Call begins at 12:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST)
Our Community Roundtables provide peer support, discussion forums and guest workshops for retreat center leaders. To join us on a Community Call, please register here to join this free community roundtable.
Facilitators: Karen McAllister
Topic: The Money Conversation We Don't Have:
Money touches every aspect of retreat center life, yet it is often one of the least talked about dimensions of our work. Behind budgets, fundraising campaigns, staffing decisions, pricing, and strategic planning lie deeper questions about security, purpose, power, generosity, and trust.
This interactive Community Roundtable invites retreat center leaders into an open conversation about the current realities of money within our organizations. Rather than focusing on solutions, we'll begin by listening deeply to one another and exploring the patterns, challenges, and opportunities emerging across our community.
Together we'll explore questions such as:
Where does money create the greatest tension or limitation within your center?
What financial patterns do you see repeating in your organization?
What conversations around money feel easy—and which ones feel difficult?
What strengths and successes have helped your center build financial resilience?
This session is designed as a collaborative listening space. The insights gathered will help shape a future workshop exploring practical and developmental approaches to cultivating healthier relationships with money in retreat centers.
Whether your center is thriving financially, struggling with sustainability, or somewhere in between, your experience is an important part of the conversation.
Bio for Karen McAllister
Karen McAllister is a co-founding member and Co-Executive Director of Clear Sky Meditation Centre in British Columbia, Canada, where she has spent more than 20 years helping to build and steward the intentional spiritual community and retreat centre.
Her leadership at Clear Sky spans organizational strategy, financial stewardship, fundraising and donor relationships, governance, program development, and the ongoing work of aligning the organization’s resources with its values and vision.
Karen is also Clear Sky’s money coach and the founder of The Mindful Money Coach. She is particularly interested in the often-unseen beliefs and assumptions about money that shape spiritual and mission-driven organizations.
Every few years, Clear Sky undertakes a deeper collective inquiry into the views and mental models that may be unconsciously running the organization around money, scarcity and sufficiency, generosity, receiving, power, belonging, responsibility and trust. Karen helps facilitate these conversations, bringing together her experience in organizational leadership, money coaching, contemplative practice and intentional community.
She is passionate about helping retreat centres and spiritual organizations bring greater awareness to their relationship with money, not simply to improve finances, but to understand what money can reveal about the culture, relationships and values of an organization.