Announcing Leaven's 2024 Leadership + Strategic Goals

On December 10, 2023 at Leaven’s annual meeting, the community made some big decisions, approving five strategic goals for 2024-2025 and electing 12 members to Leaven’s 2024 Board of Directors.

Leaven’s 2024-2025 Strategic Goals

• Recommit to Community Organizing as a Core Sacred Practice of Leaven Community - Community Organizing and Action is one of our four core values. It’s time to scale back up, training our leaders and use the lens of community organizing to guide our strategy.

• Build a Culture of Radical Belonging - In 2024, we will create a team at Leaven that attends to Leaven’s culture and communal sense of belonging, in order for Leaven to more fully live into its vision where all people can gather here - making meaning and organizing for change regardless of race, gender, religion, age, ability, sexuality, class, and other identities and experiences.

• Explore Leaven becoming a Community Resilience Hub - We will initiate and deepen our existing neighborhood and organizing partnerships to understand what needs there might be for increasing resilience in a time of climate and other social, political and natural emergencies, as well as where and how Leaven might support, lead or partner in these efforts.

• Develop Secular Sacred Spaces at Leaven - Cultivating deep, meaningful relationships is an essential part of who we are as Leaven Community. We long for more spaces to cultivate strong relationships, and for more secular spaces to explore our diverse spiritualities.

• Develop a Sustainable and Abundant Resource Pool for Leaven's Financial Stability - Leaven has a strong foundation of generous and longtime individual donors who are committed to our vision. To strengthen our financial stability, Leaven’s Raising the Dough team will experiment with and evaluate the development of additional revenue streams such as grants, events, and earned income, and will build on what we learn.

Leaven’s 2024 Board Members

• Meshal Alajmi

• Vanessa Bird

• Jennifer Creswell

• Derek Fenwick, Co-Chair

• Mike Hogan

• Lois Jordahl, Salt and Light Appointee

• Cheryl Lohrmann, Co–Chair

• Joe Morgan, Treasurer

• John Rodgers

• Jazmín Vélez

• Marshall Wattman-Turner

• Brent Wilson, Secretary

Unveiling the Sacred Spiral of Leaven

“Love and Justice are not two. Without inner change, there is no outer change; without collective change, no change matters.” - Rev. angel Kyodo williams, sensei

On October 27-29, 35 adults and 14 children and youth within Leaven Community participated in the community-wide Leaven retreat, following the Listening Season in September 2023. The primary purpose of the retreat was to unveil the next steps for the community emerging out of the Listening Season.

Retreat design centered around aligning Leaven’s existing values (Diversity, Justice, Story and Action) with its existing activities, as well as holding them alongside the hopes and dreams that had been discussed at House Meetings in the listening season.

All our activities at Leaven are connected at a fractal level through relationships and shared values - so we were able to physically map on the floor Leaven’s existing programs and the hoped-for ideas that had been expressed in the listening season.

Building momentum from the sacred spiral mapping, the group engaged in an ideas-creation activity led by Rev Julia Nielsen, director of the Leaven Community Land and Housing Coalition. Each individual wrote one bold idea on a notecard. Notecards were then passed anonymously from person to person, stopping five times for individuals to review and score each idea on a scale of 1 (no thank you) to 5 (love this idea!!) for a total of 25 points. Ideas with scores 20 and higher were then added to the spiral map.

These conversations wove a deepening story of our shared dreams for this community! Curious to learn more? Read the 2023 Leaven Retreat Report here.

What we learned during Leaven's 2023 Listening Season

To watch the video, visit this link and enter the passcode: ds4KxE!D

Key Takeaways

• Leaven is alive! Lots of folks participated and articulated the same values and dreams we remember from years ago.

• We are longing for connection. We want to be seen, to belong, and to be together in milestone moments and in daily life.

• We are experiencing the pressures of capitalism. Folks shared about being busy, overstimulated, and stressed, and named longings for sharing resources and labor.

• We focused on inner and community change - but less so systemic change. Few of us pointed to systems change or community organizing as a means to addressing the pressures we’re facing in our lives.

• Now is the time to act on our longings. We have lots of ideas and energy - but no one is going to create what we’re longing for except ourselves!

Recommendations for Next Steps

Start organizing at Leaven! If there’s something any Leaven member wants to do with others at Leaven, find 1-2 other people, organize it, and invite the community! Get it on the calendar and in the enews (via Ali and Alison) and go for it. Don’t worry if it’s not in the building - it can still be a “Little Leaven.” No one is going to do it for us - it’s time to get started!

Recommit to a culture of community organizing and systems change through practices such as: offering regular Sacred Organizing trainings at Leaven; sending Leaven members to community organizing trainings such as those offered by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF); integrating community organizing into new member orientation and materials; re-establishing a Leaven Community Core Team

Consider becoming a Community Resilience Hub - Leaven becoming a Community Resilience Hub would combine many of the longings people have named for climate action, mutual aid, and community building in one overarching project that the community could organize around and engage our neighbors in.

Follow the leadership of BIPOC communities organizing for climate justice and anti-capitalism. Show up at events and actions, build relationships, amplify their work and voices, support the movement with our bodies and our resources, and organize others to join us.

Experiment with cultivating secular sacred community spaces at Leaven, to mark big life milestones and make meaning of the world around us.

Read the Report

Curious for more? Read the written report the Listening Season Team drafted and approved together.

Leaven Listening Season Team

Sam Yerke
Fumi Tosu
Matt Smith
John Rodgers
Nancy Phelps
Cheryl Lohrmann
Derek Fenwick
Jules Nielsen
Jane Keating