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Serving Local and Marginalized Communities

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.

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Poems of Gratitude and Resilience

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.

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Tech Platforms

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

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Adaptive Leadership

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.

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Learnings from the JEDI Circle

For the past 6 months, the Retreat Center Collaboration has invited retreat center leaders into an embodied practice together in a JEDI Circle. Facilitators Jenyng Wu and Justine Johnson joined us for a recent Community Call to share what they've learned along the way.

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Connect + Collaborate

On this Community Call, hear an overview of the RCC’s 3-year history, and then explore introductory questions, commentary, and stories from participants around the country. These stories reveal a shared sense of grief and loss, punctuated by hope and resilience.

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Land Legacies: Part Two

Our second Land Legacies session brought together retreat center leaders across the United States to discuss how retreat centers are contributing to the legacy of the land on which they're situated. "The land" is a complex and interdependent web of life -- whose legacy extends across time -- and at retreat centers we are both stewards of, and co-facilitators with the land.

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GilChrist: No Place Special

Like quests, we often think of retreats as journeys out of the ordinary, toward depth and clarity in special ‘thin places’ where transformation and transcendence break through. In this thoughtful essay, Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma encourages us to “embrace the freedom to trust the ordinariness of our work.”

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Onsite, Online, and Hybrid, Oh My!

Join leaders from across the country as they share their hybrid program designs, stories of challenges and success, and tips for design and implementation on this Community Call. Highlights from the presentations and Q&A are captured in our notes.

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Retreat Centeredness and Your Work

We’ve been digging more deeply into the various interpretations we hold of the meaning of ‘retreat centers’ and ‘retreat centeredness.’ On this Community Call, we reflect collectively and in small groups on our various interpretations and how they impact our work.

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Land Legacies

‘Land legacies’ is a useful phrase because it’s versatile and provocative. It teases us into thinking bigger. How did this conversation start at the RCC? And where is it headed? RCC Program Manager Ben Scott-Brandt shares what he’s learning from the network in this short essay.

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Weaving the Threads Together

After our Flourishing Together retreat last week, today's Community Call provided quick tours of our network map, geographic map, and Mighty Network social platform, as well as 40-minute topical breakout rooms for further discussion on the threads we explored during the retreat.

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Reopening Retreat Centers

Join leaders from Pendle Hill in PA, Manresa Jesuit Retreat House in MI, and Spirit Center in ID as they share the spotlight on their reopening experiences in short presentations and a Q+A.

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Growing a Better Community

The eco-justice hub was formed in response to the RCC Fall 2020 survey where the vast majority of survey participants indicated both ecology and sustainability as important aspects of their center. Did that mean actively stewarding the land, developing eco-friendly hospitality guidelines, or participating in global movements to respond to climate chaos? Turns out it was all of it.

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An Emerging Ecosystem

On April 14 the Retreat Center Collaboration joined up with the Holistic Centers Network and Advaya to share a joint webinar. We learned more about each other, the values that guide our organizations and programming, and the different ways we approach collaboration in our networks and communities.

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The Story and the Storyteller

Abdul-Rehman Malik shares his experience facilitating story circles, encouraging retreat center leaders to weave stories of transformation, belonging, and social justice.

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Adopting Self-Organization: Notes from the Journey

While there's nothing easy about challenging culturally dominant paradigms and working together in radically different ways, the team at the Whidbey Institute has experienced self-organization through Symbiotic Enterprise as a profoundly important step into greater health.

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Equity, Interdependence, and Collaborative Leadership

This JEDI Series Discussion connects the RCC community with the work of our peers at Inward Bound Mindfulness Education (iBme). Learn about iBme's journey toward greater equity and interdependence, and their recent transition to a collaborative leadership model.

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