Are you actively engaged in creating a more just, peaceful, and ecologically responsible world?   Are you passionate about your vocation or cause, but trying to sustain yourself in the midst of heavy demands and the urgency you feel about making a difference? This retreat is a rare opportunity for renewal, deeper connection with kindred spirits and committed peers, and the chance to explore questions of importance to you.

Courage & Renewal retreats help you become a more self-aware, wholehearted leader. You’ll experience the time and space to renew, reflect, and to:

• Pause, be still, and disconnect from technology and the demanding pace of a leader’s life.
• Seek clarity in your vocation and sense of purpose.
• Honour both successes and struggles in your professional and personal life
• Strengthen your capacity to ask open-ended questions, hold tensions, and rejoin soul and role
• Build skills and processes to support your leadership and relationships with others

At the retreat, you will journey together with 15-20 emerging and experienced leaders, by engaging in large-and small-group dialogues focused on evocative texts and questions. Over the course of three days, there will be opportunities to explore the intersection of your inner capacity and authenticity as it relates to your life and leadership. There will be time for stillness, solitude, and reflection, to help unearth clarity and courage, and bring renewed resiliency to your life, organizations and communities

This retreat is modeled on the Circle of Trust® approach developed by Parker J. Palmer and the Center for Courage & Renewal. You can learn more about “Circles of Trust” at www.couragerenewal.org/approach or in Parker Palmer’s book, A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life.

 Program Cost: $540 CAD (tuition, meals & lodging)

Facilitation Team: 

Brian Braganza is an experiential educator specializing in vocational counselling, sustainability education, masculinity, and youth engagement. He is a Courage & Renewal Facilitator and has a long history with the HeartWood Centre for Community Youth Development. He supports a wide diversity of youth and young adults to live into their vocational call and have meaningful roles and voices in their communities. Brian delivers experiential programs for men and boys, which builds their abilities to connect authentically and live into their wholeness and co-designed T.O.N.E., Therapy Outside Normal Environments, a unique men’s therapeutic project. From 2012-2015 he co-designed and delivered Dalhousie University’s Sustainability Leadership Certificate Program, increasing student’s capacity to take effective social and environmental action. He lives in a straw-bale home he built on an old farm near Bridgewater, Nova Scotia. Brian is also a wilderness traveler, poet and songwriter.

Tara Reynolds is a community organizer with a passion for building trust in relationships and organizations. She is a Courage & Renewal Facilitator and an alumnae of the Vermont Leadership Institute. Tara is a co-founder of WholeHeart, Inc., which seeks to connect like minded individuals and organizations, convene experiential learning opportunities, and facilitate reflective leadership practices for a more wholehearted world. Her expertise includes working with young leaders and activists, school communities, teams, and philanthropists to create new approaches to solving complex problems. She finds joy in the wisdom of children, the beauty of the natural world, and the power of a good open and honest question.  She lives in Greensboro, Vermont, with a six-year old teacher and spiritual guru named Nadia, who also happens to be her daughter.