Call begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST)

Our Community Calls provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders. To join us on a Community Call, please subscribe to the mailing list. You’ll receive a reminder email with the Zoom link the day before each call.

Facilitator: RHI Team

Topic: Racial Healing Workshop: Embodying Resilience: A Path Forward Together

In times of transition, our commitment to connection, resilience, and healing is more important than ever. We invite you to join the Racial Healing Initiative as part of Retreat Center Collaboration for a special 90 minute post-election Community Call. This is a dedicated space for grounding, reflecting, and cultivating collective healing after the U.S. Presidential Election.

Together, we’ll explore how to root ourselves in resilience and respond thoughtfully and compassionately to the events and outcomes that shape our lives and communities. This gathering offers a virtual refuge for contemplative reflection, group dialogue, and supportive embodiment practices designed to help us process and navigate the moment with greater awareness.

What to Expect

Opening Embodiment Practice: Grounding ourselves with gentle breathwork and mindful movement to prepare for deep listening and reflection.

Contemplative Reflection & Community Discussion: Guided reflection on the impact of the election and an opportunity to share insights, hopes, and challenges in breakout groups. Together, we’ll consider questions like:

• What are you noticing in your body and emotions following the election?

• How can we support each other in moving forward with courage and compassion?

• What intentions can we set as a community to embody resilience and care for one another?

Closing Embodiment Practice: A centering practice to ground and support each participant, cultivating a sense of peace, hope, and readiness for the path ahead.

This is a safe, supportive space for open, honest sharing. We look forward to being in community with you and navigating this time with presence, resilience, and hope.

Warmly,

The Racial Healing Initiative

Call begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)

Our Community Calls provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders. To join us on a Community Call, please subscribe to the mailing list. You’ll receive a reminder email with the Zoom link the day before each call.

Facilitator: Nanci Lee

Topic: Fine-Tuning Your Guest Experience with Equity and Racial Healing in Mind

To kick off dialogue and sharing about equity and radical hospitality in our RCC community, Nanci will share some of the practices at Tatamagouche Centre and insights arising from working in reparative land practices and BIPOC circles including a recent RHI Retreat at SoulFire Farm. Part of our work is cultural- to move our organizational and circle cultures from inclusion to equity, radical hospitality and a feeling of home and collective care. We'll have some large and small group dialogue around these important conversations and practices.

Call begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)

Our Community Calls provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders. To join us on a Community Call, please subscribe to the mailing list. You’ll receive a reminder email with the Zoom link the day before each call.

Facilitators: Stanley Wu, Oren Slozberg

Topic: Resilience Within Climate Chaos, Part 2

Join us for a conversation on what practical resilience means for retreat centers in the context of hurricane Helene’s devastating impacts. 

We want to hear from you if your community and retreat were impacted by this recent storm. What you have learned and how you are responding?

Secondly, we will explore together a scenario where natural disasters are exacerbated by climate change. Imagine a scenario where this power is out for a week or more, displaced refugees are looking for shelter, emergency response is overwhelmed, stores are low on food, and tap water is unsafe to drink. How would you respond in this scenario?

Scenario work offers several key benefits: 

1. Improve decision making: explore possible futures and informed decisions. 

2. Enhance preparedness: identify potential risks and opportunities. 

3. Strategic flexibility: encourages adaptive strategies.

4. Challenge assumptions: reveals and questions deeply held assumptions. 

5. Fosters creativity: stimulates innovative thinking. 

We can use scenario work to increase our adaptive capacity and support resilient decision making. Given the fact that natural disasters are increasingly frequent and impactful, how do we prepare for a future many of us will most likely need to navigate? 

*** September 19, 2024: To allow more time for the new director to land at RCC, this call has been POSTPONED. Bookmark this page for updates ***

Call begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)

Our Community Calls provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders. To join us on a Community Call, please subscribe to the mailing list. You’ll receive a reminder email with the Zoom link the day before each call.

Facilitators: RCC Stewardship Circle + the new RCC Director

Topic: Welcoming Our New RCC Director!

Call begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)

Our Community Calls provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders. To join us on a Community Call, please subscribe to the mailing list. You’ll receive a reminder email with the Zoom link the day before each call.

