Leadership Residency Grant Proposal
A Founding Investment in the Future of Support for a Green Economy
Hazel Henderson Center
10 Carrera Street, St. Augustine, FL 32084
Executive Summary
The Hazel Henderson Center seeks grants for its Leadership Residency Program, an initiative that invites changemakers across disciplines and career stages to spend dedicated time at the Center in St. Augustine, Florida, working across the Center's seven programmatic focus areas — from emerging voices taking their first steps in sustainability and ethical economics, to established practitioners seeking time and space to deepen their most important work.
The Leadership Residency Program offers residents dedicated time and space to pursue independent projects, often connecting to some of the Center's core focus areas — among them: technology and production; employment, work, and migration; trade, finance, debt, and information; peacebuilding and the impacts of militarization; pollution and resource depletion; consumption patterns and global culture; and social and institutional restructuring.
Residents live and work on-site, drawing on the Center's extraordinary intellectual resources — including a living library of more than 5,600 books, publications, and 1,000+ journal issues — alongside the archives, professional networks, and programmatic community of the Center itself. Residencies are available September through May. In the spirit of Hazel Henderson's own collaborative approach, residents are invited to give something back — a workshop, a public talk, a written summary, or a webinar — ensuring that each residency contributes to the broader community of learning the Center cultivates.
Grant funding supports resident stipends and travel support, program coordination, facilities, and evaluation across the inaugural program period. Residency support is offered as a single, all-inclusive lump sum covering accommodations, room and board, travel, library and archival access, program coordination, and mentorship:
One-Week Residency — $2,030 — supports one resident for one week in residence, with multi-week arrangements available at $[X,XXX] per additional week
One-Month Residency — $8,120 — supports one resident for a month-long residency, the program's deepest level of immersion
Statement of Need
The challenges Hazel Henderson identified decades ago have become defining crises of the twenty-first century. Climate change, economic inequality, environmental degradation, technological disruption, and the erosion of institutional trust demand solutions that cross traditional disciplinary and sectoral boundaries. These interconnected problems require not only new policies and technologies, but a new generation of leaders — scholars, practitioners, artists, and activists — equipped with systems-level thinking, cross-sector networks, and the intellectual grounding to imagine and build alternatives.
Leaders and creators at every stage of their work need environments that expand rather than narrow their thinking. The settings in which people work shape not only what they produce, but how they think and who they collaborate with. Yet immersive, intellectually rich environments that bridge academia, creative practice, and public life — environments designed not for productivity in isolation, but for the kind of deep reflection and genuine exchange that changes the direction of a career — remain rare.
Most professional development opportunities are short, siloed, or transactional. Residency models that offer sustained immersion in ideas, community, and place have proven highly effective at cultivating transformative leadership and producing meaningful work, but remain inaccessible to many practitioners, independent scholars, and emerging voices due to cost, competitive selection, or geographic barriers.
The Hazel Henderson Center is uniquely positioned to fill this gap. Its physical setting, intellectual legacy, living library, and national network of sustainability and social innovation leaders create conditions that few institutions can replicate. The Leadership Residency Program makes these resources accessible to emerging and established changemakers at the moment when such an environment can most decisively advance their most important work.
About the Hazel Henderson Center
The Hazel Henderson Center carries forward the legacy of Hazel Henderson (1933–2022) — ecological economist, futurist, syndicated columnist, author, and a founding voice of the global sustainability movement. For more than five decades, Henderson challenged conventional economic thinking and championed renewable energy, socially responsible investing, ethical markets, corporate accountability, and quality-of-life indicators that move beyond Gross Domestic Product.
The Center operates from Henderson's former home in St. Augustine — a property that served for four decades as a gathering place for scholars, entrepreneurs, investors, educators, journalists, and systems thinkers exploring new approaches to economics, sustainability, governance, and social innovation. Following Henderson's passing, trustees, advisors, collaborators, and community partners established the Center as a nonprofit institution committed to preserving and activating her intellectual legacy. Through leadership residencies, educational programming, research initiatives, strategic convenings, and community partnerships, the Center cultivates the ideas, relationships, and practical tools needed to address the defining challenges of this century.
