Grateful Living 2022 Annual Report

Dear Friends,

In the 2022 Impact Report you will see the many ways we are building towards our future and setting the table for growth and possibility. 

The launch of our new website informs, educates, and inspires while our new community platform is where we practice together. Our content is reorganized for ease and by theme as we prepare to welcome the expansion of resources and thought-leadership. In all these ways, we are strengthening our online support for offline living with these enhancements. 

With great delight, our community survey reinforced a critical takeaway: living gratefully positively impacts life satisfaction and emotional and physical health. While science and psychology support these anticipated outcomes, we are proud to see it in action within the Grateful Living community. We know that resources, daily practice, and community all contribute to these results.

The successes of 2022 are also made possible by our dedicated board of directors, talented staff, and our former Executive Director, Kristi Nelson, who led the successes in this report. We give thanks for her leadership during this transitional year.

Here’s what I want you to know: the Grateful Living movement continues to thrive. The global pandemic and many adversities of our time remind us that living gratefully is not just for the good or stable times in our lives, but for every day and every moment living. 

With Heartfelt Gratitude,

Joe Primo
Chief Executive Officer

With the launch of our new website in November 2022, we deepened our commitment to offering an enriching online experience where you can connect, learn, and find guidance throughout your Grateful Living journey.

Highlights include:

• A reimagined eCard experience including updated designs and the ability to send via text message
• Updates to our Light a Candle feature, including candle groupings for a specific intention
• A reorganization of our vast library of content providing tailored pathways and improved search functionality
• New themes for each of the five guiding principles of Grateful Living and Br. David’s foundational Stop. Look. Go. practice
• New content categories added in response to many requests, including meditations, music, and podcasts

Discover what else is new here.

Grateful Gatherings — Creating a Global Constellation of Grateful Living

Building on our founder Br. David’s compelling vision of a worldwide network of Gratefulness practitioners, we provide a monthly collection of resources for Grateful Gatherings hosts in 23 states in the U.S. and 8 other countries — from Switzerland to India to Australia. With the recent launch of our new community platform, we’ve set the stage to grow and diversify this global constellation, connecting Grateful Gatherings hosts and participants around the world.

Stop.Look.Go: Bring Gratefulness to Life — Teaching the Core Gratefulness Practice

We offered our first live course focused on the foundational gratefulness practice, Stop.Look.Go, as beautifully articulated by Br. David Steindl-Rast and further explored by Kristi Nelson in her book Wake Up Grateful.

In addition to six live sessions, we provided weekly toolkits that included guided practices, essays, poetry, music, and videos shared on our community platform. Our esteemed special guests added their scholarship, wisdom, and humor to our explorations of how to practice Stop.Look.Go in our daily lives.

Practices, Mini-Retreats, and Workshops

Our ongoing Grateful Living Practice Series is designed to deepen understanding of Grateful Living principles and offer tools for daily practice. This year’s series included Grateful for Love and Make Your Heart a Vessel of Hope, building greater capacity to notice, tend, and act on love and hope — even amidst life’s challenges.

In an effort to build community connection during a time when many were isolated at home, we launched a series of mini-retreats in 2021 that worked so well we decided to continue them as ongoing offerings. Highlights from 2022 include the online mini-retreat Cultivating the Sacred and our first Art of Gratitude journaling workshop.

Gratitude Cards + 7-Day Guided Journey on Reflection.App

In collaboration with our partners at Holstee, we created a deck of Gratitude Cards that offer 100+ prompts designed to deepen awareness of life’s abundance and open you to the joy and transformative possibilities of gratefulness. We distributed nearly 4,000 decks of cards in the first year.

Scanning the QR code in the deck grants free access to the 7-day guided gratitude journey we created, available on Holstee’s Reflection.App.

Brother David has now reached the age of 96 and is taking more time for reflective contemplation. Despite his age, he remains deeply committed to spreading the message of grateful living and continues to be an inspiration to all of us.

While he may be slowing down his travels, Brother David is still actively involved in our community and is watching with joy as Grateful Living continues to grow globally. He remains a valuable source of wisdom and guidance, and we’re all grateful for his continued involvement in our community. If you haven’t had the chance to hear from him in a while, we encourage you to seek out some of his recent talks or writings. They are always filled with insights and inspiration.

In 2022, we conducted a comprehensive survey of our global Grateful Living community. Our aim was to listen and learn with questions like: How has gratefulness impacted your life? What are we doing well, and how can we better support you in your journey of Grateful Living? With nearly 3,000 respondents from over 50 countries, we are deeply grateful for your generous sharing.

Here are some of the things that you shared with us:

• 100% of respondents said that gratefulness impacts their well-being and offers support for mental and emotional health.
• 96% of respondents have experienced positive changes as a result of living more gratefully. 

When asked to give examples of challenges that have been positively impacted by a focus on gratefulness, five themes emerged. You said that Grateful Living gives you:

When asked how we can improve our offerings and better support you on your journey, most of you said “keep doing what you’re doing!”, with a consistent emphasis on increased support and guidance during life’s hardest moments.

Your gracious, open, and honest input is helping us to shape our future. We are committed to evolving in ways that meet the diverse needs of everyone who is drawn to this work.

Whether you subscribe to our email offerings, send eCards, Light a Candle, engage in our community platform, enroll in our programs, share our content, donate, or all of the above, we are deeply grateful for your presence. You are our treasured collaborators in spreading the gifts of Grateful Living. Thank you.