Nonprofit Professionals Recharge Their Energy at Three Free Retreats

TOOLS AND TRAINING

By Jennifer C. Berkshire

David Mann was facing a pair of major changes in his life back in 1997: the impending birth of his first child and an offer to become co-director of a nonprofit group he had helped start, the Minnesota Alliance for Progressive Action, a statewide group in St. Paul that seeks to engage residents in the political process. “I was starting to ask the question, ‘How do I want to live? ‘” he recalls.

He sought answers in a most unusual way: He headed for a retreat at Windcall, a small working ranch high in the peaks of Montana. For four weeks, Mr. Mann would live precisely the opposite of his busy activist life: He spent the days taking hikes, horseback riding, doing yoga, and writing in a journal. The trip, he says, was transformative. “I’d been working 60-hour weeks,” he says. “I discovered that I’d forgotten how to breathe. My first hike changed that.”

By the time his sojourn was over, Mr. Mann felt up to the political and personal challenges that awaited him back in Minneapolis. But the lessons he learned at Windcall have had much longer-term resonance for him. At the end of 2000, he left his job and went into business for himself as a “vision” consultant, helping nonprofit organizations reach their long-term goals.

“The Windcall experience helped me,” says Mr. Mann. “It had a healing aspect, both personally and professionally. I began to accept what it is I do well, and to be OK with that.”

Short retreats are commonplace in the nonprofit world, but sometimes, overworked charity employees need more than a few days to unwind. Longer breaks, like the one Mr. Mann took, can help stressed-out charity leaders step back, take stock, and tackle their daily tasks with refreshed energy and expanded vision. Although offerings can range widely, here are three longer-term opportunities designed especially for nonprofit professionals that are free to their participants.

Wide Open Spaces

Windcall, outside of Bozeman, Mont., has been soothing harried nonprofit leaders like Mr. Mann for the past 14 years. The guests, chosen in groups of four by a national selection committee made up of charity leaders and Windcall alumni, come from all walks of nonprofit life. Recent guests have included community organizers, directors of large statewide charities, religious leaders, and environmental advocates. The only criterion: They must have at least five years’ experience working for a nonprofit social-change organization.

The project is the brainchild of social-change-minded philanthropists Albert and Susan Wells, who purchased the remote retreat in 1986 and decided it would be an ideal setting for tired activists in need of rest and relaxation. Mr. Wells, a retired investment banker, is a descendant of a family that obtained its wealth by manufacturing eyeglasses. Both Albert and Susan Wells serve on the board of the Abelard Foundation, a family grant maker in Oakland, Calif., and Lincoln, Mass., that supports social-change organizations.

“They really believe that taking time off is essential to sustaining a long-term movement for social change,” says Elizabeth Wilcox, executive director of the Common Counsel Foundation, a consortium of family foundations that oversees the Windcall program along with a sister retreat for writers, the Mesa Refuge in Northern California. “They saw that people who were working for change were in real danger of burning out. There’s an activist mentality that says you can’t stop. People are focused 24 hours a day on helping others. Sometimes this is the only option they have to take a break.”

The retreat subsidizes transportation for those who can’t afford to make the trek to the Montana mountains, and residents have the option of staying for two weeks or four, living in a guesthouse with private bedrooms and baths. Dinners are cooked by local chefs; there is no television, no phone, and no program.

“There is no expectation of people at all,” says Sue Hutchinson, Windcall’s coordinator. “Some people bring boxes and boxes of work. It makes them feel better, even if the boxes are never opened.”

Having watched dozens of overworked, stressed-out visitors go through the decompression process, Ms. Hutchinson has a keen sense of what it’s like: “Some people arrive and they desperately need a break. Then they start thinking about their role in their organization or about what they’ve been doing. Then they start crying for a couple days.”

The combination of isolation and unstructured time isn’t for everyone, she concedes. But enough Windcall alumni feel strongly about the retreat that some of them have begun planning its future — the Wellses, Windcall’s founders and primary benefactors, plan to sell the ranch in a few years, notes Ms. Hutchinson. Of any new location for the retreat, she maintains that there is really only one requirement: “It has to be in a place of stunning physical beauty, away from it all.”

The Sounds of Silence

For all its remoteness, Windcall seems a veritable luxury resort when compared with another retreat center: the Vallecitos Mountain Refuge, a 135-acre ranch nestled deep in the mountains of northern New Mexico. Located about three hours from Albuquerque, Vallecitos has no electricity, no flush toilets, and lots of wildlife. And that’s just what its founders like about it.

“Sometimes we have to get back to nature,” says Linda Velarde, who started the contemplative retreat center in 1993 with co-founder Grove Burnett, an environmental lawyer. The land had previously been managed as a wildlife refuge, but Ms. Velarde and Mr. Burnett had a different vision for it: a refuge for people who were working to change the world. “We wanted to give activists a time out for personal and spiritual renewal,” she says. “We’ve sped things up so much with computers, faxes, e-mail. Everything is immediate. We can never reflect, only act, act, act. There’s a slower pace here that can be a shock at first.”

