“Core… practices for social transformation”

by Becca Krantz

Welcome to our new website, our new logo, and our new tagline!

If you’ve been around CORE much, you know that we love art and beauty, so we are thrilled to unveil this new look, created through collaboration with local artists Kimberly Cho and iCandy Graphics & Web design. (Watch for a future blog post about the making of our logo for more information about Kim!) Knowing us, you may also know that we love depth. So we’d like to share with you some of the deeper changes behind this visual transformation.

After the March 2015 wake-up calls of my cancer diagnosis and Tony Robinson’s murder, CORE undertook a participatory “Exploratory Journey” to reflect on our past and explore possible futures. We weren’t sure we should keep doing what we’d been doing, or if we should keep going at all. What, in these challenging times, should we be focusing our time and resources on?  After a year of surveys, face-to-face interviews, and community meetings, and another years’ work with an expanded and more diverse team of volunteer and paid leaders, we’ve made some important discoveries and decisions:

• CORE’s “superpower,” what’s been best about our work in the past, is how we bring people together to learn and practice towards social transformation.
• There is a hunger for more of this kind of hosting, and a desire to make it more inclusive and more accessible to people working for social change.
• Our new Promise is to bring people together to explore and cultivate core practices for social transformation to heal ourselves, our communities, and the world.
• Our core offering, how we plan to fulfill on that promise, is convening using powerful practices that cultivate individual and collective transformation.
• Our name, “CORE,” is no longer an acronym, but an “animating metaphor” that evokes core strength, courage, core values, centering, and coming together in heart-centered circles, as reflected in our new logo (which can also be seen as “slicing the apple a new way”).

We have also gotten clearer that the “we” of CORE encompasses a series of concentric circles, from the inner circle of staff, to a group of interim steering committee members and other volunteer leaders, to the even wider circle of all of the participants in the network. Julie Andersen and I (Becca Krantz) have been working together as the anchors of CORE since 2013, and we have decided to name this more clearly in our new position titles of “co-leaders.” Jasmine Timmons joined us in May of 2017 as strategy consultant, and the three of us have been hard at work building this new version of our inner circle into our “organizing team.”

As CORE continues to evolve, so will this new blog. We anticipate that in future posts, in addition to sharing about our upcoming convenings and harvests from past ones, we will share more about the key building blocks of our offerings – the lineages and communities of practice we draw from, and why we believe practicing together at the intersection of inner and outer change is key to social transformation. We also hope to have many different authors here, and to share profiles of CORE participants and other people and organizations whose work in the day-to-day world exemplifies these “core practices for social transformation.” Thanks for being with us on the journey. We invite your continued participation, and please stay tuned for more!