Research Collaborative
In 2021, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, The BTS Center launched a significant research initiative to pursue the question, “How would organizations act differently today if they embodied an ecological imagination?”
We might have chosen to consult with scholars, collect a bit of data, and draw our own conclusions, but instead, we opted to go deep. We invited seven organizations, all planted within Northern New England (plus one organization across the border in Montreal) — organizations representing many different sectors, including education, prison reform, the arts, community gardening and food justice, and social action — to join us for an 18-month journey of co-learning. Together comprising a Research Collaborative, we spent a year and a half in mutual exploration: reading together, asking big questions, sharing our experiences, wondering aloud, and engaging in personal and organizational experiments.
Guided by a wise team of Consultant Advisors, our Director of Applied Research, Ben Yosua-Davis, employed a qualitative, ethnographic research methodology, collecting extensive field notes over the course of almost a hundred unique gatherings and then gleaning from them important insights. In October 2023, we have published this report, which conveys our learnings.
Why does this matter? This matters because ecological devastation represents the most urgent crisis that humanity has ever faced. We are seeing the impacts of climate chaos more clearly with each passing year, and climate scientists’ forecasts for the coming decades are dire. We believe that climate devastation is not merely a problem for scientists and activists, but a symptom of the foundational cultural and spiritual structures of our society. If systems like consumer capitalism, industrial modernity, and colonial domination are the root causes of our current crisis, then every organization has something important to offer in this moment.
In this moment of uncertainty and great concern, the work of these eight organizations — Ashwood Waldorf School, Boston Food Forest Coalition, Hour Exchange Portland, Maine Prisoner Advocacy Coalition, Montreal City Mission, St. Joseph’s College, Waterville Creates, and The BTS Center — and thousands of other organizations like them, secular and religious alike, matters. Moreover, the way in which these and other organizations engage in their work matters. Their perceptions, postures, and practices of leadership have great potential to promote healing and regeneration, to nurture resilient communities, to strengthen our collective fortitude — and — without a good deal of self-reflection, care, and intention, their perceptions, postures, and practices of leadership also have the potential to perpetuate the troublesome dynamics that have led us to the very crises we face.
We gathered these organizational partners because they share our hope for a new way of embodying the best version of ourselves in response to our planet’s deep need and they reflect the earth’s wisdom in their day-to-day life and work.
We have developed and facilitated this Research Collaborative as a first significant undertaking that reflects a broader intention to approach our work with a posture of “rigorous and reverent curiosity.” We use this phrase frequently: rigorous because we aim to bring the discipline of quantitative and qualitative research to our programs, asking important questions, surfacing stories, collecting data, drawing conclusions, and sharing our findings; and reverent because we understand this work is sacred — we ask curious questions not simply because we are interested, but also because there is a divine urgency, a sacred calling, to this work of cultivating and nurturing spiritual leadership for a climate-changed world. This particular question about the influence of ecological imagination in organizational life is one of several big questions that we have begun to pursue, and we look forward to sharing our findings — with both the academic community and the communities of practitioners — in the months and years to come.
Our Partner Organizations
Our Consultant Advisors
