The largest source of news about religion, spirituality, and ideas, Religious News Service has a team of correspondents around the world covering religion and its intersection with political and cultural issues. A two-year partnership between RNS and Fetzer would include both a sponsorship and a collaboration to support media coverage about the current American religious and spiritual landscape, with a particular focus on innovation within and outside of religious traditions.

Sponsorship of the Council of Michigan Foundations October 7-9, 2018 annual conference, Igniting Ideas, Sparking Change. Philanthropy on the Move.

Support for The Center for Spirituality in Nature's Church of the Wild and Spirituality in Nature Groups. Church of the Wild honors the mutual indwelling of the Divine with the Earth and all of its beings, remembering our sacred interconnection and interdependence through multi-traditional spiritual practices, music, and solo or group wanderings. The Spirituality in Nature Group (SING) program is designed to help existing congregations forge deeper communal spiritual ties with themselves and with the sacred landscapes in which they live.

Building upon the foundation established at the two preceding Purpose Summits in San Francisco and Berlin, Global Purpose Movement (GPM) continues this pursuit of “purpose and transformative possibility” by returning to San Francisco on November 17–18, 2018, for the second Bay Area Purpose Summit. Like the previous two summits, the 2018 Purpose Summit San Francisco will convene purposeful leaders from diverse disciplines and backgrounds for an empowering weekend of personal transformation, community development, scientific research, and consciousness-expanding experiences.

In 2008, Karen Armstrong was awarded the TED Prize and began working on the Charter for Compassion—in partnership with the Fetzer Institute—a document that would reaffirm the Golden Rule at its ethical core. Responding to on-line thoughts from close to 200,000 individuals, Karen along with a Council of Conscience, representing leading thinkers in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism, crafted a document that has been affirmed by millions of people throughout the world.

To support a partnership between the Fetzer Institute and Sojourners whose mission is to “...inspire hope and build a movement to transform individuals, communities, the church, and the world.” In these politically and socially divisive times, faith communities have the potential to be a crucial agent for positive, spiritually-grounded change.

To partner with PACE (Philanthropy for Civic Engagement) and five other funders to support an exploratory study on perceptions of language associated with “civic engagement and democracy.”

Retreat centers are where deep spiritual work often takes place, offering contemplative time and space apart from the rigors of everyday life. They are also places where like-minded people come together in meaningful ways, find one another, and create important connections. The Retreat Centers Collaboration is designed to strengthen a network of retreat centers so they can work together to identify and implement sustainable business practices to ensure their vitality and ability to deepen and grow the global movement for spiritual transformation.

The primary goal of this collaboration is to inform real, positive, and efficient change in general education policies and practices, and more broadly in policies related to the lives of children and their caregivers through the recognition and strengthening of core capacities in childhood. The nine identified core capacities are relaxing, observing, listening, inquiring, reflecting, subtler sensing, empathizing, enriching sensory awareness, and discerning patterns.

General support for their mission to end preventable maternal and newborn deaths by supporting the scaling of effective community-based, culturally-respectful care and related education in underserved areas around the globe.