Our goal is to build community among organizations working at the intersection of inner work and social change for relationship, learning, and collaboration.

As we grow in reach, we are also committed to ensuring we are guided by and in service to this field and our shared values. In the coming months we will focus on building stronger relationships and considering how we establish a distributed leadership structure to govern the Collective as a field-led impact network.  The Garrison Institute will shift from catalyst to a supportive partner. Circles for Conscious Change and Gretchen Steidle will continue to support as network coordinator, and the Collective will begin to transition into a self-sustaining community of its own. Let us know if you would like to be more involved in our evolution. 

We extend our deepest gratitude for the more than 40 Field Co-Creators, Senior Advisors, and volunteers who have helped design and guide this community over the last 18 months.

Over the course of four episodes, we explore the ways in which the core values of mutual responsibility, compassion, honoring our innate goodness, and relational intelligence serve to shift systems when employed and embodied by practitioners in social change work.

• Take a journey with Founder, Susan Olesek and Ambassador, Alex Senegal of the Enneagram Prison Project to explore how discovering that we are all in a “prison of our making” is transforming communities on the inside and outside of prison systems.
• Listen to the wisdom of Zen master Norma Ryūko Kawelokū Wong Roshi of Collective Acceleration on how the Indigenous Hawaiian concept of kuleana offers a path for becoming humans who embrace our interdependence for the benefit of the Earth.
• Explore the stories of how a trauma-informed and relational orientation can drive high-performing teams, foster the leadership potential of youth, and shift educational institutions around the world from Radha Ruparell, Teach for All’s Director of its Global Institute for Shaping a Better Future.
• Learn from Roshi Joan Halifax, Founder and Head Teacher at the Upaya Zen Center how understanding our own fear of death unleashes compassion and has shifted medical establishments in their care of the chronically ill and dying.

Combined, these compelling stories and deep wisdom teachers bring us a clear example of how the practice and embodiment of inner work is fueling systems change.

Webinar Series

In the second half of the year, we will be bringing you a webinar series offered by our Conscious Change Collective practitioners offering a range of tools, skills, and practice for deepening conscious change on:

• What is a conscious approach to Artificial Intelligence?
• How do we approach program evaluation from a more empathetic, regenerative lens?
• What does the Enneagram have to teach us about engaging in the world as inner-driven change agents?

Reach out if you have skills, tools, and frameworks you would like to explore with our Collective!

We recently analyzed 55 organizations in the Conscious Change Collective whose work contributes toward democracy, peace-building, and human rights. Spiritually informed democracy organizations see the inner and outer as inseparable. Democracy is considered an embodied and living practice that exists and is enacted within community. It is built from a citizen base with the wellbeing and capacity for civic engagement.

Cross-cutting themes include a recognition that democracy is informed by expanding individual inner capacities for self-awareness, self-regulation, healing, and relational repair. The work is inherently collective, dedicated to non-violent and liberatory approaches, and honors ancestral and intergenerational wisdom. It recognizes our interdependence and calls for more regenerative systems for our whole planet flourishing.

Read more on our findings from organizations working on democracy, peace, and human rights on page 67 of in our Early Harvest: A Discussion Draft of Preliminary Insights from the Conscious Change Collective Research Group.

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Change Elemental

Change Elemental is one organization co-creating a regenerative movement ecosystem and the conditions that embody and prefigure a future of love, dignity, and justice. Change Elemental “envisions a world where resources and power are shared such that everyone has the opportunity to realize their potential, live life fully, and contribute to the well-being of people and planet.” Guided by Queer, Black, Indigenous, and feminist wisdom and traditions, Change Elemental strengthens leaders, organizations, and networks and deepens cross-movement capacity for transformation. Their approach embeds and embodies the essential elements of liberating change—turning aspiration into action and possibility into reality. In their work, these elements include:

1. Advancing Liberation and Sovereignty: Building and practicing the healing and repair of the core wounds of Turtle Island—chattel slavery, land theft, and genocide—as we move from vision to social change.
2. Creating and Transforming in Chaos and Complexity: Adapting systems change strategies for unpredictable environments while leading from vision with clarity.
3. Sharing Leadership and Power: Nourishing the ability to flex across a spectrum of leadership approaches while growing power collectively and within.
4. Valuing Multiple Ways of Knowing: Embedding knowledge systems, wisdom traditions, and expertise beyond over-privileged rationalist approaches.
5. Practicing Inner Work: Centering our individual and collective health, healing, clarity, and wholeness.

