics of power and privilege. While our work often leans into the intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality, we actively engage with all other aspects of ourselves, including but not limited to faith, gender identity, ability, veteran status, and national origin.

Our Whole Thinking Practices – awareness, working with difference, dialogue, and story – form the foundation of our approach to leadership development, holistic design and facilitation, and collaborative partnerships. We bring an ecological mindset, valuing principles of interdependence, emergence, and adaptation that guide and inform our work across networks, sectors, and ideologies.

Whole Measures is our framework for program design and evaluation, engaging communities in imagining and defining success collaboratively. These participatory, practice-based approaches center equity, encourage creativity, are rooted in place, and support both personal and systemic change.

Center for Whole Communities is committed to creating conditions where people from all sectors and backgrounds can collectively acknowledge and honor differences, and can build authentic, collaborative relationships between institutions and the communities they seek to serve.


Art by Alixa Garcia

The success of an intervention depends upon the interior condition of the intervener.

— Bill O’Brien

We understand that the problems facing our planet and its people are inextricably interwoven and our movements must reflect that reality and encourage cross collaboration and partnership.

CWC’s leadership practices and frameworks build capacity at the individual, organizational, and community level to deepen awareness, embrace differences, and value relationships, making change possible.

The leadership skills we need to bring about a more just future are not always the skills that are valued in dominant culture. We take a practice-based approach that recognizes that we each have a role to play in shifting culture, and sharing power. 

Our methodology has grown out of more than a decade of retreat-based fellowship work, and more recently a year-long Whole Communities Fellowship program that supported frontline leaders from across the country. Through online coaching, and zoom dialogue and learning space, we weave connections and capacity across sector, region and identity. 

Today we support leaders in navigating the often competing demands of accomplishing time sensitive project work, with the time and space needed to work in more equitable ways. Understanding how to value the practical and transactional work alongside a community oriented and relational approach is central to the leadership we need today. Building the capacity to balance the urgent needs here and now with long term culture change efforts is a focus of the leadership development work we do at CWC.

We have adapted our Whole Measures Framework to support leaders through a formative assessment process to identify their guiding values and leadership goals. Using the lenses of Self, Systems and Solidarity – one can develop goals for leadership development that focus on our personal capacity, and our contribution to our communities. 

We bring these approaches to our organizational and community engagements, and through fellowship programs, retreats, trainings, and coaching. Our Whole Measures approach also provides deep practice with leading processes that prioritize human health and well-being and equitable outcomes. 


Art by Alixa Garcia

The How is the What—Partnering in the Practice of Organizational Change and Development

Center for Whole Communities collaborates with leaders, organizations and communities to develop and implement projects, programs and trainings to catalyze transformation at the intersection of social and environmental problems. 

CWC approaches all engagements collaboratively. We bring expertise to the table, and, we know that in order to be effective in supporting the transformation within organizations and leaders it takes time and trust. We invest in relationships, learning organizational history and context, and understanding the experience of staff and board. With that, we identify the areas of greatest need, and design processes that foster equity both internally (systems, culture) and externally (programmatic, funding strategy). As systems thinkers, we adapt our approach to address the conditions present in a given context.

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.

— Vaclav Havel

Collectively our team has decades of experience doing transformative leadership development and system change work. While we facilitate training and education focused on centering equity, we take a systemic approach to changing structures and behaviors that perpetuate dominant cultural norms. Learning about structural inequities and history of racism and oppression will not be sufficient to change behavior or outcomes. We offer a practice-based approach that prioritizes building trust and relationships, while strengthening skills to engage in the difficult conversations and generative conflict inherent in disrupting systemic oppression, extraction and white supremacy culture.

CWC Applied Methods

  • Thinking Partnership (strategy and leadership coaching)
  • Process Design & Facilitation
  • Centering Equity
  • Whole Thinking in Practice Trainings & Retreats
  • Stakeholder and Community Engagement Planning and Implementation
  • Whole Measures (Framework for project planning, evaluation, and community engagement)
  • Network Strategy and Mapping

Transformative Practices

Enabling Conditions

  • Institutional Support & Backing (includes board and executive leadership) and is represented by financial investment and allocation of time
  • Time commitment to allow for trust building, combining intensive group experiences with applied work—bringing the practices into the org strategy, implementation and decision making. Building trust across differences is an iterative and progressive process. The understanding and willingness to invest time and navigate tension is critical.
  • Be willing to be changed—it is important that when strategies/goals include equity and justice, we must be willing to listen and adapt based on the needs and vision of those most affected. 

CWC has a strong commitment to working in teams. We have learned through countless engagements, retreats and programs that in order to serve a diverse group we need the strength of different lived experiences in order to provide effective facilitation and process design. Our work is strengthened when we have multiple perspectives addressing the inevitably complex dynamics that emerge in institutional and community contexts. 

Here’s how we work:

  • Strategic thinking partnership
  • Program design and development
  • Curriculum design
  • Custom Leadership Retreats and Workshops
  • Network development and cultivation
  • One-on-one coaching

Call us (802) 496-5690 or email us to talk more about how we can work with you.


