2022 Year-End Report

FROM OUR EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

It feels like we’re almost “back to normal.” But, then, what is normal? There is no longer a previous year, or series of years, that allows us a comparison: there is no “normal” anymore.

However, the last 12 months have held some echoes of the pre-pandemic world on the Commonweal land. The Cancer Help Program is back in full swing, though still meeting in tents outside; the Power of Hope summer camp had a good, yet shortened, run; and many of our other retreat partners have come back to Pacific House. The Commonweal Garden is humming with Dr. Anna O’Malley’s Art of Vitality groups as well as many other permaculture, community health, and children’s programs.

The world is most definitely not in a normal state— not the environment, the state of justice, peace, safety, our political system, or culture. The world is complex and profound, and at times feels impossible to grasp. Where do we start?

In our typical Commonweal way we choose a complex, yet integrated, approach to our work. We start at many points. There is no clear first designated step, but there are many points where we can start the journey. While we may not be able to prevent whatever is coming, we can try to reduce our impact and help to ensure that we emerge in a better place. At times it feels that our mission at Commonweal is to create the conditions so that the best programs and leaders can be ready when they are most needed.

At this moment in time, Commonweal has more than 40 programs. Five focus on cancer and healing, two work toward racial healing, and seven work with healing circles. We have five programs focused on environmental health, two programs in the California correctional system, four projects that support BIPOC leaders, seven that work with youth/youth adult programs, two that work in philanthropy, three that explore living and dying, three that offer embodied movement programs, and two programs that work in our own West Marin

County. We also have a permaculture school, a democracy program, a legal program, a medicine and nature program, a land transition program, and we support a shelter for migrant refugees in Tijuana.

Echoing our approach to the polycrisis, our Omega programs explore a meta-perspective on the complexity of the global challenges by building community resilience, exploring philanthropy, and magnifying the voices of young leaders, scientists, artists, and organizers in the global south.

I am grateful to be part of Commonweal at this moment in time. Together with Michael, our board, stewardship circle, program directors, and staff, we can combine our visions, resources, and community to face an unprecedented future. I hope you will join us in whatever way you are called, to cultivate the soil of resilience and healing for today and for tomorrow.

With love and gratitude, Oren Slozberg

STANLEY WU

Dear Commonweal Friends,

In September, I turned over the helm at Commonweal to my beloved friend and partner Oren Slozberg. Oren has worked with us at Commonweal for nine years. He has served as executive director for five years. His extraordinary wisdom, kindness, and commitment to Commonweal are known to all. We could not ask for a more inspired leader for Commonweal’s future.

The time was right. This was a long-planned and carefully executed next step in what Oren rightly calls “intergenerational leadership” at Commonweal. As far as our community is concerned, little has changed.

Forty-seven years ago, I walked Poplar Road in Bolinas on a windswept foggy morning. I looked out at the old RCA antenna farm across waving fields of grass and a deep cleft of forest. I saw the old white RCA office building nestled in a grove of trees. Astonishingly, a shaft of sunlight broke through the fog and low-scudding mist. The shaft of light illuminated the building with a glowing radiance. I was given a vision. We would build a center for healing ourselves and healing the earth on that land long sacred to Native Americans. Forty-seven years later—46 since Commonweal was incorporated—we are near the half century mark of a journey that stretches far into the future before us.

I am not leaving Commonweal. I remain Board president. Here are the projects with which I’m most actively engaged: Arlene Allsman is now director of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program and our on-line Sanctuary retreats. I’m fully engaged after 37 years and 216 week-long Cancer Help Programs. I am forever grateful for our partnership.

Miki Scheidel, Nancy Hepp, and Laura Pole guide CancerChoices—our beautiful new integrative cancer care website.

Our Omega polycrisis resilience projects have a strong leadership team including Stanley Wu, Mark Valentine, Andrea Frey, and Susan Grelock Yusem. Kyra Epstein beautifully leads our work at The New School.

Ann Blake is the skilled executive director of the Jenifer Altman Foundation, which continues to play a significant role in environmental health and justice globally.