Their offerings span a wide range from facilitating and nurturing interdependent networks and learning labs that create conditions for equity and liberation to designing liberating cultures, finance systems, teams, strategy, and governance for complexity and chaos.

Over the life of their 40+ years of work, they have contributed to shifting hundreds of systems from individual institutions to larger societal systems. Examples include mutual aid and community well-being networks created during their programs that still exist years later; planting the relational seeds that led to the collaboration for the first People’s Climate March that shifted public connection to and understanding of the climate crises; and nourishing cross-issue movement networks that have been able to advance systems change across issues of living wages, racial justice, and reproductive justice.

On the role of inner work in social change, Change Elemental explains:

These last few years have been marked by cycles of chaos and complexity, as we have moved between rapid response and the long view of advancing transformative change in unpredictable, emergent terrain. The organizations and networks we partner with, and the movements we are all a part of, have moved through these cycles, sometimes flowing in self-determined ways and often buffeted and taking on the forms needed to meet the challenges of the moment brought on by rising authoritarianism, multiple pandemics, and intensification of centuries-old systems of oppression.

Meeting the moment requires all of us to be powerfully in our roles/contributions to defend and protect communities as well as advance a thriving future. We need individual power AND collective power—virtuosity AND ensemble—grounded in and embodying a vision of the future, to be in and move generatively through conflict, hold tenderly the tensions of difference and egos, and to holdfast to a value of interdependence among all our planetary relations. Innerwork cultivates the power within that supports us to be in power with.

As we practice, experiment, and iterate forward, we continue to return to the question: How might we build the power with and the power within (and appropriate uses of power over) necessary to advance liberation and sovereignty? And we live into the responses as we listen to our many ways of knowing (ancestral, nature-based, cultural, intuitive, intellectual, and creative), practicing innerwork individually and together as a Change Elemental team and with our many partners… Inner work supports our team to stay grounded and hold center in chaos and complexity. This supports us in moving through uncertainty with clarity, guided by our vision, values, and what’s most important in the moment.

“The universe is not asking us to do something, the universe is asking us to be something. And that’s a whole different thing.” —Lucille Clifton

Check out more of Change Elemental’s work and thinking, including:

• Tools & Tinctures for the Future We Want
• Living Interdependent Systems: A Practice of Attuning to the Wisdom of Nature
• A Feather’s Reflections on Leading in Chaos

The Arrow: Buddhist Movement Chaplaincy

Call for submissions for a special issue of The Arrow—co-sponsored by the Buddhist Studies Program at Union Theological Seminary—on Buddhist Movement Chaplaincy is open. The priority deadline is June 30 with an anticipated publication date of September 2026. You DO NOT have to be Buddhist – we are inviting any individuals to share their wisdom.

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9 Faces of Potential

This is a self-guided course in the Enneagram, designed and curated by The Human Potentialists. The course comes with video exemplars of Enneagram Prison Project Ambassadors who have transcended the prisons of their own making, and their lived experience of incarceration. Your self-development journey unfolds at your own pace through centering practices, teachings of all nine types, type panel videos, reflection prompts, somatic practices, and much more to support your embodiment of the Enneagram as a tool for personal growth and transformation. If you are seeking greater connection, or ready to unlock your highest potential and purpose, this course is for you.

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Considerations for Teaching Dharma in a Time of Ecological Crisis: A Workshop for Dharma Teachers with Mark Coleman

Receive FREE access to a 1-hour workshop recording with Senior Spirit Rock teacher and author Mark Coleman plus a reflection and resource guide. This workshop creates a contemplative space to explore the intersection of Dharma practice and the ecological crisis, examining how it impacts us personally, communally, and in our role as teachers.

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The Inner Work of System Leadership

The popular article by John Kania, Radha Ruparell, Peter Senge, and Hal Hamilton focuses on elevating attention to the inner-outer connection. They build upon the idea that catalyzing collective leadership requires developing the following three capacities: 1) Ability to see the larger system of which you are a part 2) Fostering more reflective and generative conversations and 3) Shifting the collective focus from reactive problem-solving to co-creating the future.

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*The opinions expressed by our members do not necessarily represent the opinion of the Garrison Institute or its Board of Directors.