Art by Alixa Garcia

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” —Rumi

Our ability to be aware of ourselves, our past, is a gift to the present moment. CWC’s work helps us stay present with each other: to fall down, get up, learn, grow and begin again.

Ginny McGinn

Senior Strategist

With heart, soul, and substance, CWC is making fundamental culture shifts within our movements, organizations, and institutions so necessary to our capacity to thrive on this planet.

Rosa Gonzalez

Board member, Whole Communities Fellow

CWC amplifies the voices of those who labor for justice and for joy. I learn each day from this team's commitment to transformative action and right relationship.....

Susannah McCandless

Special Projects

I am drawn to Whole Communities work because it.... centers an unwavering commitment to holding and facilitating courageous spaces that call us to the core of ourselves with undeniable skill, care, and vulnerability.

Samara Gaev

Senior Fellow

Through this work, I can practice into the world I believe is possible, where all beings are protected from harm and we are collectively healing the wrongs of the past, remembering and following original codes of reverence, reciprocity, repair and right relationship.

Kristin Rothballer

Senior Fellow

The processes and practices CWC grows alongside land and community are so needed in our daily collective efforts to live into the world we need and deeply desire. Deep love and gratitude for offering us more ways to show up to our own lives and with each other.

Tannia Esparza

Board Member, Whole Communities Fellow

At its heart, the work of CWC... is the work of healing. Healing from the impacts of our extractive economy and supremacy culture require practices that help us to love ourselves... AND community to create and support new possibilities with.

Kavitha Rao

Senior Fellow and Board Chair

I’ve come to believe that the most essential part of change work is cultivating human connection first and foremost.... to create the conditions for the creativity, trust and partnership that will allow us to manifest the world we want.

Julian Mocine-McQueen

Senior Fellow

I’m committed to listening for community stories that acknowledge and work creatively with difference, tension, and grief in ways that are generative, restorative, and life-affirming....

Mohamad A. Chakaki

Faculty Trainer

I believe that the deepest transformation (in our selves and in the world) comes... through understanding brought on by honest engagement, patience, courage, love, and genuine interest—all qualities I see at the heart of the work of CWC.

Jesse Maceo Vega-Frey

Faculty Trainer

....I’m constantly being challenged and challenging others to see our interconnectedness. My goal is always to bring history into the present and demonstrate the ways in which... “of all our studies, history is in the best position to reward our research.”

Delma Jackson III

Senior Fellow

....In a moment ripe for change, our world relies on the values and work driven at CWC. Grounded in land and planet, connected to diverse wisdoms and moving towards justice through leadership, CWC is the best way forward for me.

Patrick Brown

Board Member

....CWC's thoughtful, deeply inquiring and compassionate approach to facilitating change is a model that can be helpful in solving problems in all kinds of communities.

Kris Butler

Bookkeeper

I love how the work of CWC calls upon us to bring our full selves to one another; to embrace creativity as a means to connect, seek truth, and play; and encourages us to follow the lead of the natural world - always open to transformation.

Richarda Ericson

Senior Fellow

I continue to be impressed by CWC's commitment to justice, people and earth, and excited by their practices of truth-telling, relationship building and care.

Leigh Robbie Gaymon-Jones

Board Member

CORE PRACTICES
HOW WE WORK
MEET OUR TEAM
JOIN OUR TEAM

Our Offerings:

Co-creating Whole Measures

Facilitating Organizational Change
Retreats & Trainings
Virtual Community Series
Transformative Leadership

We envision a future where movements for racial, social and environmental justice are rooted in relationship, reciprocity, authenticity and beauty.

Practice with us.

Whole Measures for Urban Conservation

November 8, 2020
Resources

Connecting People to Power: Community Engagement Pilot Report

June 16, 2023
Resources

The Practice of Equitable Conservation in Cities

June 16, 2023
Resources

How Darkness Can Dance

December 19, 2024
blog

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Kristin Rothballer

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New York Times, December 20, 2020

‘Weather’ — The poet Claudia Rankine writes for the Book Review about the climate in America at this moment.

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Cascadia Underground, July 6, 2020

New ‘Cascadia’ Field Guide will use Indigenous Classification rather than Western Taxonomy

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Sogorea Te’ Land Trust

Sogorea Te’ Land Trust is an urban Indigenous women-led land trust that facilitates the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people.

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Whole Measures are designed to:

Create Alignment

Help organizations align their program priorities, decision-making, resources, and activities with values and practices that contribute to healthy, whole communities.

Engage Dialogue:

Engage Dialogue: Elevate and inform dialogue within and across organizations on the relationship between healthy lands, healthy people, and healthy communities.

Guide Program Evaluation:

Support the development of program evaluation systems that allow organizations and communities to measure impacts qualitatively and quantitatively over time.

Support Collaboration:

Create the foundation for more effective, reciprocal, and collaborative relationships, based upon a shared vision of success and common values.

Measure Impact:

Help organizations and change makers answer the question, “In what ways – positive or negative – do we affect the creation of whole communities? How can we measure those effects?”

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Art by Alixa Garcia