Our mission
The Core Gift Institute is a welcoming place to find information about discovering and giving gifts.
We believe gifts are a foundation for increasing health and abundance in both individuals and communities.
Our Signature Gift
"The Core Gift Institute helps people discover and follow their unique and purposeful path in life.
We give it by extending a friendly welcome to all, sharing a variety of new and compelling ways to relate gifts to every aspect of life, offering expertise with a commitment both to depth and playfulness, and helping people know how deeply magnificent they are."
What do we do?
- Provide learning events and coaching for practitioners and organizations who want to integrate gifts into their work.
- Provide individualized coaching for people who want to discover and give their gifts.
- Sponsor nature-based walking pilgrimages for adults who want reflective time to discover and discern how to use their gifts.
- Maintain a resource center for information about gifts through our website, podcast and social media.
Why?
One thing we know for certain: understanding and using our gifts is both an old and a new idea. Cultures and faith traditions, many centuries old, used specific methods to identify and nurture gifts in their members.
Now, modern neuroscience and positive psychology have backed up older wisdom traditions by proving that individuals thrive when they are able to find meaning in their lives by knowing and giving their gifts. Yet there is no centralized place where a person or organization can go to get a wide perspective and in-depth information about gifts from a wide variety of beliefs and fields of practice. The Institute is committed to helping fill that gap.
“The Institute has so much information about gifts from a variety of places—positive psychology, faith traditions, education, community organizing, mythology, and indigenous practice. To have examples and information from so many perspectives really helps to deepen my understanding of and commitment to integrating gifts into all parts of my life.”
Karol, Educator
Who are we?
Although the Core Gift Institute has a business license, a website, and a home-base near Seattle, Washington, we do things in a very different way from the typical non-profit organizational structure.
We are a collective—a wide-ranging group of gifted people and organizations who come together in different ways to learn more about discovering and giving gifts.
Rather than having employees, we contract with people and organizations to bring their gifts of hosting learning groups and trainings.
Rather than advertising, we look for places where there is interest and enthusiasm for giftwork so that we can join in and contribute to mutual learning.
Being a gift-centered organization, we rely on the gifted authority of our friends and partners rather than the usual hierarchy of a management system. We have a structure that seeks to be in alignment with the practices of knowing and giving gifts.
The host
Bruce Anderson is the Executive Director and the connecting thread between individuals and organizations engaged with the Institute.
He’s the “buck stops here” person for operations of the Institute.
See his story here.