Transformative Dialogues Grant Proposal
A Founding Investment in the Future of Support for a Green Economy
Hazel Henderson Center
10 Carrera Street, St. Augustine, FL 32084
At a Glance
What it is: A grant fund supporting the convenings, roundtables, salons, and working retreats hosted at the Hazel Henderson Center in St. Augustine, Florida.
What it funds: Event logistics, participant travel, facilitation, and documentation of outcomes for each dialogue.
Funding sought: $15,000, supporting two Transformative Dialogues — additional gifts support additional convenings.
You'll receive: An in-depth report on the dialogue(s) your gift funded — session summary, participants, and outcomes.
Managed by: Beth Binns, Managing Trustee, and Dr. Carol Spalding, Co-Trustee.
Contact: Jan McAlpine, Director of Development — mcalpine622@gmail.com — 269-815-2783
Executive Summary
The Hazel Henderson Center seeks $15,000 to support Transformative Dialogues — the convenings, roundtables, salons, and working retreats that bring scholars, entrepreneurs, investors, educators, journalists, policymakers, artists, and community leaders together to explore the interconnected challenges of our time and turn conversation into change, with the urgency it demands.
Hazel Henderson believed deeply in the power of conversation — that lasting change requires bringing the right people into the same room, with enough time and trust to think together honestly. At the heart of this approach is mindfulness — the practice of paying purposeful, present-moment attention to one's own thoughts and actions. Research shows this kind of attention frees people from habitual, siloed patterns of thought, opening them to make new connections and generate genuinely novel ideas — the kind of thinking outside the box that innovation depends on. Companies and governments alike are increasingly recognizing what Hazel Henderson understood intuitively: that this quality of attention is what allows people to think clearly, connect ideas across disciplines, and innovate together.
This $15,000 request funds two Transformative Dialogues for two days each — roughly $7,500 per gathering — covering event logistics, participant travel, facilitation, and documentation of outcomes. Additional funding, in similar increments, allows the Center to host additional dialogues.
Statement of Need
At a moment when so many of the world's hardest problems — climate, finance, governance, technology, equity — cut across every discipline and sector, the people best positioned to solve them rarely sit in the same room. Transformative Dialogues exist to close that gap. Each convening is built around a simple premise: give the right mix of people enough time, trust, and a well-held space, and they will surface insights and partnerships that no conference panel or webinar ever could.
These are not only networking events. Every gathering is designed with a specific outcome in mind, and outcomes take many forms depending on who is in the room and what question brought them together:
Business and Investment Practice — new or revised programs, products, and investment criteria adopted by companies and investors who took part in a convening.
Policy Recommendations — frameworks and position papers that inform legislation, regulation, or agency guidance at the local, state, national, or international level.
Scholarly and Field Publications — peer-reviewed articles, white papers, and edited volumes that carry a convening's thinking into academic and professional literature.
New Partnerships and Working Groups — formal collaborations between participating organizations that continue well past the gathering itself.
Public Resources — shared frameworks, toolkits, webinars, and educational materials that extend a convening's insights to practitioners who weren't in the room.
Community-of-Practice Growth — ongoing networks of participants who continue to exchange ideas, coordinate action, and support one another's work.
Every gathering is documented so that what happens in the room continues to generate value long after participants leave St. Augustine — and so the Center can point donors and partners to the tangible change each convening helped set in motion.
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.
Hazel Henderson was a self-taught economist and futurist. Author of numerous books, including the award-winning Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy, she founded Ethical Markets Media and co-created measures such as the Green Transition Scoreboard and the Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators. Her contributions were recognized with an Honorary Membership in the Club of Rome, a Fellowship of Britain's Royal Society of Arts, and the 1996 Global Citizen Award, shared with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, among many other honors over her decades of work.
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
The Center's key assets include:
A living library of more than 5,600 books and 1,000+ journal issues
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
Interior Meeting Spaces
Plenary Sunroom — seats 25–30 participants, with a full kitchen and wet bar
Library — 18 participants, plus 10 in the mezzanine, surrounded by Hazel Henderson's ~5,600-item research collection
Breakout Rooms — living room, dining room, and porch, for smaller working sessions
Overnight Accommodations
Two ensuite bedrooms with writing desks and private bathrooms, for facilitators, speakers, or traveling participants staying on-site
Outdoor Space
A pool and deck that seats 25, plus a permaculture touring garden, for informal conversation between sessions
Accessibility & Amenities
Elevator access to the second floor
Full kitchen, wet bar, and washer/dryer on site
St. Augustine is the oldest continuously inhabited European-founded city in the United States, founded in 1565, and the Center sits inside that living history. It is home to the Castillo de San Marcos, the nation's oldest masonry fort, built to defend the city against rival powers, and to Fort Mose, the first legally sanctioned free Black settlement in the country; the city was later a pivotal site in the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Its historic district is compact and fully walkable — cobblestone streets, Spanish colonial architecture, Flagler College's gilded halls, and the Castillo 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.
