Inspiring Everyday Leadership
We envision a world in which our everyday leaders speak, write and serve with hope, integrity, gratitude, and grace.
About Grassroots Gratitude
Our Mission
To foster gratitude as the secret strength of everyday leadership.
Grassroots Gratitude is a social purpose venture that took root as its founder was writing her book, An Ecology of Gratitude: Writing your way to what matters. It is the brainchild of community advocate, author and master journal writer Lorraine Widmer-Carson.
Lorraine’s mission is to encourage everyone to see themselves as leaders, cultivate their awareness of their personal strengths and nudge gratitude higher up the ladder of personal character strengths, while stretching in the direction of BHAG’s. Quite simply, Lorraine advocates for the benefits of writing longhand and using your refreshed self-awareness for getting down to basics.
In her experience, the journal has assisted her understanding of the swirl of life and its variables. It has sharpened her focus and improved her ability to listen and pay attention to the things that really matter in the short term, while keeping bigger goals in mind. For Lorraine, the most important things are fundamental or our relationships: our core leadership roles in family, in community, and in our home place.
Grassroots Gratitude’s BHAG (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal): Everyone will shift their imaginations to understand that we are interconnected via our relationships to ourselves, to each other and to the planet. The change we envision? People will learn to connect to themselves and others more positively. The outcome? Our levels social capital will be galvanized with more trust and compassion.
Our Values
Our values guide everything that happens here at Grassroots Gratitude, which means always being true to one’s core self. Leading from a place of integrity and authenticity is like following a North Star—you can never lose your way.
Honesty
“Lorraine—the thing you have is street cred.” So said John Allard, then Chair of the Banff Community Foundation to me. I would never want to risk losing that distinction. I have built my reputation on being credible in a small town that hosts the world, and have lived here since 1980. We have raised four children, run a family business and been involved in the Social, Health, Recreational, Environmental and Cultural niches of this corner of the planet. In the family – we have lots of human experiences and can recognize kindness, as opposed to fake anything. Grassroots Gratitude values honesty and builds trusting relationships – essential building blocks of social capital and currency of our human systems.
Creativity
For Grassroots Gratitude, leadership equals relationships. The world needs more leaders who see possibilities. They are creative problem solvers, positive, imaginative and can relate to each other on a strong inter-personal level. With respect to cultivating and maintaining a childlike sense of wonder, more than 60 years ago, Rachel Carson wrote: “If I had the influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years.” Rachel Carson, Sense of Wonder: A Celebration of Nature for Parents and Children
Relationships
Grassroots Gratitude sees our relationships and relatedness as the glue that keeps each of us hitched to everything else in a one-of-a-kind, unique-to-you mosaic of connections. An Ecology of Gratitude: Writing your way to what matters ultimately invites the reader to realize that no matter what the system, context, or conversation, “it is never about just one thing.” John Muir (a founding father of national parks systems): “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Gratitude is the glue that hitches us in our place. Gratitude Ignition Guide: Inspiring Thoughtful Writing asks readers to consider their leadership roles and use journal-writing and gratitude as strengthening agents to start the day.