What is the WTR Network?

The Work That Reconnects (WTR) Network is a global community of facilitators, emerging practitioners, and all those who are moved by the WTR. We are weaving connections across the globe, uplifting creative expressions of the Work, and collaborating in service to the Great Turning.

In 2015 Joanna Macy, the root teacher of WTR who carried the Work forward with passion and creativity for decades, was nearing retirement. In September of that year, forty-eight members of the WTR community, including Joanna Macy, gathered for an intensive retreat in Northern California, USA. With a change of venue and shortened time together due to wildfires burning in the vicinity, the participants felt an urgent need for more interconnection and cross fertilization among WTR practitioners. A clear intention formed to create some kind of a network, one that would function as a living system. With the planting of this seed, the evolution of the Work That Reconnects Network began.

Building on an extensive mailing list developed by Joanna Macy and her long-time assistant Anne Symens-Boucher, the Work That Reconnects Network has grown to include members and followers from around the world. An international group of Network Weavers – which includes both volunteers and staff members – collaborate in the leadership, management and visioning processes for the Network. Volunteers and advisors from around the world contribute on committees and councils to sustain and deepen our work.

In its first ten years, the WTR Network has grown from a few dedicated volunteers in the USA to a global community with diverse interconnecting webs. It has been a space where we come together to deepen our work, hold each other through grief and gratitude, and weave a future rooted in connection.

In celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Network, we invited facilitators from around the world to tell the story of the Network in their own words, captured on video. The heartfelt offerings show how the power of the Work that inspired the founders of the Network, continues to resonate today. Seeing the faces, and hearing the words, of the contributors reveals the Network to be, as one of them says, “an organic, living and loving response from the heart of the world.” Watch this brief and lovely film, and be re-inspired and perhaps grateful to be part of this community.