Center For Ethical Leadership

MISSION: To cultivate leadership and build capacity for change, helping communities tap collective wisdom in service of the common good. The Center for Ethical Leadership was founded in 1990 by Bill Grace, PhD. Since its inception it has been a place where individuals, organizations and community groups could turn to for support in learning to live their core values into all aspects of their lives. Over the years we've offered various programs and workshops targeting different populations and sharing our latest learning about cutting edge leadership tools.

The Center for Ethical Leadership invites people to reach across boundaries, build trust, and lead from their core values to advance change. By convening diverse perspectives--especially those historically excluded--we are creating healthier, more just, and inclusive communities in the Pacific Northwest and across the country. The Center works across sectors with business, government, nonprofit, education and community groups. Founded in 1990, we are best known for the following work:

ETHICAL LEADERSHIP - Ethics is intended to promote behavior directed toward the greater good. There is often a gap between the way things should be and the way they are. Leaders step into these gaps and make changes that align behavior with values. The Center's 4-V model of ethical leadership has been used extensively to create cultures of integrity.

GRACIOUS SPACE - Gracious Space is about creating space to open people to individual and group transformation needed for change. We establish Gracious Space to host diversity, improve communication and build trust across differences such as race, ethnicity, age, and socioeconomic status. It is also essential to cultivate collective leadership.

PEACEMAKING AND HEALING - We believe that healthy leaders propel healthy communities. While working in communities, we repeatedly come across people with deep pain and trauma from their life experiences, often exacerbated by the growing inequity and political polarization in our society. This is why we develop inclusive, culturally fluent leaders who are willing to create empathetic spaces for personal and social healing, so that we can relearn how to engage with each other in a good way and work together to advance the common good. We are using the Peacemaking Circles process based on those of the Tagish Tlingit First Nation tradition, which combine the basic tenets of both Gracious Space and collective leadership, focusing on building trust and relationship before jumping to problem solving.

VALUES AND INITIATIVES - We help people claim their core values and put them into action. For organizations, this typically involves three conversations to make explicit: the values individuals bring to work; the shared values of the group; and the values that define the organization's relationship to the common good.

COMMUNITY LEARNING EXCHANGE - These gatherings break the isolation among local, place-based activists and supports knowledge sharing, perspective, validation, and mutual support. Through in-person and virtual gatherings, we build relationships and advance social change work. We create forums to share actions, practices and ideas in environments that respect and value local wisdom.

MAKING CHANGE - Some people seek to manage change. We help people intentionally make the changes that matter most to them. The Center utilizes comprehensive change models that align individual behavior, group cultures and organizational systems and structures. All of these approaches help people transform individually, form new relationships and work together in new ways. The typical result is people sharing their gifts and talents more fully to move the organization's work forward.