Windcall is a small working ranch north of Bozeman, Montana.
Over a sixteen-year period, more than 400 social justice leaders came there to participate in the Windcall Resident Program.
At its start, the program was an experiment set up to address the alarming incidence of turnover in social justice organizations due to burnout. What it became was a successful model for developing and sustaining vision and inspiration, resiliency and balance in the leaders who attended.
Since the ending of the original Windcall program in 2005, its purpose and methods have been carried forward through the efforts of the Windcall Institute. The Institute was created and is guided by a national board of past residents. They successfully transferred the program to an interim site in Vermont for two years and are launching two new pilot projects due to open in the fall of 2008. In addition, they are examining ways to share the Windcall discoveries and ultimately change how social justice non-profits, and allies including funders and donors, approach sustaining and nurturing leadership.
Make an impact. Success breeds success.
Of the 420 Windcall residents, more that 95% are still working for positive social change today, as vital to their organizations' work as ever before. Click here to learn more about Getting Involved.
Susan and Albert Wells have been involved in the social justice movement for more than fifty years.
The first 15 years of their life together were marked by the national turmoil that surrounded the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam and the murders of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Impacted by these momentous events, they felt an urgent desire to help get our country back on track.
Albert became a guiding force in Abelard, a nonprofit foundation that he and Susan helped establish in the late 1950's to support social change organizations working in low-income and poor communities.
In the late 1980's, concerned by the growing incidence of leadership turnover is these kinds of organizations, Susan and Albert retooled their Montana ranch as a place where social change workers could address their symptoms of burnout and renew their energy, creativity and commitment. They called their groundbreaking experiment The Windcall Resident Program.