The Commonweal Archive Project is new. Erin O’Reilly, Susan Grelock Yusem, and I are weaving together the stories of Commonweal.

Several other projects remain especially close to my heart.

I co-founded Healing Circles with Diana and Kelly Lindsay. Diana and Oren and a wonderful team sustain this brilliant global work.

I co-founded the Collaborative on Health and the Environment, also global in reach, now beautifully led by Kristin Schafer.

The Migrant Support Project supports Gift of Love in Tijuana, a church sanctuary housing more than 1,200 migrants. Founded by Angela Oh and Ming Tu through their Gift of Compassion project at Commonweal, this is heart work for me.

The Commonweal Garden and Natura, led by Anna O’Malley, MD, with James Stark’s strong support in the Garden, is a source of enduring regenerative power and beauty.

Many other Commonweal projects and partners are close to my heart. I named some of them in my personal Fall Letter, which you should have received.

How is Commonweal doing? Beautifully. Oren has long guided our community with his able Stewardship Council and with the core support of COO Arlene Allsman and CFO Vanessa Marcotte. We have an extraordinary and committed Board of Directors.

How am I? Grateful. Light. Free.

Stay with our beloved community. We all built Commonweal together—and will keep building it together.

With love and prayers, Michael Lerner

STANLEY WU

IN 2022, WE:

Launched the CancerChoices website, a completely remade web platform that provides independent, science-backed resources to help people with cancer, caregivers, and healthcare professionals understand choices in integrating conventional, complementary, and self care to improve cancer outcomes.

Established a fellowship program to support young visionary leaders in the Global South studying the polycrisis; launched a new website and online magazine called the Long View; and served an increasingly influential funder community working toward resilience in the polycrisis through Omega programs.

Assumed new leadership and presented webinars to more than 7,500 participants in 18 countries during the Collaborative on Health and the Environment’s 20th anniversary year.

Trained 600 educators in various fields from 10 countries to facilitate discussions about art; celebrated 10 years as a partner with the New York Times Learning blog; and offered free weekly Look Club Online sessions to expand a global audience through Visual Thinking Strategies

Engaged our New School at Commonweal community in conversations about resilience, integrative cancer care, spiritual growth, women’s empowerment, and social justice—with more than 86,000 podcast listens and 250,000 video watches in 51 countries this year.

Developed an evidencebased palliative care volunteer training curriculum, based on 20 years of hospice training experience by Humane Prison Hospice Project staff, and secured hundreds of thousands in new funding to train fellow prisoners in compassionate end-of-life caregiving and grief companionship.

Provided almost 40,000 service hours through Healing Circles Global and Healing Circles Healthcare–with training for 240 circle leaders from around the world–for participants and healthcare professionals facing grief, cancer, caregiving, social isolation, death & dying, and injustice.

Continued the Migrant Support Project at Cañon de Alacrán near Tijuana, Mexico, where a new grant from the Cold Mountain Fund at RSF Social Finance is funding the construction of a school for more than 400 refugee children.

Received a 2-year grant from Fetzer Institute to support Gift of Compassion’s racial praxis (theory and practice) program in Southern California, offering trust-based giving to partners that manifest love and compassion in youth entrepreneur, sober living, violence interruption, wellness building, meditation, yoga, and outdoor experience communities.

Played a central role in reform of the California juvenile justice system, including the pending closure of the state’s troubled youth prison system and helping lawmakers design and fund local programs serving justice system youth who are being “realigned” to counties from state institutions—fitting accomplishments during this 30th anniversary year of the Juvenile Justice Program.

Uplifted the national conversation about racial justice and healing through the Center for Healing and Liberation’s inaugural residential Black women’s nourishment retreat at Commonweal, in partnership with the Octavia Fund

Formalized Commonweal Northwest in Langley, Washington: a beautifully restored 100-year-old building that is a generous gift from Diana and Kelly Lindsay and the Langley community.