Convening in a place with this long a history of defending freedom and testing new ideas gives Transformative Dialogues gatherings a sense of continuity with the deeper American project they aim to serve. The setting itself is part of what makes these gatherings work: an intimate, historic house designed for mindful, undistracted conversation rather than a conference hotel.
Project Description
Program Overview
Transformative Dialogues funds three kinds of gatherings hosted at the Hazel Henderson Center:
Roundtables — focused, small-group sessions built around a single pressing question, designed to produce a shared point of view or plan of action.
Salons — informal, conversation-driven evenings that bring together diverse thinkers in the tradition of Hazel's own gatherings at 10 Carrera Street.
Working Retreats — multi-day, immersive sessions that give participants the time and space to move from dialogue to genuine collaboration.
A Track Record of Convening
Transformative Dialogues continues a practice that predates the Center itself. Hazel Henderson and Ethical Markets Media operated from St. Augustine for more than 40 years, and 10 Carrera Street has long served as a gathering place for exactly the kind of cross-disciplinary conversation this fund supports. Past convenings held at the house include a Roundtable on the Future of Democracy, bringing together participants from the US, Europe, India, and Japan; a FinTech Retreat on steering financial technology toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals and COP21 commitments; a series of SRI Pioneer Retreats convening early leaders in socially responsible investing; and Beyond GDP retreats developing the Ethical Markets Quality of Life Indicators and Green Transition Scoreboard.
Since the Center's 2023 renovation, that legacy of convening has continued and grown. The Center currently hosts two Flagler College classes each week as part of its Innovative Studies in Sustainable Business Practices initiative, alongside meetings and salons such as "Creating Alternative Futures," a working session on building the Center's community of practice, and "At Home with Hazel," a poetry salon celebrating Hazel's life and work. This ongoing rhythm of teaching, dialogue, and gathering is the foundation Transformative Dialogues funding builds on and expands.
Use of Funds
Funding to Transformative Dialogues goes directly toward the practical work of hosting gatherings that matter:
Event Logistics — preparing and hosting the Center's meeting rooms, library, and grounds for roundtables, salons, and multi-day working retreats.
Participant Travel — helping bring the right voices to the table, including scholars, practitioners, and community leaders who could not otherwise attend.
Facilitation — skilled facilitation that turns a room of accomplished, opinionated people into a genuinely collaborative working session. •
Documentation of Outcomes — capturing the insights, commitments, and frameworks that emerge from each convening in a written record used for donor reporting and the Center's own institutional memory.
Community-of-Practice Follow-Through — the ongoing relationships and working groups that turn a single meeting into sustained collaboration among participants.
This funding covers convening costs and is distinct from the Center's separately-funded Program Partner Network.
Reporting & Accountability
Because this fund supports a specific, discrete set of convenings rather than a full year of programming, donors receive an in-depth report on the dialogue(s) their gift funded, including a summary of the session, who took part, the outcomes that emerged, and how the gift was applied against the budget below. Donors also receive coverage of the dialogue(s) they funded within the Center's broader annual report, alongside the standalone report described above.
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
Transformative Dialogues is overseen directly by Beth Binns, Managing Trustee, and her Co-Trustee, Dr. Carol Spalding, who provide leadership and fiduciary oversight for this fund.
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.
Conclusion
Hazel Henderson spent sixty years convening exactly this kind of gathering — bringing the right people into the same room, with enough time and trust to think together honestly, and turning that conversation into change. Transformative Dialogues carries that conviction forward in the same rooms where she once hosted it, giving today's changemakers the mindful, undistracted space that genuine collaborative sensemaking requires.
Grant support from you will enable the Center to continue this rhythm of convening — hosting the roundtables, salons, and working retreats that generate lasting public value well beyond the gathering itself. We are grateful for your consideration and invite you to reach out with any questions or to schedule a conversation with Center leadership about how your support can make this work possible.
Funding Options
Total funding sought: $15,000, supporting two Transformative Dialogues
The estimated allocation below reflects how a $15,000 gift would typically be applied across two convenings:
| Use of Funds | Share | Estimated Amount |
| Event Logistics (space preparation, catering coordination, materials) | 30% | $4,500 |
| Participant Travel | 25% | $3,750 |
| Facilitation | 20% | $3,000 |
| Documentation of Outcomes (session records for donor and institutional reporting) | 5% | $750 |
| Maintenance & Management (administrative and fund oversight) | 20% | $3,000 |
| Total | 100% | $15,000 |
The Center welcomes support structured in any of the following ways:
Full Funding — $15,000, supporting two Transformative Dialogues
Single Dialogue Sponsorship — approximately $7,500, supporting one convening
Additional Dialogues — additional gifts, in similar increments, fund additional convenings beyond the first two
Gifts of any size are welcome, and we welcome the opportunity to discuss how a gift might be structured to fit your priorities.
Contact