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.

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, Erin McAuley

Topic: Retreat Programming

Dive into the latest trends in retreat programming in this peer-support discussion. Share what trends you’ve been seeing, and compare notes with leaders at retreat centers who are doing similar work at a similar scale. We’ll explore how centers navigate ‘scaling up’ their programs, and take a look at residencies and other alternative approaches to onsite programming.

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.

There is no Community Call scheduled for October 24. Calls will resume on November 14.

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.

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

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

Facilitator: Paul Mach

Topic: Prayer Experiences at Your Center

Paul Mach sends this invitation to the Catholic cohort:

Let’s talk prayer.

What kinds of prayer experiences does your center offer to people?

Do you have any special retreats around a certain type of prayer experience?

What questions do you have about prayer experiences?

Come join us to explore this theme in a collaborative space.

The Catholic Centers Affinity Group meets quarterly and is for any retreat center identifying as Catholic.

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 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: Cathy Stackpole, Mohan Aguirre, Ben Scott-Brandt, Erin McAuley

Topic: Your Center’s Sustainability Journey - Discussing Recent Study

On this call we’ll be discussing RCC’s recent Sustainability Study. This study was conducted by a Cal Poly University student team of industrial engineers. The resulting Sustainability Toolkit is one step in a larger movement toward sustainable retreat center business and program models. Join Mohan Aguirre from Mount Madonna Center in California, and Cathy Stackpole from Ferry Beach Retreat and Conference Center in Maine, as they co-facilitate this conversation, using case study examples from their own centers’ experience applying these tools. Please bring your comments, questions, and ideas for further application or research.

Review the toolkit here

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: Ben Scott-Brandt, Erin McAuley

Topic: New Learning and Trends in our Community

RCC Program Director Ben Scott-Brandt will present data from the 2023 RCC Community Survey and facilitate a discussion on how centers plan to utilize the information in their unique contexts.

You can start exploring the results right now:

• Download the Community Survey Results

• Download the Raw, Anonymized Data

We encourage you to also take a look at data from past surveys, studies, and assessment tools, which are publicly shared in this Google Drive. You can now conduct your own analysis using fully anonymized raw data collected by RCC.

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 1:00 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)

Please register to attend.

Facilitator: Ben Scott-Brandt, RCC Program Director

Special Guest: Bob Reeg, CEO of Peace Through Action USA

Topic: Info Session: RCC and Peace Through Action AmeriCorps

Peace Through Action USA is planning an AmeriCorps national service program to tackle social distress (such as hate, racism, violent crime, discrimination, and toxic polarization), and will compete for a federal program grant in 2024.

U.S.-based retreat centers in the RCC community could be well suited to host AmeriCorps service members as part of this program. In this info session, Bob Reeg will share more about how your center could become an AmeriCorps service site in this future program, with RCC's support. Please bring your questions and curiosities as we explore how retreat centers might work together in service of more peaceful communities.

Call begins at 2:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)

Please register to attend.

Facilitators: Dave Macek, Sonia Marcus

Topic: Fundraising Collaboration Hub: Collaborative Proposals

Are you interested in learning together with peers about fundraising? David Macek, director of development and business strategy at Inward Bound Mindfulness Education, and Sonia Marcus, executive director at Southern Dharma Retreat Center, will be facilitating this peer-support conversation for RCC community members to learn about fundraising. All levels and abilities are welcome to contribute to this generative 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: Marissa Metelica, LJ Boswell

Topic: On the Path to Decentering Whiteness: Exploring Suppression, Release, & Transformation

On the road to decentering whiteness, it is important for us to recognize and attend to the patterns of white supremacy ideology that arise within us. This is an opportunity to explore our own internalized patterns that impede invitations to liberation. In this 90-minute session, through writing and movement, we will explore the experiences of suppression, release, and transformation as they relate to our work of decentering whiteness at retreat centers.

This community call is open to people of all racial identities, facilitated by two white bodied people. During breakout groups, BIPoC folks will have a private and protected space for their work with the themes. BIPoC folks may also choose to participate in the RCC's upcoming "BIPoC People in Retreat Spaces” affinity group, which will address the same themes of decentering whiteness.

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

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

Facilitators: Paul Mach, Leslie Wright, Jean Sullivan

Topic: Telling Guests the Story of Our Value

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

We’ll be asking for your input about how you tell potential guests the story of your center's value. How do you communicate with the public about who you are, the services you offer, and why guests should choose your center for retreat? What language do you use—and is it effective? What makes Midwest destinations unique? Bring your marketing and program materials. Together we’ll identify ways to help Midwest centers stand out!

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:  Jamie Deering with Ben Scott-Brandt, Erin McAuley

Panelists: Karen McAllister, Larry Jay, Billy Mark, Marc Weiss, Troy and Faith Bierma, Jennifer Newman

Topic: Models for Balancing Hospitality, Work, and Life

Our Community Call this week responds to requests in our Facebook group to connect with peers about how to achieve a healthy work-life balance as folks who live onsite at retreat centers. It’s easy to assume that “new monastic” or other forms of spiritual community life will be smooth sailing because of the shared commitments of those involved, but humans are messy and complicated! We’ve invited a panel of speakers representing six centers to share from their experiences on the difficulties of living where you work, establishing healthy boundaries for personal space, and what they are learning along the way. Jamie Deering, director of programs ministry at Franciscan Sisters of Little Falls, will facilitate this panel discussion and a Q&A. We hope you’ll join us!

Click for a list of facilitator and panelist bios.