COMMONWEAL PROGRAMS

CancerChoices

Center for Creative Community Fall Gathering Bolinas Power of Hope Taproot Gathering Y WE Write

Democracy Together Center for Healing and Liberation

Collaborative on Health and Environment

Commonweal Biomonitoring Resource Center

With the help of your generous donations and support, our programs offered healing, support, and resources to hundreds of thousands of people world wide. Read about more of the impact Commonweal programs had in 2022 at commonweal.org/ impact-2022

Commonweal Cancer Help Program Bay Area Young Survivors Sanctuary Commonweal Retreat Center

Communitas Foundation for Embodied Medicine

Gift of Compassion Migrant Support Project Healing Circles

Healing Circles Global Healing Circles Houston Healing Circles Langley Healing Circles Healthcare Courage & Renewal Network of Northern California

Health & Environment Action Research Team Health and Environment Literacy Project Diabetes and the Environment Project CovidStrategies

Healing Yoga Foundation

FISCALLY SPONSORED PROGRAMS

California Nurses for Environmental Health & Justice

Innovative Learning and Living Institute Center for Dying and Living Center for Ethical Land Transition

Kids and Caregivers

Kinship Blooms

Movement Liberation Fund

Platform Impact Leaders Fellowship project SOUL Octavia Fund

Humane Prison Hospice Project

Integrative Law Institute

Juvenile Justice Program

Natura Institute for Ecology and Medicine at Commonweal Garden Partners for Youth Empowerment

Regenerative Design Institute Retreat Center Collaboration

The New School at Commonweal

The Resilience Project Visual Thinking Strategies

OMEGA

SafetyNEST Science Somos El Poder

Syntropy Healing and Research

West Marin Climate Action West Marin Review

COMMONWEAL BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Steven Bookoff, Treasurer Catherine Dodd

Jaune Evans

Katherine Fulton, Vice Chair

Michael Lerner, President & Board Chair

Angela Oh

Lisa Simms Booth

The Pacific House at night.

WITH GRATITUDE

We express our deep gratitude to the following organizations that have supported Commonweal this year:

Alameda County Arts Commission

● Alberta S. Kimball – Mary L. Anhaltzer Foundation  ● The Altman 2011 Charitable Lead Annuity Trust   Amy’s Kitchen  ● Angell Foundation  ● Barbara and Donald Jonas Family Fund of the Jewish Communal Fund  ● Bay Area Young Survivors   The Bancroft Foundation  ● City of Berkeley  ● Bovine Bakery  ● The Buck Family Fund of MCF  ● California Arts Council   The California Wellness Foundation  ● Cedars-Sinai  ● Chavez Family Foundation  ● CLC Kramer Foundation  ● Clementine Fund

The Cold Mountain Fund of RSF Social Finance  ● Compassion and Choices  ● County of Marin  ● Dana Sila Foundation   Dean & Margaret Lesher Foundation  ● Diocesan Council, Inc  ● Distracted Globe Foundation  ● Dream of a Better World   Dune Road Foundation  ● Fetzer Institute  ● Fidelity Charitable  ● Fidelity Charitable Trustees’ Initiative  ● Firehouse Fund: Cultivating Sparks   Forest Trust Charitable Fund  ● Fountain Project Foundation  ● The Fred Gellert Family Foundation  ● Frey Family Foundation   George T. Cameron Educational Foundation  ● GLIDE, LLC  ● The Heinz Endowments  ● Hemera Foundation  ● The Hobson Family Foundation   Houston Methodist Baytown Hospital  ● International End of Life Doula Association  ● Island County State of Washington   Jenifer Altman Foundation  ● Joan E. Wattles Trust  ● John and Wauna Harman Foundation  ● John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation   Jonas Philanthropies  ● Kimball Foundation  ● Larson Legacy Foundation  ● Life Comes From It  ● Lightner Sams Foundation of Wyoming M2 Fund  ● Marin Community Foundation  ● Masto Foundation  ● Matthew London and Sylvia Wen Gaia Fund  ● Maverick Lloyd Foundation   Medtronic  ● Mobius  ● Mulago Foundation  ● Muriel Murch Full Circle Endowment Fund  ● Norcliffe Foundation  ● O’Donnell Iselin Foundation   Oak Foundation  ● One Project  ● Pledgeling Foundation  ● Pyramid Communications  ● The Randleigh Foundation