The Center's key assets include:
A living library of more than 5,600 books and 1,000+ journal issues — described in full in the Engagement with the Living Library and Archives section below
Archives preserved through academic partnerships, including the University of Missouri
Residency accommodations, a research library, collaborative gathering spaces, a workshop room, kitchen, outdoor areas, a pool, and parking
An experienced leadership team and Strategic Foresight Advisory Committee with deep expertise in sustainability, ethical finance, education, and community development
Close relationships with Ethical Markets Media and its globally recognized Research Advisory Board, connecting the Center to a broad international network of practitioners, investors, academics, and public-sector leaders
The Hazel Henderson Center is a Florida not-for-profit corporation and a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. EIN: 41-2894661.
The Place
St. Augustine is the oldest continuously inhabited European-founded city in the United States, and the Center sits inside that living history. Its historic district is compact and fully walkable — cobblestone streets, Spanish colonial architecture, Flagler College's gilded halls, and the Castillo de San Marcos, standing guard over the bay since 1672. Within a short walk of the Center: waterfront seafood restaurants, neighborhood wine bars, art galleries, and dining that draws on four hundred and fifty years of layered culinary history. The Atlantic beaches are fifteen minutes away.
This isn't incidental to the program — it's central to it. Hazel chose this home deliberately, and every resident who comes here experiences a version of what she built her life's work around: a place where big thinking and genuine hospitality coexist.
Project Description
Program Overview
The Hazel Henderson Center Leadership Residency Program provides individuals and small teams — scholars, writers, activists, researchers, artists, social entrepreneurs, educators, journalists, and community leaders — with structured, immersive residency experiences at the Center's St. Augustine campus. Residencies range from one week to extended engagements of up to four weeks, with the possibility of multi-visit arrangements for residents engaged in longer-term projects. The program serves participants whose work advances sustainability, ethical economics, regenerative development, social innovation, democratic governance, or related fields — often connecting to some of the Center's core focus areas. Residencies are available September through May.
Who May Apply: Types of Residents
The Leadership Residency Program is intentionally open to a broad range of participants. The kind of rigorous, mission-aligned work that changes the world takes place not only in universities, but also in studios, newsrooms, nonprofit offices, community organizations, and independent practice. Residency categories include:
Scholars and Researchers — University and college faculty, doctoral candidates, post-doctoral scholars, and independent researchers pursuing projects that draw on the Center's living library, archival collections, or practitioner networks — for example, a professor developing interdisciplinary curriculum on ethical markets, or an independent researcher examining regenerative economic models in coastal communities.
Writers and Authors — Authors, essayists, and journalists working on books, long-form investigations, or narrative projects connected to sustainability, ethical finance, social innovation, or the ideas Hazel Henderson championed — for example, a journalist writing on the economics of peacebuilding, or an author developing a book on the history of the socially responsible investing movement.
Artists and Creative Practitioners — Visual artists, filmmakers, designers, and other creative practitioners whose work engages with themes of ecological sustainability, economic justice, systems change, or community resilience — for example, a documentary filmmaker developing a project on the transition to regenerative agriculture, or a designer creating public-facing tools to visualize quality-of-life alternatives to GDP.
Social Entrepreneurs and Practitioners — Leaders from finance, policy, business, nonprofit leadership, and community development undertaking applied projects — for example, an impact-investment analyst studying the evolution of ESG standards, a city sustainability director developing a regenerative development strategy, or a nonprofit founder designing a new model for community wealth building.
Educators and Curriculum Developers — Teachers, professors, and curriculum designers developing interdisciplinary educational materials aligned with the Center's mission areas — for example, an educator creating a high school curriculum on systems thinking and ecological economics, or a university instructor developing a course on ethical entrepreneurship.
Activists and Community Leaders — Organizers, advocates, and community leaders whose work connects grassroots action to the systems-level thinking the Center cultivates — for example, a climate justice organizer developing a policy framework for equitable energy transition, or a community development practitioner documenting lessons from participatory economic planning.
