OUR APPROACH

Three ways we
invest in Love.

We invest in Love by uplifting spiritual solutions through three pillars: grantmaking, storytelling, and convening.

Each pillar grew from what we heard across Turtle Island (Canada), responding directly to the recommendations for embedding Love into systems change.

1. IF we create a philanthropic movement that cultivates a sacred worldview where Love is the animating force shaping how we show up for ourselves, one another, and the Earth,
2. AND we resource spiritual solutions that foster self and systems transformation,
3. THEN the flourishing of people and planet can endure.

1. 1Recognize Love as an animating force for systems change, not merely a sentiment+

   When Love is relegated solely to the private or emotional sphere, we diminish its potential as a transformative force for change. To name Love as an animating force is not to demand an agreement on a spiritual understanding. Instead, it invites us to recognize that all of us can move with Love as a practice embodied through values that are in service to the common good: compassion, courage, forgiveness, honesty, generosity, humility, and many more. All of us have intrinsic access to these values, and all of us have choice in how we embody and express them. When we recognize Love as an animating force, we become accountable to our choice in embodying and expressing these values. The more we name our accountability, the more its meaning grows, the more we become aware of our experience with these values, and the more skillfully we can deepen our embodiment and expression of them. In this way, Love becomes a living current that moves through how we see and do our work.

2. 2 Cultivate a living connection to Love for self and team +

   When individuals and teams embody the consciousness, narrative, and behaviours of Love, Love becomes an authentic force within the system we work within. Cultivating a living connection to Love requires an intentional exploration of ontology—inviting individuals and teams to reflect on what Love, a sacred worldview, and flourishing means for themselves and their collective work. Spending time learning with and from the more-than-human world will benefit these explorations. This connection can be sustained through regular practices: making time to go inward, opening the heart through ceremony and rituals, inviting in sacred teachings, encouraging play and laughter, and creating space for integration, while establishing community agreements, activating unique gifts, and holding containers for repair. For these practices to take root, organizations can embed these ways of working into strategies, policies, and operational structures, and directly name the commitment to actively support self and team in sustaining a living connection to Love.

3. 3Center justice and equity as enablers of repair in systems change work+

   Love cannot express itself in its fullness where harm goes unnamed and unaddressed. To speak of Love without actively dismantling the enduring legacies of colonization, systemic discrimination, and dispossession is to offer surface-level change. Harmful, too, is the dismissiveness that refuses to sit across difference—allowing unexamined biases and assumptions to overtake our capacity for dialogue across divides. True repair requires action, with justice and equity serving as the vital enablers of that repair. This calls on us to examine our own egos and fears, to courageously step into the discomfort of owning power and privilege, and to honour the unfinishedness in each of us as a shared invitation to grow. When we meet this threshold, our expressions of Love cease to be fragile and mature into a living covenant of healing and collective liberation.

4. 4 Honour and sustain the spiritual and relational work of local actors +

   Profound spiritual and relational work is already being carried out by local actors, though they may not use terms like “love,” “spiritual solutions,” “relational infrastructure,” or “social cohesion.” A collective effort, grounded in deep humility, must be made to learn from these knowledge-holders without imposing institutional frameworks. This requires engaging in reciprocal dialogue around shared language, honouring and documenting their work on their own terms, and directly strengthening their local networks. Resourcing efforts must help protect and sustain their full portfolio of assets, including their spiritual, cultural, linguistic, intellectual, and material gifts. Young people leading community-based efforts should especially be supported in their leadership, agency, and creativity for Love.

5. 5Invest in the bridge-builders of the emerging systems change space+

   Some of the most consequential work in the emerging systems change space is carried out by people whose contributions are vital and systemic, yet inherently difficult to capture through conventional metrics: ceremony and ritual leaders, conveners, translators, storytellers, network weavers, facilitators, field-builders, and relational catalysts. These bridge-builders spin threads of trust across sectoral, geographic, ideological, and generational divides. They cultivate the conditions for disparate efforts to recognize themselves as kinship networks moving within a shared ecology of care. Investing directly in these bridge-builders, and protecting their time, energy, and relational labor, is fundamental for movement-building.

6. 6 Enable local actors, bridge-builders, and organizations to cultivate a living connection to Love +

   Many sectors operate under considerable pressures: urgency, complexity, scarcity, emotional labor, institutional expectations, and frequently, an orientation toward problems and deficits. When people are forced to move continuously under such strain, their capacity for deep presence, moral imagination, empathy, and joy can erode.

   We need to create the conditions in which practitioners and organizations can pause, reflect, replenish, and cultivate the inner capacities required for the work. This calls on systems change work to provide un-earmarked, flexible funding that grants people and teams the time and mentorship to nurture an embodied connection to Love within themselves and their organizational culture.

7. 7Fund the conditions for flourishing, not only the symptoms of their absence+

   Sectors are accustomed to funding the downstream manifestations of systemic breakdown: poverty, mental ill-health, housing insecurity, and environmental degradation. While addressing these immediate harms remains vital, sectors must simultaneously invest upstream in the deeper conditions that influence systemic breakdown: meaning, purpose, belonging, moral formation, beauty, wonder, and forgiveness, which interplay with the ethical stewardship of A.I. and active care for the more-than-human world. This requires meeting communities where they are, and resourcing them to work across levels of impact (ontology, narrative, and behaviour), socio-ecological scales (individual, family, community, society, and ecological), and solution expressions (such as through inquiry and research, art and culture, and programs, products, and policy).