Facilitators: Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma

Topic: How Our Centers Serve in Politically Divided Times

Retreat centers serve as, among other things, spaces of refuge, healing, and learning. How are we bringing these qualities to meet our communities’ needs both before and after a fraught U.S. election on November 5? Come with your own examples and questions, and be prepared to learn and dream together.

Call begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)

Our Community Calls provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders. To join us on a Community Call, please subscribe to the mailing list. You’ll receive a reminder email with the Zoom link the day before each call.

Facilitators: RCC Stewardship Circle

Topic: RCC Evolution Update

Join the RCC Stewardship Circle to hear updates on our leadership transition and share your feedback as part of the collaborative community that is the RCC. Your voice matters as we build our network’s future together in a spirit of transparency, deep listening, and mutual care.

Call begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)

Our Community Calls provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders. To join us on a Community Call, please subscribe to the mailing list. You’ll receive a reminder email with the Zoom link the day before each call.

Facilitators: Eve Wachhaus, Erin McAuley

Topic: Managing Risks at Retreat Centers

Risk at retreat centers can take many different forms—facility maintenance, emergency preparedness, safety protocols, organizational procedures, and more. On this call, Eve Wachhaus of Adamah will frame what risk can look like at retreat centers, and dive into the exploration of one area of risk management: contracts, insurance, and legal protections. 

How do you manage risks at your retreat center? There will be time for community questions and discussion, and we invite you to bring your questions, sample contracts (with all personal or identifying information removed), and share your methods for managing risk. (Please bear in mind this will not be a forum to discuss ongoing legal entanglements—legal proceedings should always be kept confidential). Join us for a grounding and generative discussion!

–

About Eve Wachhaus: Eve is a foodie who loves to build hospitality systems. She is a 33-year veteran of the hospitality industry, and  has managed hospitality operations in the corporate, social and Kosher markets, with Hershey Entertainment & Resorts, Hyatt Hotels, her own catering company and food blog, and now with Adamah. In addition to all forms of hospitality operations from housekeeping to food service, Eve has been committed to housing justice, and she spent eight years leading affordable housing and disaster recovery efforts with Habitat for Humanity, and co-created Harrisburg, PA’s Long Term Disaster Recovery Committee. Currently as COO of Adamah, Eve oversees retreat operations at both Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Connecticut and Pearlstone in Maryland. Eve brings her expertise and her contagious optimism to Jewish Retreating for over 20,000 guests a year. In her tenure, Eve oversaw the pandemic emergency food response, opened a boutique retreat addition on campus, and facilitates Retreat Jewish, bringing operators of Jewish retreat centers together to elevate the field of Jewish retreating in America. Also, Eve makes great hummus.

Call begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)

Our Community Calls provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders. To join us on a Community Call, please subscribe to the mailing list. You’ll receive a reminder email with the Zoom link the day before each call.

Facilitators: Nanci Lee, Brenda Salgado

Topic: Racial Healing Workshop: Seasonal Attunement, Ritual, and Food Sovereignty

How do retreat centers attune to seasonal rhythms, ritual, and the land? Join Nanci Lee and Brenda Salgado for a community conversation exploring how retreat center programs—camps, sunrise ceremonies, seasonal retreats, food sovereignty and culinary farms, gatherings for planting and harvest—connect to racial healing.

What personal or organizational practice do you have that attunes to the seasons and the rhythms of the land? How do you acknowledge diverse practices and ways of being? We invite you to bring your own stories to share during this community discussion.

Call begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)

Our Community Calls provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders. To join us on a Community Call, please subscribe to the mailing list. You’ll receive a reminder email with the Zoom link the day before each call.

Facilitators: Stanley Wu, Oren Slozberg

Topic: Resilience Within Climate Chaos

Join us for a conversation exploring core components of resilience for land based retreat centers and community centers. Stanley Wu and Oren Slozberg will facilitate a conversation to begin organizing an enormous topic of how to identify first steps towards developing resilience.

Call begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)

Our Community Calls provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders. To join us on a Community Call, please subscribe to the mailing list. You’ll receive a reminder email with the Zoom link the day before each call.