Every summer, up to 18 nonprofit workers participate in the 10-day-long Vallecitos Refuge Fellowship Program, which is sponsored by grants from the Ford and Nathan Cummings Foundations, and donations from individuals. To be eligible for the retreat (for which guests pay only their travel costs), participants must have at least five years of public-interest experience and a proven commitment to leadership. The application process is simple, notes Ms. Velarde. Potential guests are asked two questions: Why do they do the work that they do, and why do they want to go to the woods?

Once they arrive, they can be forgiven for wondering if they have landed in a different world — if not another era. Days at Vallecitos feature meditation, talking circles, sweat lodges, drumming, and hiking. Guests stay in platform tents, small cabins, and yurts. But it’s not what passes for hiking among the city-slicker crowd. There are no trails here; would-be hikers must make their own. “You have to do a lot of things as a community here,” says Ms. Velarde. “It’s a kind of community-building in a different way, different from what they’re doing in their own work. These are earth-based activities done together.”

But while the communal showers and occasional bear sightings may take some getting used to, it’s the silence that often proves most challenging for visitors to Vallecitos. Not only is the ranch itself deeply quiet, far from the roar of highway traffic and the incessant chirping of cellphones, but the refuge requires that its guests “commit” to silence. No talking is allowed on the ranch before 10 a.m., and one full day of each 10-day stint is spent in silence. Guests take a wordless walk to a nearby meadow each night after dinner.

“That silence can be transforming, but it can also be a real challenge for people,” says Diana Cohn, senior program officer at the Solidago Foundation, in Northampton, Mass., and a Vallecitos alumna who says that the retreat helped bring greater balance to her work life. Solidago, a grant maker that supports nonprofit environmental and labor-rights programs in the United States and Mexico, encourages its grantees to attend the refuge and other programs like it. “Some people get transformed and bring that experience back with them,” says Ms. Cohn. “We also hear that it was tortuous at first, then they loved it.”

Peace and Prose

If backwoods hiking and tent living doesn’t appeal, perhaps a rather more gentle writers’ retreat is just the thing. Blue Mountain Center, in the upstate New York town of Blue Mountain Lake, offers a monthlong getaway for nonprofit activists and cultural workers, but with a twist: They must be engaged in a writing process related to their work. The center also welcomes visual artists and composers with an activist bent. Residencies last for four weeks and require that participants pay only for their travel.

Fourteen guests at a time stay in a turn-of-the-century Adirondack summer house, a donation from the Hochschild family. “Harold Hochschild was the author of a series of books on the Adirondacks,” notes Harriet Barlow, the executive director of the Blue Mountain Center since its founding in 1982. “He was interested in doing something that would be supportive of writers and the arts,” she says. The family was committed to literary pursuits, she says, noting that the clan also includes the writer Adam Hochschild. “They wanted to offer writers an opportunity to take time away from the pressures that can get in the way of creating.”

In addition to housing writers and artists, Blue Mountain also welcomes nonprofit workers.

“Our hope is that the activists will be restored and go back to their good works,” says Ms. Barlow. The mixture of artists and activists at the retreat leads to “alchemy,” she says. “The writers feel reinforced in their interest in and commitment to the world, and activists feel quieted in some way.”

The retreat is more mountain resort than contemplative campout. There’s a tennis court, boats, hiking trails — the citified variety — and even a phone. Writers have their own rooms in the lodge in which to work and rest, while artists and composers are provided with their own studios. Although the center’s staff members hope that guests will take advantage of the area’s beautiful setting to relax and enjoy themselves, it’s really about the writing, says Ben Strader, the center’s managing director.

“We give people a chance to step away from the day-to-day running of an institution and take the time to engage in a more reflective analysis,” says Mr. Strader. “Often that thinking takes a written form.” He emphasizes that to participate in the Blue Mountain program, one need not have a track record as a published writer, but simply a willingness to think and explore in writing. “The writing you do here might not be suitable for publication or you might not want to have it published,” he says. “That’s up to you.”

Dizzying Demands

As restorative as a lengthy retreat can be, it is not necessarily the solution for every overwhelmed charity leader, says Ms. Cohn. She thinks that the dizzying demands faced by many nonprofit workers may require a broader solution than a single break can offer.

“Deadlines, travel, stress, exhaustion — lots of people in the nonprofit field are dealing with this stuff,” she says. “We have to ask if there’s a problem with the work setting itself. What is it in our work culture that produces so much stress that we need a two-week retreat in the middle of nowhere to recover?”

But with budget cuts looming everywhere, donations down, and demands on charities increasing, nonprofit workplaces are unlikely to become less stressful any time soon. For now, a few weeks in the mountains still seems like a good cure for the overworked blues, says Mr. Mann. “It was amazing to have a whole month where I didn’t have to produce anything for anyone,” he says of his time at Windcall. “The only expectations were for me. I don’t think I knew how hard I’d been working until I got there.”

What other retreats are available for nonprofit professionals? Tell your peers in the Tools and Training online forum.