Contemplative practice can assist people in creating together a living experience of a new paradigm of social justice out of which work can then flow, work that creates social justice rather than striving to create social justice while leaving a trail of social debris. — Robert Gass, Rockwood Leadership InstituteA number of groups have now formed to provide training and guidance in integrating awareness practices into social change work in order to improve the effectiveness of and sanity within the progressive social change movement. For example, having trained nearly 2,500 alumni, Rockwood Leadership Institute is the nation’s largest provider of multi-day, transformative leadership trainings for social change nonprofit and philanthropic organizations. 
Recognizing that visionary, collaborative and sustained leadership supports a strong civil society, Rockwood’s trainings are organized around five core practices—Purpose, Vision, Partnership, Resourcefulness and Performance. Similarly, but with a very different approach, stone circles works to sustain activists and strengthen the work of justice through spiritual practice and principles. And the Center for Transformative Change informs, incites and empowers the transformation of society by making the cultivation of compassion and presence synonymous with broad-based social change.
The reason for shifting the political landscape must be in service to the greater goal of shifting our social landscape… so that we can change the fundamental nature of our relationship to one another, to the planet, to the world and to life itself through the vehicle of a deep change in relationship to ourselves. —angel Kyodo williams
Hidden Leaf is grateful for the work of the training organizations listed below. Please let us know if there are others we should add to this list.
- BOLD (Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity)
- Center for Contemplative Mind in Society
- Center for Transformative Change
- Center for Whole Communities
- C-Integral
- East Bay Meditation Center
- generative somatics
- Interaction Institute for Social Change
- Leadership Learning Community
- Management Assistance Group
- Momentum Institute
- Movement Generation
- Movement Strategy Center
- RoadMap
- Rockwood Leadership Institute
- Ruckus Society
- Social Transformation Project
- Strozzi Institute
- Windcall Institute
- Working Partnerships USA
- YES!