Our Annual Report (pdf, 200kb) reminds us how thoroughly your kindness has risen up to meet our needs over the past nine years and during this past year in particular.  Thank you for fostering a world of grateful living.

Vision
A worldwide community dedicated to gratefulness as the core inspiration for personal change, international cooperation, and sustainable activism in areas of universal concern.

Purpose
To provide education and support for the practice of grateful living as a global ethic, based on the teachings of Br. David Steindl-Rast and others.  We offer free resources through our online hub, Gratefulness.org, as well as workshops, retreats, and local groups that teach people to cultivate gratefulness. We aim to set up a spiral of learning, practice, and sharing that opens out into real-life action and service to society.

The practice of gratefulness moves people in four directions.  In our personal lives, it has an inward aspect, restoring courage; and an outward aspect, inspiring generosity.  In our social lives, it can be focused one-to-one, reconciling relationships, or it can be focused further afield:  as an instrument for healing our Earth through reverence for nature, intergenerational respect, interfaith dialogue, and awareness of opportunities to serve.  These four directions add up to a commitment to live in the light of all we’ve been given.  That means living fearlessly and therefore non-violently. 

Mission
To build up and expand our interactive website as the focus for a global community of people whose spiritual practice is grateful living.
To provide a unifying ethic that demonstrates we are not separate one from another, in an age of globalization that undermines our ethics and sense of worldwide community.
To offer workshops and retreats that increase people's awareness of gratefulness as a tool for personal healing and compassion towards others, a lifelong practice.
To partner with other organizations and institutions who want to explore how gratefulness can transform and energize their own work and mission.
To support local groups studying the practice of grateful living.
To demonstrate the interconnectedness between gratefulness and the healthy flow of resources in a spirit of sufficiency.
To promote public awareness of gratefulness as a power for change in areas such as ecology, religious tolerance, and intergenerational respect.

What can gratefulness accomplish
in our lives and our world?
This grateful living mini-course supplies practice ideas
plus links to an abundance of resources.