The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Global  ● Rockefeller Brothers Fund  ● RSF Small Planet Fund  ● RSF Social Finance   Satterberg Foundation  ● Scheidel Foundation  ● Schwab Charitable Fund  ● Seattle Foundation  ● Sierra Club

Silicon Valley Community Foundation  ● Small Business Administration  ● So Hum Foundation  ● Social Good Fund   Straus Family Creamery  ● Stupski Foundation  ● Sunshine Polka-dot Foundation  ● Susie Tompkins Buell Fund  ● Sylvan C. Coleman Trust   Tides Foundation  ● Trinity Episcopal Parish in Menlo Park  ● University of California, San Diego  ● Viking Trust Charitable Gift Fund

Virginia Wellington Cabot Foundation  ● W.K. Kellogg Foundation  ● West Marin Fund  ● Whidbey Island Center for the Arts   The Whitman Institute  ● Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

We offer special thanks and gratitude to the following Commonweal Friends for their generous contributions of $1000 and above during the last year.

We had so many more generous donors this year: you can find a full list on our website under “About Us.”

Dr Frank Adams & Dr Maureen Swenson

Kim Alman

Stephen Andrew

Laura Arneson Horn

Robert & Carol Baird

Carol Banquer

Corrine Bayley Kevin Bayuk

Katie Beacock

The Birnbaum/Woods Family Jill Blair & Fay Twersky

Melani Bolyai

Penelope & Terry Bourk

Jeff & Judy Brody

Steve & Marjorie Burr

Nora Campanella

Alison Carlson

Andrea Caupain

Ross Chapin & Deborah Koff-Chapin

Mark Cheng

Timothy Clark

Susan Cummins & Rose Roven

Ann & Bob DeBusk

Gun Denhart

Mike & Nanette Dentinger

Alex Dorsey

Catherine Dussault

Richard Eagan & Elizabeth Ostrow

Cathy & Steve Edgett

Peter Evans

Dawn Fairbanks

Ulrike Faubert

Kristina Flanagan

Breanne Foster

Katherine Fulton & Katharine Kunst

Alexander Germanacos

Sarri Gilman

Bing Gong & Eleanore Despina

Sally Goodwin Cynthia Graham

Terence Grant

Karen Green

Stasia Grose

Frank & Carol Gruen

Thordis & Gary Gulden

Linda Gulker

Harry & Shirley Hagey

Wendy Hawkins

Jeannette & Grant Heidrich

Meg & Gary Hirshberg

Chris Hitt & C. Kay Briggs

Emily Honig

John Hunting

Nanette Johnson Eugene Kahn Rick Kantor

Carol Kerley & Linda Dunham

Cindy Kohlmiller

Marty Krasney

Trish & Larry Kubal Alex Kushner Ellen LaBelle Rachel Lang Harry Lasker

Susan Leonard Jackie Levin Susan Levin Molly Levitt

Cynthia Li Diana Lindsay

Lynnaea Lumbard & Richard Paine

Peter Lyman

Jonathan MacQuitty & Laurie Hunter

Chloe Martin

Josephine Merck

Doris Meyer

Martin Meyer

Ann Miller

Jerry Millhon

Artis Montague

Frederick Moon

Peter & Anna Marie Morton

Robyn Muscardini

Pete Myers

Judy & Richard Nagelberg

Lynn Nelsen

Carol Newell

Michael Northrop & Kathleen Regan

Angela Oh & Ming Tu

Laura O’Shea

Anil Pal Kochhar

April Paletsas & Holly Strasbaugh Linda Park

Carol Pencke & Mary Laumer

Eliza Perkins & Joseph Osborn JaMel Perkins

Katia Petersen

Lynn & Olivier Pieron

Jean & Gary Pokorny

Michael Quattrone & Kala Smith

James & Caren Quay

Scott & Paula Rash Alex Reed

Mark & Susan Reinstra

David Rempel & Gail Bateson

Heidi & Bill Rielly

Elizabeth Muir Robinson

Abby Rockefeller

Adam & Adina Rose

Alexander Rose Alice Rose

Marcie Rubardt

Roger Sant & Doris Matsui

Pamela Schell

Steve Scoles

Cynthia Shaw

Ron & Eva Sher Wayne Silby

Meg Simonds & Mark Butler

Howard & Rhonda Smith

Jim & Fawn Spady

David Spaw

Janet Staub & James DeLong Mary Stephens

William Stewart

Jenepher Stowell

Karen Stromme

Sara Stuart Cara Taylor

Peggy Taylor & Rick Ingrasci Mary Ann Tebbe

Richard Thalheimer

Claire Theobald

Candace Tkachuck & Donald Guthrie

Debora Valis & Steve Shapiro

Sara Vellve

Yana Viniko

Lucy Waletzky

Caroline & Fong Wang

Paul Wexelblat

Barbara Wiener

