Announcing our new Executive Director!

A message from Gayle Williams, Board Chair, and Estrus Tucker, Search Committee Chair:

Following an extensive national search, we are delighted to announce that Terry Chadsey has been selected as our Executive Director.

Terry brings the talent and experience, as well as the continuity and change, we need as we live into the Center’s recently completed strategic direction and transition from Marcy and Rick Jackson’s founding leadership. A strong visionary leader and skilled Circle of Trust facilitator, he embodies the values, principles and practices at the heart of our work. The Center’s board, staff members and Senior Partner Parker Palmer all embrace Terry’s leadership with excitement and deep gratitude. Terry will begin this new role July 1, 2010.
 
Marcy and Rick Jackson will continue working for the Center as Senior Fellows on specific projects and responsibilities that match the needs of the Center and their gifts and capacities for making important contributions.

Our mission to nurture personal and professional integrity and the courage to act on it is needed now more than ever. We are confident that in Terry Chadsey we have found the right leader to help us all write the next chapter of our important work.

From Founder and Senior Partner, Parker Palmer:

I cannot imagine a better choice. I have worked with Terry closely and I know him well. I have deep and abiding respect for his skill, his competence, his compassion and his character. He's one of the finest people I've ever known, and his leadership style is exactly what we need—from within the circle, not above it or outside it.

Terry’s wife, Jane Chadsey, is half the reason I am so happy! While Jane is not directly involved in Courage work, she understands K-12 education well through her own career and is a superb conversation partner for Terry and the rest of us.

In a way, this is a third-generation transition for the Center. In the early 1990s, with the help of my friends and colleagues at the Fetzer Institute, I founded the program that became the organization. In the late 1990’s, I had the great joy of handing the leadership role over to Marcy Jackson and Rick Jackson, who have served our work so wonderfully well over the past decade, taking us farther and deeper than any of us imagined we could go. It means a great deal to all of us that Marcy and Rick will continue at the Center, doing the parts of the work they most love while Terry takes the helm.

As for me, I’ve moved from “father” to “grandfather” to “great-grandfather” in the course of a mere twenty years—a new indoor record—but I’m not yet ready for The Home! I look forward to continuing my work alongside Terry, Marcy, Rick, the Center’s gifted staff, and the other one-hundred fifty members (and growing) of the Courage community.

By choice and design, I do not sit on the Center’s board, so I can say this with objectivity: the board, led by Gayle Williams, and the committee charged with finding a new Executive Director, led by Estrus Tucker, did a remarkable job holding the process that concluded with Terry’s appointment. Adhering to the same principles and practices that inform our Circles of Trust, they proved once again that the best way to do business is with deep respect for the soul.

I'm very grateful for all this, for the sake of the staff, our facilitators, our supporters, and all those who are well-served by the work we do. As we move into the third decade of Courage work, I say thanks for all that has been and yes to all that lies ahead.