Sacred-Centered Organizational Culture
Cultivating a Workplace Rooted in Sacred Love, Belonging, and Spiritual Solutions
At Fetzer, we believe organizations working toward social transformation can themselves be places of transformation.
Our sacred-centered organizational culture work explores how organizations can support individual and collective spiritual formation while cultivating structures, relationships, and ways of working that reflect their deepest values and the world they seek to create.
We begin with our own organization. For more than a decade, Fetzer has been experimenting with what it means to create the conditions and infrastructure for a spiritually grounded, deliberately developmental workplace. This includes our internal workplace spirituality programming, known as the Community of Freedom; spiritual development support for staff; Bridging and Belonging; and organizational practices ranging from hiring and compensation to performance management, leadership, and decision-making.
Together, these efforts reflect our belief that inner spiritual grounding and the structures and practices of organizational life can be mutually reinforcing. Our experience with the Community of Freedom, for example, is helping us understand how sustained inner work can contribute to transformation at individual, communal, and organizational levels.
Grounded in what we are learning internally, we are increasingly extending this work outward in partnership with other sacred-centered organizations. We resource spiritual development and organizational culture efforts, develop and share practical knowledge and tools, and accompany organizations as they explore what sacred-centered culture looks like within their own contexts.
Through mutual learning, practice, and ongoing experimentation, we hope to deepen our collective understanding of what supports sacred-centered organizational life and contribute to an emerging field of practice.
Ultimately, this work reflects our interest in organizations themselves as sites of spiritual formation and transformation and as living laboratories for ways of working and structuring organizational life that embody the loving and flourishing world we seek to create.
This work also explores how sacred-centered organizational cultures shape who we become through the work, how we do the work together, and our capacity for collective action toward shared flourishing.
How the work takes shape
Spiritual Formation & Development
Creating ongoing opportunities and supports for social, emotional, and spiritual formation through Fetzer’s Community of Freedom, spiritual development resources and benefits, contemplative and communal practices, and spiritual care. The Community of Freedom creates regular space for staff across the Institute to engage in personal and collective spiritual formation within a multireligious and spiritually pluralistic community.
Sacred-Centered Organizational Practice
Bringing Fetzer’s values into the structures and everyday practices of organizational life, including human resources, policies, leadership, performance and development, decision-making, and other ways of working and structuring organizational life. We view these not simply as operational functions, but as places where an organization’s deepest values can be expressed and practiced.
Bridging & Belonging
Cultivating the capacities, relationships, and organizational conditions that support belonging across difference, grounded in the sacredness and interdependence of all people. Fetzer’s Bridging & Belonging approach integrates inner work and outer action across people, systems, and culture toward shared sacred flourishing.
Partner Resourcing & Accompaniment
Supporting partner organizations as they strengthen spiritual formation and sacred-centered culture within their own contexts through resources, accompaniment, and opportunities for mutual learning. Our early work with partners has reinforced the connection between individual spiritual development and more sustained organizational approaches to spiritual formation and culture.
Learning & Field Building
Learning through practice, documenting and sharing what we and our partners are discovering, and contributing practical knowledge, tools, and frameworks to an emerging field of sacred-centered organizational culture. This includes learning from Fetzer’s own experience, creating opportunities for organizations to learn with and from one another, and exploring how this work connects with and strengthens formation and collective action across our Collaboratives.
Membership to these collaboratives is by invitation only, however if you would like to stay up to date on the development of these collaboratives , please sign up for our newsletter.
If you have any questions regarding this work, please send an email to [email protected].