Transformative Change (XC) is the first national center entirely dedicated to bridging the inner and outer lives of social change agents, activists and allies to support a more effective, more sustainable movement of social justice for all.
We believe that when agents of change are supported in living more balanced lives, they are empowered to create more effective, lasting change in the world.
Whether that is in health care reform, education, homelessness, the environment, fair housing, LGBT rights, immigrant rights, women’s rights, rights for people of color, rights for youth…healthy, balanced champions mean rights for everyone.
Our mission is to inform, incite and empower a broad-based, presence-centered transformative social change movement.
Mission-driven and results-oriented, XC is a model for the growing movement toward integration, sustainability and wholeness in the lives of agents of social change.
History
CXC was founded in 2000 by author/activist, Rev. angel Kyodo williams, as a response to the need for more grounded, sustainable approaches to peace, justice and broad-based social change.
Originally started in New York City, what was then known as the New Dharma Community held weekly gatherings that offered basic instruction in meditation and helped connect that practice to the daily lives of a diverse group of people. The success of the New York Circle became the inspiration for offering that possibility on a larger scale.
After co-teaching back-to-back African-American and People of Color meditation retreats at Northern California’s renowned Spirit Rock Meditation Center, Rev. williams was compelled to move to the San Francisco Bay Area to open a center of operations. She saw the Bay Area’s long standing twin cultures of social change work and mind-body awareness practices as a unique opportunity to bring these two commonly discrete areas together. By December 2003, she arrived in the Bay Area, sublet a small home, put cushions on the living room floor and the Bay Area-based New Dharma Community was begun.
Over the next year the small group quickly grew into the New Dharma Meditation Center for Urban Peace. New Dharma Meditation Center for Urban Peace became home to a spirit-centered “transformative practice community” rooted in the practice of meditation.
New Dharma supported mainly people of color in their meditation, yoga, and inner awareness practice. It was clear that people of color, though not well represented in existing practice centers, were out there seeking to engage in mind-body awareness practices that explicitly and inextricably linked these practices to their immediate concerns and commitments to heal their communities and transform the society in which they lived.
Within three years, we realized that our approach at that time, which was mostly focused solely on meditation practice, while worthy, wasn’t going to change the world. And we wanted to change the world. So we decided to stop the work we were doing and take the time to revision. New Dharma shut its doors.
Since then we’ve been invested in changing the WAY change is done. We have become Center for Transformative Change, the first center of its kind to intentionally bridge inner awareness and social justice. While we still do yoga, meditation and inner awareness practices, we also offer trainings in those practices specifically designed for those in the social change and social justice movements. We envision folks taking those practices out into their organizations and communities and transforming movements for justice and progressive social change.