Windcall Institute. Restoring the health of the movement.

2022 Annual Report

Table of Contents

I. A Letter from the Executive Director

II. Program Overview:

• Staying Power
• Residencies

III. Windcall's Resilience

IV. What's ahead for 2023

V. Financials

VI. Join Our Movement

VII. Stay Connected

A Letter from our Executive Director

Windcall offers transformative healing to the movement for justice.

The world is experiencing a period of great transformation to shift deeply-held beliefs and constructs that cause and perpetuate trauma. In this unprecedented moment in history, organizers are struggling to process their own lived traumas and overcome intergenerational suffering while leading and inspiring their communities to work together amidst increased violence.

Organizers lock away hard emotions for the sake of the struggle for justice and the urgency of injustice. They need time and space away from over-scheduled lives to heal the trauma. Only then they can embody the joy and resilience of a just and sustainable world.

Windcall has been a part of the solution for over 30 years and plans to continue for another 30.

By reshaping organizers’ connection to nature, self, and community as a form of healing, Windcall’s unique model realigns the organizing purpose to long-term sustainability. We ground our praxis in the four elements of nature to guide organizers on a journey from healing trauma to embodying liberation.

2022 saw tremendous growth for Windcall.

In a year full of pressures to protect individual rights, vulnerable communities, and the planet, Windcall stepped up to meet the unprecedented levels of trauma and stress that our movement family is experiencing. We expanded our full-time staff team and, in partnership with our site partners and expert trainers and practitioners, we:

• offered 55 residencies, tripling our pre-pandemic offerings,
  
• partnered with our first Black-owned site at Foxfire Ranch in Mississippi,
  
• developed organizational residencies to support sustainable culture shifts in community teams and foundation grantee cohorts,
  
• hosted the first alumni Beacons Lab as an election decompression space in the Bay Area, and
  
• continued to grow our community of practice as a steady connection to the rhythms of Pachamama, the planet.
  

Yet we still face challenges.

The time has come for Windcall to grow its potential as a respite and vessel for resilience for a wider radius of the movement for social justice. In 2023, Windcall will finally transition to its own 501c3 entity. We will need the full support of our alumni, donors, and funding partners to continue growing our small but mighty staff team and expand our training team.

Additionally, Windcall continues to intentionally seek BIPOC property owners who have just the right location and amenities to host Windcall Residents and Staying Power Beacons.

We are longing for joyful, loving movements leading with deep care for self and others. Yet most organizers lack the spaces and resources to heal, reflect, and explore new ways of being. Windcall is a key space for that in the movement and our potential is just beginning to be realized.

- Viviana Rennella,

Executive Director

Program Overview

For over three decades, Windcall has provided space for rest and reflection to individual organizers through its Residencies and to movement organizations through the Staying Power Program. One thing has remained constant over the years; the burnout culture of the organizing world - it ‘churns and burns’ through young and eager organizers leaving few folks in the work for the long run. As a result, future generations of organizers are denied seasoned mentorship, wisdom, and networks of relationships.

Windcall (WC) is a counterforce to burnout culture, stopping the everyday grind for movement makers to instead nourish themselves, deepen their resiliency practices, and heal during these particularly traumatic times. Windcall believes a just transition requires us to simultaneously work to heal ourselves while we heal the planet, providing an antidote to the extractive systems of capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy and white supremacy - which demand an environment of overwork, stress, and division to survive. To make this inner shift, WC offers two programming pathways: Staying Power and Residencies.

Staying Power Program

The vision for Staying Power grew from alumni realizing the profound need for transformation beyond their residency experience into their everyday personal and professional lives.

We have built a team of practitioners who hold space and build stepping stones for organizers, their organizations, and the movement at large to shed the conditioning of extractive systems.

Staying Power curates customized spaces for our alumni, movement partners and the grantee cohorts of funder allies.

The Staying Power Program offers:

In 2022, the Staying Power Program:

• Engaged 248 people through its seasonal practices, with a core group of 15 forming an ongoing community of practice.
• Convened the first Alumni Beacons Circle in the Bay Area. The Beacons Circles offer ongoing space for alumni to develop their visions for resilient change in movement building. Nineteen organizers gathered at the first Bay Area Beacons Circle for an election decompression in November.
• Provided three Organizational Residencies to progressive organizations. WC provides assessment and support to​​ organizations, movement formations, and grantee cohorts through coaching, planning and facilitation of their organizations' culture, policies, processes, and practices towards greater sustainability.
  
• RYSE Youth Center
  
• Ms. Foundation
  
• Bay Rising
  

“The session helped me find a safe space within me and around myself. It can be so hard to find safe spaces these days and our minds have a hard time focusing on positives. I appreciated that we focused on building relationships and community. So often this step is overlooked or rushed because time is precious and the space for the work we are engaged in here is being fit into a busy schedule. It felt luxurious to have and take the time to get to know the people I am working with at RYSE.”

