The Theater of Change is a groundbreaking methodology developed as a collaboration between the Broadway Advocacy Coalition and the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School. The Theater of Change workshop blends artistry, law, policy, and community engagement to produce activism: stories powerfully and artistically told with engagement strategies built in to have powerful impact in the arenas where change really happens.

Support for the 13th Wisdom 2.0 Conference, returning to its inaugural location at the Computer History Museum in the Bay Area.

A learning partnership with Convergence Center for Policy Resolution to help the Institute understand the relationship between collaborative problem-solving and spirituality. This partnership will produce a case study to draw out and make explicit the spiritual principles that underpin Convergence’s work. Learnings from the project will also help the field of bridge-building integrate spiritual wisdom into their social healing technologies toward building a spiritual foundation for normalizing collaborative problem-solving in the US.

Support for the Fetzer Education Learning Summit in November 2021. This effort will contribute to our overall effort in creating the spiritual infrastructure for the spiritually grounded movement in the context of education. This Learning Summit also builds on last year’s webinar series, “Catalytic Education: Building the Spiritual Core in Times of Trauma,” which explored the necessity of incorporating spirituality into mental health for teachers and students during periods of considerable upheaval.

The funds will be dispersed over two years to focus on building the field of faith-friendly intermediary networks by networking the networks, building capacity of faith-based organizations and leaders, catalyzing the convening power of the Ohio Governor’s Office of Faith-Based & Community Initiatives (GOFBCI) and producing findings that are replicable and shareable with other states, and the federal Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships Initiative interested in faith-friendly field building at the intersection of civil society and government.

The funds will be dispersed over four years to bring Mindfulness-based Social Emotional Learning (SEL) to a critical mass of Michigan schools through a collaboration with Inner Explorer (IE), Millennium.org, and Michigan Collaboration for Mindfulness in Education (MC4ME). Through this expansion, the Institute seeks to deepen the current curriculum of IE to include more teacher involvement and support, and deeper spiritual questions of meaning and purpose.

The project will deepen the organization’s capacity and amplify prominent BIPOC faith voices for highlighting a spiritually enriching vision of democracy. Because the Campaign engages urban Christians as their primary audience, the proposed partnership will fill a critical gap within our democracy efforts and empower a spiritually and ideologically grounded organization within the larger ecosystem for connecting spirituality to civic action and unpacking nuance and complexity in healing racial divides.

The Partner will create and test a spiritual formation process for diverse interspiritual leaders. In collaboration with Naropa University, leading spiritual teachers and thinkers, and the Institute, the Partner will develop a two-year process of interspiritual education and mentorship, utilizing in-residence retreats at affiliated institutions and facilitated distance-study through online courses under the guidance of respected spiritual teachers from multiple traditions.

In collaboration with the Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) and Charles Koch Institute (CKI), this project seeks to explore the challenge of pluralism and diversity on college campuses. The goal of the project is to find solutions to growing polarization in American civic life in general, and specifically to make higher education friendlier to diverse worldviews and ways of knowing.

This project aims to engage in a sponsored programmatic effort at the 10th World Assembly of Religions for Peace (RFP) in Lindau, Germany from August 20-23, 2019. The Institute aims to introduce our vision of the shared sacred story to the RFP network during the event.