June Wilson

Serita Winthrop

CancerChoices

Offering Integrative Care Choices and Research

We have a simple goal at CancerChoices—to make integrative cancer care available and affordable to everyone one who wants it. Integrative cancer care should be the standard of care for cancer. Why? Because integrating the best of conventional care, self care, and complementary therapies will help you live better and possibly longer than conventional care alone.

The big news for us this year is that—with 10,000 hours of dedicated work to build it—we launched the new CancerChoices.org website. The new platform is built on a tremendous amount of creative thinking, planning, outreach to people with cancer, and professional design. Coupled with rigorous research and engaging graphics, CancerChoices is the most comprehensive and accessible free resource on integrative cancer care online. We continue to add new content, publishing a new therapy review, handbook, or blog post every two weeks on average since the site launched.

CancerChoices remakes, expands, and deepens the information on our previous site, Beyond Conventional Cancer Therapies (BCCT), which in turn was based originally on Choices in Healing, Michael Lerner’s groundbreaking 1994 book. The frame and tone of CancerChoices is that of a supportive guide. It offers expansive new sections on choices in integrative cancer care, new stories from people who have lived with cancer, user-oriented handbooks, and volunteers to help people navigate its almost encyclopedic breadth and depth of information.

Starting in August, we launched a series of companion webinar conversations in partnership with The New School at Commonweal—including a website walkthrough with program staff as well as conversations with Callanish Society Founder Janie Brown, author and docuseries director Kelly Turner, and integrative oncologist Donald Abrams. A separate series of learning circles bring the qualities of conversations and group learning to CancerChoices, building community and deepening understanding of integrative cancer care.

We’ve also transformed our reviews of complementary therapies. The reviews present information in layers, starting with brief top-level summaries and a comprehensive rating system to give a snapshot view of each therapy’s effectiveness, safety, use by experts, and cost. Readers who want to see the basis of summaries and

ratings can drill down to access details, all the way down to source research articles. We interpret findings from groups of similar studies to help readers understand the strength of evidence for using a therapy in various situations.

We’ve received overwhelmingly positive feedback from both people with cancer and health professionals. Experts who have reviewed our therapy reviews have both contributed expertise and made extremely favorable comments about the quality of our research.

Most significant, the therapy reviews on BCCT rated 4.9/5 for quality and trustworthiness of information by researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI). This was the top score among 11 sites providing similar information. We have since strengthened our research and reporting processes. In other words, researchers at NCI rated BCCT best in the field for quality and trustworthiness of information on complementary therapies, and CancerChoices is a quantum jump better.

We are grateful for the vision and contributions of Lucy Waletzky, MD, Roger Sant and the late Vicki Sant, the Scheidel Foundation, Miki Scheidel, and all the others who have contributed both time and financial support to CancerChoices. And we need your help and support to keep it by far the best resource on integrative cancer care on the web.