Facilitator: Kirstin Vander-Giessen Reitsma

Topic: Addressing Common Hospitality Obstacles

As retreat center stewards, our vocations are organized around a core belief in the power of hospitality to heal and to transform. Henri Nouwen defines hospitality as space to be who we are, and to change. We can each tell stories of beautiful hospitality moments that glow with a magical light beyond ourselves and our ordinary capabilities. But we can also tell stories about the times people simply “being who they are” set off a small avalanche of unwelcome consequences. In this call, we’ll pool our collective wisdom to expand our thinking about specific hospitality-related challenges.

Call begins at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)

Please contact RCC Admin Assistant Erin to get more information and attend this conversation.

Moderators: Jamie Deering, Leslie Wright

Topic: Discovering the Assets Among Us

On this call, we will be collaboratively exploring the assets in our group. Your assets might include:

• Skills you have (e.g., graphic design)

• Knowledge you want to share (e.g., how to develop a contract)

• Networks you participate in (e.g., other groups that may benefit from connection with the RCC Midwest Region, and vice versa)

• Other strengths you bring to the table (e.g., enthusiasm!)

Come to this collaborative time prepared to share your input as we explore these focal questions together:

• What assets do you have that you or your team would enjoy sharing with others? (What would you like to do more of?)

• What are three unmet expertise needs of your retreat center?

We believe our sustainable future is our network with each other. Let's discover how we can help each other flourish.

The Midwest Region Affinity Group meets quarterly and is for any retreat centers located in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.

Call begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)

Our Community Calls provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders. To join us on a Community Call, please subscribe to the mailing list. You’ll receive a reminder email with the Zoom link the day before each call.

Facilitators: RCC Stewardship Circle

Topic: RCC Evolution Update

Join the RCC Stewardship Circle to hear updates on our leadership transition and share your feedback as part of the collaborative community that is the RCC. Your voice matters as we build our network’s future together in a spirit of transparency, deep listening, and mutual care.

Call begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)

Our Community Calls provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders. To join us on a Community Call, please subscribe to the mailing list. You’ll receive a reminder email with the Zoom link the day before each call.

Facilitator: Brenda Salgado

Topic: Energetic Hygiene and Sovereignty Practices

Holding space for others is both beautiful and requires a lot of energy from us. For so many of us, we have been taught about physical hygiene from a young age: taking a shower, brushing our teeth, etc. We haven't always been taught about energetic hygiene and how to restore our energetic field before, during and after challenging events, holding space for others, or after hearing difficult news. Part of being able to engage in racial healing and other rewarding work that stretches and grows us is learning to connect to our body and breath, and learning how to feel agency to clear and restore our energy. Brenda will share about Toltec perspectives and practices on energetic sovereignty and responsibility, and will also create space for collective wisdom and sharing in our community about how others in our network work with clearing and restoring your energy when it is needed. Come for sharing and restoration!

Call begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)

Our Community Calls provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders. To join us on a Community Call, please subscribe to the mailing list. You’ll receive a reminder email with the Zoom link the day before each call.

Facilitators: Francisco Burgos, Erin McAuley

Topic: Open Space

This call will provide multiple opportunities to explore topics that are important to your center now. We’ll begin by exploring three main topics of interest that retreat center leaders identified at last year’s RCC Annual Retreat:

• Intergenerational Leadership

• Successful Program Stories

• Resilience

You’re invited to bring a topic of your own and we’ll offer multiple breakout rooms for smaller conversations about these topics before coming back for large group harvesting. We look forward to seeing you there.

Call begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)

Our Community Calls provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders. To join us on a Community Call, please subscribe to the mailing list. You’ll receive a reminder email with the Zoom link the day before each call.

Facilitators: Francisco Burgos, Nanci Lee, Michael Shewburg, Oren Slozberg, Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma

Topic: RCC Transition Check-in

Join the RCC Stewardship Circle to hear updates on our leadership transition and share your feedback as part of the collaborative community that is the RCC. Your voice matters as we build our network’s future together in a spirit of transparency, deep listening, and mutual care.