8. 8Fund the meaning-making dimension of systems change and societal transformation+

   Create legitimate, pluralistic sanctuaries for exploration across spiritual understandings (including faith, cultural, and secular understandings) without prescribing belief or demanding dogmatic conformity. There is a fundamental distinction between promoting a particular doctrine and honouring the intrinsic human need to make meaning. All sectors can support spaces that invite foundational inquiries: What gives human life meaning? What do we owe to one another? How do we cultivate wisdom and moral courage in times of crisis? How do we live in wise relationship with the Earth? Building on these foundational inquiries, sectors can support spaces that ask bold institutional questions: Why do our public systems lack policies on Love? Why are mindfulness and contemplative practices absent from civic governance? Why does it feel taboo to speak about the value of faith, spirituality, and morality in places of power and privilege? Why are ceremony, rituals, and teachings missing from our everyday gatherings? How can A.I. be in service to Love? All sectors can create brave spaces where these questions can be explored seriously and creatively, free from judgment and fear.

9. 9 Fund long horizons and protect the conditions for emergence +

   The challenges associated with the metacrisis are nonlinear, interconnected, and context dependent. They rarely conform to linear theories of change or predetermined timelines. Many forms of spiritual and social transformation unfold at community-time: through relationships, trust, cultural change, and successive generations. Sectors must develop the institutional maturity to hold uncertainty and sit comfortably with the unknown. Funders can create portfolios that intentionally hold space for experimentation, emergence, failure, adaptation, intergenerational work, and movement-building. Adopting multi-year, flexible, and pooled funding mechanisms can protect the soil required for this type of long-term impact to take root and bloom.

10. 10 Apply a multi-stakeholder, multi-sectoral, coordinated approach +

    Love is a shared responsibility, and so its vision must be carried forward through a whole-of-society approach. Multi-stakeholder engagement and partnership are essential, since spiritual solutions require diverse actors working together to share information, expertise, and resources. Efforts should link naturally across sectors, including health, education, livelihoods, and land stewardship. Working through these familiar entry points can reduce stigma and embed care into daily life.

    Good coordination and governance will benefit from transparency, inclusiveness, and accountability, and should continuously learn from experience and evidence.

11. 11 Advance stories that make another future imaginable and celebrate present truths +

    What we as a society are capable of building depends, in part, on the stories we encounter and breathe into—about who we are, what is possible, and what constitutes a good life. When public discourse is saturated by narratives of division and scarcity, our collective hope (and moral imagination for what’s possible) becomes constrained. Sectors can steward stories that illuminate discovery, awe and wonder, and solidarity. Accumulated over time, these narratives form a living archive of possibility that helps practitioners learn from one another, helps funders recognize emerging patterns, and helps the broader public encounter alternatives to dominant narratives of distress. This does not mean that we retreat from suffering or refuse to name injustice. It is rather a commitment to wholeness: recognizing that the present already holds countless living projects of Love—and these truths, too, deserve to be witnessed, shared, and celebrated.

12. 12 Map the ecosystem and strengthen research on Love and flourishing +

    Canada currently lacks comprehensive mapping and research focused on Love, flourishing, spirituality, systems change, and philanthropy. Mapping existing initiatives and building a rigorous evidence base is essential to identify promising practices, learn from community innovations, and establish an integrated research-practice-policy agenda. Yet research must not be designed only to prove the validity of Love. Its true posture must be one of deep respect—honoring community wisdom and uplifting insights, stories, and tools so local actors can thrive in relationship, reciprocity, and regeneration within their own worlds.

    Multi-stakeholder engagements to determine a research agenda should account for power imbalances between actors, and demonstrate epistemic humility toward differing ways of knowing and doing research.

    While quantitative instruments, like those used in the Global Flourishing Study, offer valuable, macro-level data, Love and flourishing remain fundamentally subjective and context-bound. Research will benefit from a mixed methods approach, moving beyond only top-down compliance outcomes to embrace participatory, narrative, and arts-based methodologies that can reach the depths of local expressions. Understandings should be gathered on local expressions of love, spirituality, and relationality; as well as on the efficacy, acceptability, and feasibility of interventions for prevention, response, and recovery.

13. 13 Convene spaces where all knowledges meet to strengthen co-learning and networks +

    Harnessing a sacred worldview calls on us to build bridges across class, backgrounds, disciplines, generations, and knowledges. These spaces should support knowledge dissemination and partnership opportunities, and be made accessible to those who experience marginalization. A central focus should be on learning from, documenting, and sharing the work and impact of communities, who can naturally illuminate unique entry-points, facilitators, barriers, and innovations of spiritual solutions. Encouraging network-building can lead to the development of joint theories of change, outcome measures, monitoring and evaluation systems, and accountability mechanisms—alongside collaborations that center compassion, creativity, and courage. Gatherings, whether in-person or virtual, should embody the spirit of being in community: relationship-building, reflection, presence, reciprocity, song and dance, time, beauty, story, shared inquiry, ceremony, contemplative practice, land-based learning, shared meals, artistic expression, dialogue circles, or other practices that blend relational, spiritual, and systems approaches. To sustain crosspollination over time, an online platform that hosts resources and a directory of people and organizations involved in spiritual solutions is necessary.

14. 14 Foster sound policy for spiritual solutions for flourishing +

    Initiatives that work to develop and enhance public policies are essential for sustaining spiritual values and practices as living, enduring realities within civic life. Leadership trainings and policy dialogues with governments, donors, and institutions can help them appreciate the value of spiritual solutions for human and planetary flourishing.

    We can strengthen the bridge between practice and policy by offering spaces for strategic foresight processes, collaborative coordination, and open-data sharing platforms that allow spiritual solutions to inform public policy at scale.