—Nancy Hepp, Program Manager and Lead Researcher, and Michael Lerner, Director, CancerChoices cancerchoices.org

Humane Prison Hospice Project

Transforming the Way Prisoners Die

Humane Prison Hospice Project’s goal is to transform the way prisoners die in the United States, offering education, advocacy, and programming to train fellow prisoners in compassionate end-of-life caregiving and grief companionship.

This past year, we had the tremendous opportunity to begin partnering directly with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) and AMEND, a public health-focused program at University of California San Francisco dedicated to changing the culture within correctional settings.

Through in-person and virtual offerings, we were also able to significantly expand our reach this year, touching more than 21 organizations and more than 1,300 interested stakeholders and potential advocates. Each of these events included a showing of the moving Academy Awardnominated documentary film, Prison Terminal, followed by a panel discussion with the Humane team.

Feedback from these events has been overwhelmingly positive, resulting in hundreds of people nationwide subscribing to Humane’s mailing list, more than $100,000 from individual donors, the engagement of several skilled volunteers, and dozens of people inquiring how they could help to promote prison hospice programs in their own states and communities.

Because of our progress toward advancing our mission, seed funding offered by an anonymous donor through the Tides Foundation in 2019 was extended with a new gift of $250,000. This impactful donation—along with a three-year grant from The Dune Road Foundation and a new grant from The John and Wauna Harman Foundation—meaningfully helped support program development, implementation, and organizational growth in 2022 and will extend into 2023. In addition, we cultivated and secured $30,000 in committed funds from two institutional funding partners to support Humane’s advocacy work.

Presently, Humane—in partnership with CDCR—is creating an evidence-based palliative care volunteer training curriculum. This curriculum incorporates best practices from the Brothers’ Keepers Peer Support Program that we have facilitated at San Quentin since 2017, existing curriculum that has been developed and used by our staff to train hospice volunteers in the community over the past 20 years, and material used to train peer hospice volunteers at California Medical Facility, home of the only prison hospice program in the state.

We plan to begin piloting our new curriculum this winter at both the Central California Women’s Facility and San Quentin. This will be the first step toward long-term plans to expand our peer support palliative care training to additional facilities in California’s 33-prison system and to promote the use of this training model in other states that have demonstrated interest in this model.

With the graying of the prison population, the need for more compassionate and effective end-of-life care is acute. No human being, not even those behind prison walls, deserves to die alone without comfort and appropriate care. Humane’s model of training prisoners in compassionate end-of-life care and grief companionship is transformational not only for the prisoner receiving the care, but also for the prison correctional staff who witness this incredible act of humanity, and for the trained prison caregiver, who may for the first time in their life have the opportunity to extend compassion, empathy, and grace to another human being.

—Lisa Deal, Executive Director, Humane Prison Hospice Project humaneprisonhospiceproject.org

EDGAR BARENS/PRISON TERMINAL

Collaborative on Health and the Environment

A Year of Impact, Transition, and Celebration

It’s been a momentous year for the Collaborative on Health and the Environment (CHE). Marking our 20th year has offered opportunities to celebrate CHE’s contributions to environmental health over the last two decades, and to consider how we can best contribute to solving the urgent global challenges we now face.

Throughout the year, CHE’s signature webinars continued to reach a global audience with emerging science on endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs), the voices of young scientists, and deep-dive series on key environmental health science and policy topics of the day.

Amplifying Environmental Health Science

CHE has hosted 34 webinars since last September, reaching thousands of participants across the United States and in countries around the world. Examples include our series exploring the health effects of plastic production and use, the complex science and policy issues surrounding PFAS “forever chemicals,” and how chemical exposures contribute to obesity.

We collaboratively produced monthly webinars highlighting the health impacts of EDCs. We hosted presentations from young scientists from Agents of Change in Environmental Justice and the Young EDC Scientists Showcase, the latter coordinated with our partners at HEEDS (Healthy Environment and Endocrine Disruptor Strategies). Monthly CHE Alaska webinars featured the work and voices of indigenous leaders, scientists, and other environmental health experts in the arctic region.