Call begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)

Our Community Calls provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders. To join us on a Community Call, please subscribe to the mailing list. You’ll receive a reminder email with the Zoom link the day before each call.

Facilitator: Brenda Salgado

Topic: Racial Healing Workshop: Welcoming Spring with Ritual, Reflection and Creativity

For different cultures and traditions, Spring Equinox holds deep meaning connected to the rebirth, germination, new life, creativity, and the return of the light. People around the world continue to gather in community, ritual and celebration to honor this time of renewal. With all we are holding, with the extremes of beauty and suffering in the world, let us take time to honor the lessons of nature. The cherry blossoms in my front yard are a reminder to bloom and begin anew. The rosemary flowers invite my bee neighbors to dance and gather to make sweet honey together.

Join us in this spirit of renewal, and collectively nourishing what we want to plant seeds for, for our centers, families, and communities. We will also be reflecting on prayers and intentions for our RCC/RHI Beloved Community and for balance, justice and compassion in the world.

Please bring paper and any writing instruments you would like.

Call begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST)

Our Community Calls provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders. To join us on a Community Call, please subscribe to the mailing list. You’ll receive a reminder email with the Zoom link the day before each call.

Facilitators: Nanci Lee, Francisco Burgos

Topic: A Celebration of Ben Scott-Brandt and RCC

Join us for a BYO drinks-and-snacks virtual open house to celebrate Ben Scott-Brandt and all the RCC has accomplished under his leadership. Stewardship Circle members Nanci Lee and Francisco Burgos will be our emcees as we offer our toasts or stories or songs or poems or…be creative! Ben will offer some remarks as well around 2:00 p.m. EST. We hope to see you there as we honor this big transition for Ben and our community.

Call begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST)

Please register here to attend this conversation.

Facilitator: Ben Scott-Brandt + TBD

Topic: Initial Conversation

The purpose of this affinity group is to spark curiosity and connection between leaders at senior, well-established centers and those who are imagining or just launching brand-new retreat centers. Possible outcomes of this initial conversation might include regular quarterly meetings for this group, 1:1 mentorship relationships, or a Google Group thread where participants can continue to connect asynchronously. At this meeting, we'll play a couple icebreaker games to get to know each other, and invite Q+A to learn more about what's alive across this old/new polarity within the RCC community.

Call begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST)

Our Community Calls provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders. To join us on a Community Call, please subscribe to the mailing list. You’ll receive a reminder email with the Zoom link the day before each call.

Facilitator: Ben Scott-Brandt, Erin McAuley

Topic: Effective Marketing with Limited Resources

Join your RCC peers for an interactive discussion as we exchange notes on effective marketing tools and strategies that work for retreat centers. Many centers don’t have the time or staff to develop sophisticated marketing approaches that harness technology and are driven by data. But every center needs effective marketing. We’ll look at a few simple questions: Who are you trying to reach? What communication tools and platforms have proven the most effective? How are you expanding or deepening your guest base? By pooling our collective wisdom, this Community Call will help us see the simple improvements we can each make to improve our marketing impact.

Call begins at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST)

Please contact Ben Scott-Brandt to get more information and attend this conversation.

Facilitator: Leslie Wright

Topic: Choosing Collaborations That Work

Nonprofits talk about collaboration with great frequency. Funders often ask for it. And collaboration may become necessary for many of us to sustain our operations and impact. Most of us can tell at least one experience with a “collaboration” that was disappointing or even damaging. Collaboration can lead to transformative results but it will take work and good ones almost always involve some risk to participants. So how do you decide if you and your organization will take the plunge? Join us to explore some of the indicators of a worthy collaboration. We will also share some tools to help guide your decision-making.

The Midwest Region Affinity Group meets quarterly and is for any retreat centers located in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.

Call begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST)

Our Community Calls provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders. To join us on a Community Call, please subscribe to the mailing list. You’ll receive a reminder email with the Zoom link the day before each call.

Facilitator: Brenda Salgado

Topic: Opening Up Our Money Stories

Money is one form of wealth, and all forms of wealth are currency and energy. What we feel, think and experience in our bodies regarding our relationship to wealth is part of our human journey. The beliefs and patterns we hold around money are impacted by our experiences, as well as ancestral and societal influences. Opening up our money stories is a way to observe and transform our own relationship to the flow of abundance, wealth and energy in our lives.