- RYSE staff participant,

Spring 2022

Residencies Program

The Windcall Residency is a nine-month experience that provides a highly supportive environment, removes most of the outside pressures and internal constraints that inhibit organizers’ renewal, and introduces practices that lead to long-term sustainability and resilience.

Since the first resident came in 1989, nearly 700 movement organizers have experienced the power of Windcall.

In 2022, Windcall's Residency Program:

• Received nearly 100 applications and hosted 55 residents, the most in any single year in the organization’s history.
  
• Welcomed diverse participants from a variety of backgrounds: 87% were BIPOC and 42% were Black; over 50% were LGBTQIA; 84% of participants in our programs identify as cis female. Windcall's participants are well represented from all geographic regions of the country, including the South.
  
• Deepened our reflection debriefs and tailored guidance with each resident.
  
• Developed transformative practice guides and tools to support residents’ self-guided exploration of their own resiliency.
  

New Partnership

In 2022, Windcall welcomed our first BIPOC-owned site partner. Foxfire Ranch is a historic, Black-owned event and retreat space that has been in the Hollowell family since 1918. Foxfire Ranch is located in the red clay hills of North Mississippi, at the foothills of the Appalachian Trail, on the fields and rivers that are the ancestral homelands of the Chickasaw Indians. Residents are experiencing a new level of connection and healing in the heart of the South.

Respecting Legacy and Honoring Ancestry.

In 2018 Foxfire Ranch celebrated its 100-year anniversary, building on a vast legacy of Black land ownership in the South. For the next century they envision co-creative relationships that nurture social and artistic movements for justice and liberation, all

while maintaining an explicit connection to community, place and the unique Hill Country culture.

Own the Land, Heal the People.

Foxfire honors the restorative power of rural land spaces owned and stewarded by Black folks. Foxfire is part of an emerging network of sanctuary spaces throughout the global and deep South committed to serving the needs of justice movements by providing an environment conducive for healing, connection, ease, deep learning and celebration. They believe that long standing family land legacies are a form of collective and cooperative land stewardship across multiple timelines and generations

“It was beautiful, the generational legacy they’re building at Foxfire. Getting to hear from Mr. Bill and Big Mama about their grandparents, growing up the daughter of sharecroppers - how many centuries of oppression there were for their families. And then seeing them on their land, what they’ve been able to build, and the vision they had. There was so much depth there, it wasn’t just a retreat center. So much history is embedded in the way spirits came through. Malcolm X believed in land being important part of our liberation; it felt very clear going to Foxfire.”

- Traci Ishigo, Vigilant Love, CA, Foxfire Resident

Windcall's Own Resilience

Windcall is at the forefront of transformative healing in social justice with an excellent track record spanning decades which is a solid investment for foundations concerned for the health and sustainability of today’s changemakers. With the support of two multi-year grants, Windcall was able to invest in its internal infrastructure and:

• Hired its first full-time Program Director.
• Added a new part-time Administrative Associate.
  
• Increased the Residency Coordinator from part-time to full-time.
  

As a national and virtually-staffed organization, Windcall has had to plan creatively for the resilience of its team, while developing ongoing programming. Unrestricted, general operating grants have provided resources to:

• Support staff with work from home stipends and equipment.
  
• Deploy online teamwork tools and platforms.
  
• Develop an organizational wellness plan to resource individual staff and the team as a whole.
  
• Host in-person retreats grounded in nature to form relationships and manifest Windcall’s vision.
  

What’s ahead for 2023

To sustain the level of impact achieved in 2022, Windcall intends to strengthen its internal infrastructure in 2023 by hiring a Program Coordinator to continue developing the Staying Power model and bring the model to more movement organizations.

Windcall will continue investing in the long term sustainability of the alumni by launching additional Beacons Circles to support the adoption of transformational practices into organizational culture and policies. Future Circles will include an Indigenous group, a Reproductive Justice group, and a Northeast Regional group.

"The movement needs lots of vision and activists don’t have time. The best visionaries take time but the daily firefighters can’t look up. I was conscious that a process like this would be so helpful for looking up from the violence and looking at the stars."

- Thenmohzi Soundararajan, Equality Labs, CA,

Point Reyes Resident

The Windcall Team

Viviana Rennella

Executive Director

Jayeesha Dutta

Program Director

Alex Torres

Residencies Coordinator

Becca Williams

Administrative Associate

The Windcall Advisory Board

The Windcall advisory board is a strong leadership and fundraising body comprised

of Windcall alumni.

Erin Matson

Co-founder and Executive Director of Reproaction

Katelyn Johnson

Executive Director at Black Roots Alliance

Kelley Weigel

Director of Uplift Oregon at RISE Partnership

Strela Cervas

Certified Coach and Consultant & Certified Forest Therapy Guide

Core Consultants

Cassie Gardener Manjikian

Interim Residencies Coordinator

Trainers

Site Hosts, Coordinators & Chefs

2022 Revenue: $617,611

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