This year also marked the merger of CHE’s Because Health website with our partners at the Center for Environmental Health.

Checking in with the CHE Community

As part of our reflections during this 20th year, we asked supporters for input on what’s working best at CHE.

We also interviewed previous staff, advisors, funders, leading environmental health scientists, advocates, and policymakers.

Respondents consistently urged us to continue hosting webinars as a respected platform for environmental health scientists and changemakers. Others cited the value of the convening and catalytic role CHE has played over the years. Many encouraged us to build on this track record to link emerging scientific evidence more directly with changes in policy and practice so urgently needed to address today’s environmental health challenges.

Fresh Leadership, and Celebrations

It’s been a year of transition for CHE as well. Previous director Karen Wang moved on at the end of the calendar year, and program manager Hannah Donart stepped in as interim director for several months in spring. In June, Hannah handed the reins to me.

I’m excited to bring all of my experience—more than three decades of science-based advocacy in the environmental health field, with an emphasis on children’s health issues—to CHE.

To mark the 20th anniversary, we’re hosting a series of “CHE Cafe” online conversations. We’re also publishing a compilation of thought pieces from leading scientists and gathering at Commonweal for an in-person (and live streamed) celebration in early November.

We’ll be launching a revamped website early next year and updating our logo. And we’re changing our name slightly to set a new tone as the work moves into its next 20 years. We’ll be the Collaborative for Health and Environment in 2023 and beyond.

–Kristin Schafer, Director, CHE healthandenvironment.org

Partners for Youth Empowerment

Sparking Social Healing through Creativity and Connection

There is no denying that young people today face extraordinary obstacles that have deepened social isolation and magnified collective trauma, from racial violence and climate crisis, to a global pandemic and “comparison culture” emboldened by social media.

Across the country, more than one in three high school students report feeling “persistently sad or hopeless.” And, despite the unprecedented need for collective action, the proverbial “village” that our children need to feel safe, be healthy, and become whole is, itself, overwhelmed and stressed. Since the pandemic emerged, parents have reported increased depressive symptoms and more negative interactions with their children, frontline teachers are burnt out and leaving the profession in droves, and other influential adults, such as youth workers, have reported feeling disconnected with today’s young people and helpless to help them navigate the complex issues of our time.

For more than two decades, Partners for Youth Empowerment (PYE) has been a powerful antidote to these social ills. We exist to uplift young people and develop their social and emotional resiliency through the simple premise that youth thrive through positive adult connection. The key, our co-founders discovered, was to help the adults who work with youth to (re)discover their own creativity and to harness that creative force to authentically connect with young people and reinforce their sense of self and community.

The secret? Creative empowerment.

Developed and tested by Peggy Taylor and Charlie Murphy, our Creative Empowerment Model is the basis for all of our work at PYE. The model centers creative expression and helps unlock the will to reimagine by

challenging blockers to connection and cooperation while offering adults the tools to support youth.

Since 1997, we have trained tens of thousands of adults worldwide to ignite a global network of “creative facilitators.” We also reach young people directly through our Power of Hope Camp on Whidbey Island, a sister program to Commonweal’s Power of Hope Camp Bolinas, and other youth camps and trainings that run globally.

Unfortunately, like many service organizations, the pandemic continued to impact our traditional in-person programming in 2022 and we made the difficult decision to pause PYE’s Power of Hope Camp this year. Nevertheless, we supported our partner camps in Bolinas, CA (Power of Hope), Eugene, OR (Culture Jam) and Cortes, BC (Power of Hope) by sharing our most seasoned facilitators to cross-pollinate ideas across the camps, culminating in a gathering called Camp ReJubilation Twenty-nine of our network facilitators from the Pacific Northwest gathered on the magical meadows of Whidbey Island to reconnect, re-energize, and reimagine the next generation of creative community programs.