Many of us have been taught to hold shame or silence around money. In this workshop, we will share exercises for thinking more broadly about wealth, and inviting abundance as a state of being into your life, allowing for healing and transformation of your evolving money story. From this place we call in resourcing for our well-being, our communities, and our work in the world.

This call will NOT be recorded. Please join us live on Zoom. Receive the link to join by subscribing to the mailing list.

Call begins at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST)

Our Collaboration Hubs are spaces for retreat center leaders to collaborate on specific topical interests. To join this conversation, register here.

Facilitators: Ben Scott-Brandt, Oren Slozberg

Topic: Strategy Discussion: Retreat Centers as Resilience Hubs

We invite you to join this peer cohort for a strategy discussion around a new proposed resilience initiative at RCC. Our purpose for this meeting is to clarify the ideas that have been shared thus far and put together our next steps. There's a wide array of opportunities before us to create meaningful, lasting impacts -- in our network and in our local communities -- by collaborating on resilience.

Call begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST)

Our Community Calls provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders. To join us on a Community Call, please subscribe to the mailing list. You’ll receive a reminder email with the Zoom link the day before each call.

Facilitators: Ben Scott-Brandt, Nanci Lee of Tatamagouche Centre

Topic: Recruitment and Retention Strategies for Vibrant Staff

On this Community Call, we’ll discuss staffing and staff structures at retreat centers. Join us to exchange creative recruitment strategies to attract the right candidates, especially in rural areas, as well as best practices to encourage retention and reduce staff turnover, including equitable compensation. A key aspect of our discussion will be a deeper exploration on how to identify the appropriate staffing levels at each center, and benchmarks that may be useful to measure staffing expenses and impacts within our organizations’ budgets.

Call begins at 3:00 p.m. Eastern Time (EST)

Please register to participate.

Facilitator: Rev. Lorren Z. Buck

The BIPoC People in Retreat Spaces Affinity Group is part of the RCC’s commitment to disrupt systems of oppression and catalyze our collective healing and liberation. This four-part series is for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color working in retreat spaces, and is facilitated by Rev. Lorren Buck of the Racial Healing Initiative team.

Call begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST)

Our Community Calls provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders. To join us on a Community Call, please subscribe to the mailing list. You’ll receive a reminder email with the Zoom link the day before each call.

Facilitator: Ben Scott-Brandt, Erin McAuley

Topic: Living into the Questions Together

On this Community Call, we invite you to reflect on the year and our shared story as a community. We’ll dedicate space for solo journaling (bring paper and markers), and invite you to share your center’s visions for 2024 in small groups. We’d love to hear what you’ve been learning, and what you’re dreaming up for the coming year. The call will close with a celebration of the moments of inspiration, learning, and growth we've each encountered with peers across the RCC community this year.

Call begins at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST)

Please contact Ben Scott-Brandt to get more information and attend this conversation.

Facilitator: Leslie Wright

Topic: Maintaining Operations During Extreme Weather

Retreat Centers face multiple challenges during extreme weather. How do we care for staff, guests, and program participants and how do we insure the continuity of operations for our facilities? There are three critical steps: assessing the risks, identifying the most critical activities, and creating a plan—before it happens. Join us as we begin the conversation that will help us all be more resilient in the face of increasing numbers of extreme weather events.

The Midwest Centers Affinity Group meets quarterly and is for any retreat centers located in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.

Call begins at 1:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST)

Our Community Calls provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders. To join us on a Community Call, please subscribe to the mailing list. You’ll receive a reminder email with the Zoom link the day before each call.

Facilitator: Margarita Solis-Deal

Topic: Sharing Poems of Gratitude and Resilience

Poems and stories are so powerful! On this call, we’ll share the poems that have given us strength and inspired us in the important work of retreat centers. Using a contemplative approach that draws on practices like lectio divina, dharma contemplation, and haggadah, we’ll savor the nuances of these poems as a community by reading them aloud. Please bring a poem or short reading to share, and a thoughtful ear as we reflect on the words together.