Emerging Voices — Students, recent graduates, and early-career practitioners taking their first sustained steps in sustainability, ethical finance, or social innovation — for example, an undergraduate student developing an honors thesis on circular economy models, or a recent graduate launching a social enterprise and seeking time to ground their vision in deeper research and reflection.
Applicants from other backgrounds whose proposed work aligns with the Center's mission are also welcome to apply. Residencies may be awarded to individuals or small teams, including intergenerational and cross-sector collaborations.
Residency Structure and Objectives
Residencies range from one week to a full month, with multi-visit arrangements available for residents engaged in longer-term projects. The program is designed to accommodate different working rhythms and project needs: a writer deep in a manuscript may benefit most from an uninterrupted month of focused work, while a practitioner testing a new policy framework may find that an intensive week of structured dialogue and network connection is precisely what the project requires.
The length and structure of each residency is determined in conversation with the applicant during the selection process, ensuring that the stay is calibrated to the scope and ambitions of the proposed work. Prior to arrival, each accepted resident participates in a pre-residency conversation with Center leadership to establish clear goals, identify the most relevant library and archival resources, confirm their public-facing contribution, and map connections to the Center's practitioner and advisor network.
During their stay, residents are fully integrated into the life of the Center — not simply housed on campus, but woven into its ongoing programming, convenings, and intellectual community. This integration is a deliberate feature of the program: the relationships and conversations that form during a residency are often as consequential as the work produced in solitude. Residents share meals, attend events, and participate in the informal exchanges that characterize the Center's intellectual culture.
The Center aims, during the grant period, to serve [X] residents across [X] residency engagements, with a cohort that reflects the full range of disciplines, career stages, and backgrounds the program is designed to reach. Program objectives include:
Provide each resident with full access to the Center's living library, archives, gathering spaces, and peer and practitioner networks
Connect residents with members of the Center's Strategic Foresight Advisory Committee, Ethical Markets Research Advisory Board, and broader network of sustainability and social innovation leaders
Integrate residents into the Center's ongoing public programming, workshops, and community convenings where relevant
Support each resident in making a reciprocal public contribution — a workshop, talk, written summary, or webinar — during or following their stay
Produce, as a program outcome, a report at the close of the grant period capturing each resident's project summaries, conclusions, and recommendations for the future development of their work
The sections below describe the specific resources and program elements available to each resident during their stay.
Engagement with the Living Library and Archives
A distinguishing feature of the Leadership Residency Program is the access it provides to the Hazel Henderson Collection — a living library rather than a static archive. The collection encompasses more than 5,600 books and publications, more than 1,000 journal issues, and an extensive archive of Henderson's own research, correspondence, and organizational records. Materials span sustainability, ecological economics, ethical finance, systems thinking, future studies, environmental policy, social innovation, governance, and human development. Each resident is provided dedicated workspace and full access to this collection throughout their stay.
Residents are encouraged to engage actively with the collection — not only as a reference resource, but as an intellectual interlocutor. Henderson's own annotated volumes, working papers, and archival correspondence offer unique insight into the development of ideas that shaped the global sustainability movement. Residents whose projects draw directly on Henderson's writings or archival materials are supported in that work by Center staff and, where relevant, by partners at the University of Missouri, where additional Henderson archives are preserved.
Beyond the library and archives, each resident receives structured introductions to Center advisors, practitioners, and network members whose expertise is relevant to their work. In keeping with Hazel Henderson's own collaborative spirit, residents are also asked to make a reciprocal contribution to the Center's community of learning — a workshop, public talk, written summary, or webinar — ensuring that each residency generates public value that extends well beyond the stay itself. Documentation support is available to help residents capture, summarize, and disseminate work produced during the residency.