We also focused on deepening long-standing partnerships and continued our work with IndigenEYEZ, a Canadabased nonprofit with the mission “to inspire an intergenerational legacy of well-being among First Nations people in British Columbia and beyond.” Together, we collaborated to design, adapt, and launch Spark: Creative Facilitation Training for Indigenous peoples wanting to engage, inspire, and mobilize Indigenous youth and communities. We engaged more than 75 participants in our Spring 2022 workshops and ran them again this fall.

Throughout the year, our dedicated staff and teaching artists continued to collaborate, ideate, and introduce new creative ways to transform the youth-serving community into the change agents that young people need now, more than ever.

—Andrew Nalani, Claudia Pineda, and Larisa Benson, Co-Directors, Partners for Youth Empowerment partnersforyouth.org

Omega: Navigating the Global Polycrisis

The headlines for the global polycrisis change weekly. At this writing, climate, COVID, and conflicts without end remain the principal headlines.

How do we learn to live with courage, clarity, and compassion in a world on fire? Omega incubates strategic initiatives for living in the polycrisis. This year, Omega was active in four initiatives.

Omega Resilience Awards and Research Grants

The Omega Resilience Awards (ORA) fellowship program supports young visionary leaders in the Global South. Our fellowship anchor institutions are the Asociación Argentina de Abogados Ambientalistas in Latin America, Start Up! in India, and Health of Mother Earth Foundation in Africa. The focus is on their understanding of the polycrisis.

ORA Research Grants support analyses of the polycrisis from action research organizations. Grants are underway for the Cascade Institute in Canada, the Post Carbon Institute in Oregon, Global Tapestry of Alternatives based in India and Mexico with partners around the world, and Cohort 2040 in the United Kingdom.

Omega Website and The Long View

By the time you read this, Omega will have launched a greatly enhanced website and platform. Our expanded Long View is now an online magazine linked to a searchable database of curated articles.

The Omega Collaborative

The Omega Collaborative houses our engagement with global networks of Omega partners, colleagues, and others working on polycrisis resilience.

This year, we have presented webinar conversations with Ian Goldin, Oxford professor and past vice president of the World Bank, whose new book Rescue From Global Crisis to a Better World—is a blueprint for a new world.

We spoke to Kim Stanley Robinson about his book The Ministry for the Future—a radical utopian speculative novel describing how we might actually stabilize the climate.

Tatsujiro Suzuki, a leading authority on Fukushima, spoke about new nuclear threats like those to the nuclear power plants in Ukraine.

We heard from Rachel Kyte, the British Dean of the Fletcher School of Diplomacy, who spoke on the polycrisis challenge for global institutions.

And we heard from Thomas Homer-Dixon, founder of the Cascades Institute in British Columbia, author of such seminal works as The Upside of Down and Command Hope.

Resilience Funders Network

The Resilience Funders Network (RFN) is an unusual hybrid network serving the funder community. Unlike classic funder affinity groups, RFN includes present and past foundation board and staff and private donors. RFN offers webinars, private sessions for engaged funders, and consultations for individual foundation, legacy family, and funder affinity groups. Now in its fourth year, RFN serves a relatively small but increasingly influential funder community. It simply takes time for foundations to move from an exclusive focus on their areas of interest to a recognition that the polycrisis affects everything they care about.

Do we have a solution for navigating the polycrisis? No. Are we engaged heart and soul in the search for how to navigate these world-changing times? We have no choice. Join us. Support our work.

—Michael Lerner, Director, and Stanley Wu, Coordinator, Omega omega.ngo

JONATHAN FORD / UNSPLASH

MARI ANDREWS • JACQUELINE BARNETT • PEGAN BROOKE • ROBIN DINTIMAN • MARK GARRETT MIRTA GUZMAN • NAOMIE KREMER • MEL PREST • ZACHARY ROYER SCHOLZ • ILENE SUNSHINE

The Alchemy of Place an exhibition

painting,

sculpture, and

curated by Joan Grubin • presented in spring 2022