In March and April of 2022, a collaborative program with the leaders 4 organizations and retreat centers was held to ponder the question: how are we called to faithfully honor our inner spiritual journey and hold the outer journey of working for justice in these challenging times? Read about what we learned.

As the Retreat Center Collaboration enters its fifth year, we’re updating aspects of our governance structure, core funding, fiscal sponsorship, and staffing to better reflect our values and better support our community and programs.

June’s Community Calls brought us together to share, listen, and learn from each other.

The Innovative Learning and Living Institute is “an opportunity to connect a new generation of neighbors, dreamers, and schemers with the mystery of retreat centers – and the gift of inhabiting spaces that have been set apart for reflection and transformation.”

What will it take for your organization or retreat center to tend to the wound of racism? As Lorren Buck and Marissa Metelica from the Racial Healing Initiative Team shared during a May 2022 Community Call, we can heal from the wounds. We can dream into possibilities of transformation.

Meditating in community, whether physically together or on Zoom, can be generative, enact trust in ourselves and others, and serve as a reminder to slow down, breathe, and tend to ourselves.

Lorren Buck and Arleen Peterson, Racial Healing Initiative team members, shared with participants an understanding spiritual bypassing, how it can show up in retreat center work, and collectively, how we can rise above spiritual bypassing.

Retreats always involve movement: Physical, cultural, psychospiritual, and political. Some of the most potent retreat experiences are the ones that bring us to the edge of our comfort zones. From the edges, the margins, we reflect upon who we are and begin to imagine who we might become.

Our legacies include people of great wisdom, champions of justice and with immense fortitude.  People who convened in sweat lodges, hush harbors and retreat centers.  In these places they purified their spirits, nourished their souls, and conditioned their bodies for the battles ahead.  Together we remember how they too helped to build the spiritual foundation for a loving world.

Victoria Santos and Jenyng Wu share the aggregated data and analysis that the Racial Healing Initiative collected in the retreat center assessment survey conducted in January 2022.

On this call, Christine Lajoie, HR manager at Fetzer Institute, and Francisco Burgos, executive director at Pendle Hill, share best practices, challenges, successes, and learnings in regards to human resources and compensation.

The journey through the pandemic has often been a hazardous one for retreat centers. In this community call, we learn from Eve Wachhaus at Pearlstone about how her team has navigated the last two years at this adventurous retreat center in Baltimore.

The Racial Healing Initiative team opens their series of community offerings on racial healing by inviting retreat center leaders to bring their questions and stories about race, power, and racial healing. In this RCC Community Call, Arleen Peterson and Rachel Plattus facilitate practice, story-sharing, and discussion.

On this Community Call, we take stock of our community's needs and interests, discuss how retreat centers are structuring equitable pricing for programs, and share pandemic-related news and check-ins as we continue to navigate those challenges.

Our first community call of 2022 is an exchange of our collective learnings and a discussion on how we may turn to our local and marginalized communities to help us hold this question.

Explore several facets of the RCC community's recent efforts around racial equity, justice, and healing, and hear from the program designers and facilitators who have contributed their leadership to the following RCC programs: Roots to Reach, the JEDI Circle, and the Racial Healing Initiative.

For our Community Call in the week prior to Thanksgiving and Native American Heritage Day, a small group of RCC community members gathered to spend time together slowing down and turning inward. Several folks brought poems to pass around — a way to share in the bounty of our collective wisdom.

Wondering what technological platforms other retreat centers are using? On this community call, peers share their experiences with applications, software, and platforms.

The Retreat Center Collaboration is excited to announce the launch of the Racial Healing Initiative, a brand-new RCC program made possible with generous support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and other future supporters.

On this week’s Community Call, Shakiyla Smith, Vice President of Organizational Culture at the Fetzer Institute, shared her professional insights on navigating complexity and meeting adaptive challenges in the sacred spaces of retreat centers.