The guiding purpose of our work is to serve as a home for ongoing inquiry, learning, and transformation in response to the unprecedented challenges of our time—environmental, technological, social, moral, spiritual—and the call for a human response commensurate with our responsibility. As the intense polarization of competing worldviews grows, we must increase our collective capacity to meet local and global challenges. The world needs us courageous, creative, and connected. These times demand that we show up and engage in ways that transcend what we may have ever imagined.
The many challenges we face as humans today can feel overwhelming, dampening our spirits and threatening our communities. In the face of all this, we come together and engage in authentic, informed, and wholehearted actions that lift our collective spirits and bring us to new levels of connection, strength, meaning, purpose, and love.
I am so grateful for what I learn every day with those of you who are connected through this sacred place. I invite you to read these stories of the creative, uplifting, and impactful responses people and communities are making in these times. Together we are becoming what the world needs now.
We were made for these times. May we look back, decades hence, and know that our best selves came forward.
With gratitude,
Heather Johnson
Executive Director, the Whidbey Institute
STEWARDING YOUR INVESTMENT • WHOLEHEARTED SERVICE
CO-CREATING EXPERIENCES, NURTURING COMMUNITY • STEWARDING PLACE
IN LOVING MEMORY • 2016 DONORS • SUPPORT OUR WORK
Our 2016 achievements were dramatically shaped by a capacity-building grant from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, totaling $210,000 over three years, to establish a robust development office. This award provided the opportunity to grow our team, including hiring a full-time Development Manager—a role now held by Holly Harlan—to help steward our next stage of growth and organizational maturity.
As a home for transformative learning in a world fraught with complex challenges, the Whidbey Institute is faced with an exciting opportunity: there are many more people and programs seeking a home for their work on our campus than we can currently serve. Growing our capacity to meet this demand means: 
177 donors contributed $57,653 to the Whidbey Institute on the first Tuesday in May, 2016, in order to steward the land, support our mission, and care for the work and spaces we love and share. We thank each donor, of gifts large and small, and the hardworking team who made the day a success despite nation-wide technical challenges. Special thanks to the Linda Sue Park fund for Gaia and an anonymous donor who together provided a $20,000 match fund to double your gifts. 
In an early 2016 interview welcoming her to the Board Presidency, Kate Snider (pictured, far left) said, “when we come to the Whidbey Institute, we know that we can enter into important, honest, open conversation about the issues that matter most in the world. We expect to learn from one another, and learn from the land. We have a safe place to be challenged, to experiment, to enter into deep inquiry and meaningful connections. As a mother, an entrepreneur, a business owner, an environmental consultant, and a citizen of our region and planet in this unprecedented time of change, challenge, and opportunity, I find the engagement and connection that the Institute provides extremely meaningful—to me, and by extension, to everyone that my life influences. I know this to be true for all of us who have opened ourselves up to the Institute throughout its 40+ year history.”
We owe a great debt of gratitude to Gabriel Shirley, who completed two terms (six years) of board service in October, including significant service as Board President. He has been involved with the Institute since he first participated in our Spirited Work program in 1999. 
Madisun Stern joined our staff team in September 2016 as Database Administrator. She brings skills in event planning, community engagement, and non-profit marketing as well as a profound appreciation for our organizational mission. 
Since purchasing Legacy Forest from Whidbey Institute founders Fritz and Vivienne Hull at the end of 2015, we have been inviting meaningful conversation into this space by hosting learning groups, board and staff teams, conversational gatherings, and communities of practice. Storyhouse was home to over 40 meetings and gatherings in 2016. 
Robert Keeney (pictured, far left) is an indispensable member of the Whidbey Institute volunteer team, and frequently comes to the land for a day or a week at a time to build trails, remove hazard trees, clear windfall, and support our land care team with his labor, skill, and wisdom. He’s been coming to Chinook since 2010, and his volunteer hours in 2016 alone add up to about three weeks of full-time service.
Anna Strick arrived at the Whidbey Institute in the spring of 2016 with a great deal of hot-weather farming experience, gained on the East Coast and especially in the Carolinas. She spent the 2016 growing season living in Mushroom Cabin, working in the Westgarden, and engaging students at the Institute and through the South Whidbey School District gardens. Through a season gardening alongside coordinators Abigail Lazarowski and Cary Peterson and fellow interns Liza Elman, Devin Mounts, and Stoni Tomson, she gained a great deal of cool weather crop experience, additional practice engaging children in the garden, and a newfound love of South Whidbey Island.
Kumudini Shoba, who has both an extensive Ayurvedic knowledge and a master’s degree in bio-organic chemistry, has been involved with the Whidbey Institute for many years and planted many of the specimens in the Westgarden’s herbal border. She continues to mentor, steward, and care for both our plants and our community knowledge, in part through hosting herbal wisdom classes in the Westgarden each spring, summer, and autumn.
Mara has continued her decade-long volunteer stewardship of the Appletree Garden through 2016, and we honor her for her continued skill and dedication in cultivating beauty. “Each plant gives something to the people that come here,” Mara said.”I have wild tulip bulbs from the mountains of Afghanistan and Northern Iran—plants from New Zealand, South Africa, Japan, and China. The garden is like the center of a web of relationship, not only with all the people who have worked there over the years abut also with the places that the plants come from.”
Charlie Murphy was a beloved friend to our organization and an inspiration to all who knew him. He leaves behind a loving husband, Eric Mulholland. 