Participant Selection
Residents are selected through an open application process reviewed by a committee of Center leadership and advisors. Each applicant proposes a specific project to be advanced during the residency, and applications are evaluated relative to the applicant's career stage and discipline: an emerging voice's proposal is assessed against expectations appropriate to their stage of development, and an established practitioner or scholar's proposal against correspondingly higher expectations. Selection criteria include:
Strength, clarity, and significance of the proposed project
Connection to some of the Center's core focus areas and its broader mission
Demonstrated potential for community impact and public engagement
Degree to which the residency environment — the living library, archival collection, practitioner network, and interdisciplinary community — would meaningfully advance the applicant's work
Commitment to the reciprocal contribution that is a condition of each residency
The Center is committed to building a diverse and inclusive program and actively recruits across disciplines, career stages, geographic backgrounds, and institutional affiliations, including practitioners and scholars without traditional institutional support.
Evaluation and Learning
The Center assesses program effectiveness through participant surveys administered at the midpoint and conclusion of each residency, structured debrief conversations with each resident, and documentation of project outputs and milestones. Outcomes are compiled in a program report at the close of the grant period, capturing lessons learned, resident project summaries, and recommendations for program growth. This learning directly informs the Center's strategic planning and future funding proposals.
Organization
The Hazel Henderson Center is guided by an experienced leadership team with expertise in sustainability, education, nonprofit management, ethical finance, and community development:
Dr. Carol Spalding, Co-Trustee
Beth Binns, Managing Director and Co-Trustee
Dr. Paula Seymour, Director of Innovative Studies Programs
Mara Zepeda, Director of HH Legacy Initiatives
Jan McAlpine, Director of Development
Tommy Maletta, Editor, Ethical Markets
The Center also benefits from the guidance of its Strategic Foresight Advisory Committee, whose members include Leslie Danziger, Elsie Maio, Vicki Robin, former U.S. Representative Claudine Schneider, and Jean Gaddy Wilson. A broader network of advisors and collaborators contributes expertise across environmental stewardship, architecture, education, finance, governance, entrepreneurship, and systems change.
The Center's close relationship with Ethical Markets Media and its internationally recognized Research Advisory Board provides residents with access to a global network of practitioners, investors, academics, and public-sector leaders — significantly extending the professional development and collaborative opportunities available beyond what any single institution can offer.
Conclusion
The Hazel Henderson Center Leadership Residency Program offers participants — from emerging voices to seasoned practitioners, scholars, and artists — something rare: a place to slow down, go deep, and connect with a living intellectual legacy that has shaped the global sustainability movement for more than five decades.
Hazel Henderson spent more than five decades demonstrating that economic thinking could be reimagined — that the measures we use to define success shape the futures we build. The Leadership Residency Program carries that conviction forward, equipping the next generation of changemakers with the time, space, resources, and relationships they need to do their most important work. Grant support from you will enable the Center to launch this program, welcome its inaugural cohort of residents, and build the operational foundation for a program of lasting intellectual, creative, and public impact. We are grateful for your consideration and invite you to reach out with any questions, to request a full program prospectus, or to schedule a conversation with Center leadership about how your support can make this work possible.
Funding Options
The Center welcomes support at any level. The cost of each residency is presented as a single, all-inclusive lump sum covering accommodations, room and board, travel support, library and archival access, program coordination, mentorship, and all associated operating costs:
One-Week Residency — $2,030 — supports one resident for one week in residence, with multi-week arrangements available at $[X,XXX] per additional week
One-Month Residency — $8,120 — supports one resident for a month-long residency, the program's deepest level of immersion
The Center welcomes support structured in any of the following ways:
Full Program Sponsorship — A sole funder providing full support for the entire program budget, covering a cohort of residents across residency types
Residency Sponsorship — A single funder sponsoring one residency — one-week or one-month — at the level of their choice
Collective Funding — A funder collaborative or co-funders contributing collectively toward a pooled fund supporting multiple residencies across a season
Funders providing full program sponsorship or individual residency sponsorship will be recognized as the named supporter of the program or of specific residencies. All contributors are acknowledged in program communications, the closing program report, and public dissemination of residency outcomes, in accordance with each funder's recognition preferences.
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