Our Programs
Wolf Willow Institute programs are designed to affect meaningful change in a complex world.
All our programming explores five inter-woven strands. Competencies; the tools, skills, concepts and processes for leading in complexity. Capacities; the behaviours, mindsets, practices, sensibilities and inner qualities exhibited by skillful systems leaders. Community; the recognition of our inter-dependence with a focus on relationship, connection, culture, collaboration, dignity, belonging, diversity and an ethic of care. Mystery; honouring and incorporating the intangible, the sacred, the ceremonial, the land-based, the aesthetic, the mythic and artistic domains of experience. Integral; a commitment to whole-person learning that honours multiple ways of knowing, being and doing, and balances cognitive learning with somatic, heart-centered, spiritual and depth approaches.
The Positive Deviants Fellowship: a 9-month learning journey consisting of in-person retreats and online support for a small cohort of established systems leaders looking to fully embody their calling, cultivate new capabilities and deepen their impact.
The Café at the Edge of the World: a series of beautiful and surprising virtual learning experiences that offer a multi-cultural and multi-modal inquiry into decolonizing systems thinking, honing wicked questions, mapping visible and intangible systems, and understanding ourselves as integral to systems.
The Black Changemakers Systems Studios: hosted in partnership with Black Lives Matter Canada, the studios explore complexity principles and the tools of systems change while centring the life experience, expertise and community strength of Black Canadians.
Here Be Dragons: A blend of social innovation training and action-inquiry for groups working on complex challenges. Groups apply as a team and join other teams from diverse backgrounds for a 5-day retreat designed to help them bring a systems lens to their challenge domain.
The Indigenous Changemakers Systems Studio: A six-month initiative that brings together Elders, storytellers and changemakers from the Treaty Three region in northern Ontario looking bring a culturally-centered systems lens to the opioid crisis.
The Imaginarium: Part art studio, part petri dish; this is a practice space for building our complexity muscles. We combine creative practice and creative constraints (pressure makes diamonds!). We open different vantage points and lean into what we call “embodied imaginings” to access different kinds of intelligences.
Eldering in Times of Transformation: After decades of initiation through life’s triumphs and losses, what are our most pressing questions, our strongest intuitions, and our boldest desires for our world as we journey into our 60’s, 70’s, 80’s? And how might exploring those offer us insights into contributions that we might still make, that we must make, as systems of all kinds collapse and are reimagined?
