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
