Core Initiatives

Healthy People, Healthy Communities, Healthy World

The Challenge of Change

Health and sustainability are crucial and interconnected challenges facing governments and citizens in every corner of the world. Locally and globally, our capacity to address these challenges depends on our capacity to generate healthy change in people and in communities, as well as in the environment we all share.

At West Coast Integral Initiatives,
  • our purpose is enhancing capacity to promote healthy change in people and communities.
  • our approach is firmly grounded in the innovative yet practical framework that is inspiring leaders, policy makers and practitioners the world over - the Integral model. 
In addition to a practical menu of professional services and learning events, West Coast Integral Initiatives highlights three cornerstone initiatives to generate healthy change and to meet the challenges ahead:
  • Integral Health Promotion
  • The CHANGE Initiative
  • Integral Coaching Initiatives

Integral Health Promotion

Tam Lundy says: "We move closer to the goal of healthy people, healthy communities and a healthy world when we pay as much attention to generating health as we do to preventing disease. To meet the challenges ahead, we need a salutogenic orientation, a focus on generating or enhancing higher levels of health - in people, place, and planet."

Integral Health Promotion offers a practical salutogenic (or health-generating) framework for promoting health, well-being, and healthy development - in people, communities, and the environment we share - locally and globally.

Paying attention to all of the factors that influence healthy people, healthy communities and a healthy environment, Integral Health Promotion supports us to respond to our most pressing problems and our most promising potentials.

Integral Health Promotion is a comprehensive yet practical response to emerging goals and priorities in the field of health promotion and education, enhancing health, well-being and healthy development in five essential ways:

  • Health-generating assets (including healthy public policy);
  • Integral leadership;
  • Leveraging community contribution;
  • Cultivating human potential; and
  • Integral capacity building.

The CHANGE Initiative

Heraclitus said, centuries ago: "everything flows, nothing stands still" ... "nothing endures but change."

We agree. But not all change is healthy change. So, how do we learn to intentionally cultivate healthy change? How can we invest our time and resources in those areas where healthy change can most effectively grow and flow? And what are the most effective levers for healthy change?

Growing our capacity for healthy change requires an approach that takes into account the complexity of our lives, and the contexts in which change occurs. Our approach to change must pay attention to all of the factors that influence health, well-being and healthy development.

An integral lens* - paying attention to all of the factors that contribute to healthy change, provides the innovative thinking and practice framework to promote healthy sustainable change in people, place, and planet.

Integral Coaching Initiatives: Catalyzing Healthy Change  

Change-makers increasingly recognize that our own development is an important part of the change equation. We understand that Gandhi's advice to "be the change you want to see in the world" applies as much to our own inner development as our actions in the world. It's not just what we do. It's also how we be. And what we're becoming.

So, to change the world, we also change ourselves. As practitioners and policy makers, we put ourselves - and our own development - at the center of the change equation. And with skillful coaching, the change efforts of individuals and teams are given a helping hand. 

* West Coast Integral Initiatives is a consulting and training initiative specializing in the practical application of the Integral Approach in diverse organizations, sectors and community settings. At West Coast Integral Initiatives, our work is modeled on the groundbreaking thinking and practice paradigm advanced by Ken Wilber and other integral pioneers. In Wilber's words, integral means "comprehensive, inclusive, balanced ... not leaving anything out."