2024 Annual Report: The Windhorse Legacy Project

2024 has been a productive year for the Legacy team. We continue to publish educational materials; build our community of subscribers; cultivate the international network of Windhorse centers; encourage Windhorse teachers; and engage with the wider mental health field. All of this is in the service of keeping the Windhorse recovery approach and its communities near and far, alive and well. During these tumultuous times, it is so important to keep all of our candles of sanity lit in the cross-winds of social change.

 The financial health of the Legacy Project:

 FY2024 Projected Totals:

Fundraising income……………………………………….$24,000.

Program expenses……………………………………………$3,000.

Hourly compensation for Legacy contractors….$28,680.

Projected annual budget deficit……………..……..$7,680.

Investment accounts balance on 12/31/24: $50,000

2024 is a year of significant transition. After 43 years of archiving, documenting, and living the story of the Windhorse Project, I am retiring from my role as Director of the Legacy Project. Many excellent leaders have developed in the areas of administration, teaching, and clinical work in all of the Windhorse centers, so the Project is in good hands. Blake Baily will assume the Director responsibilities for the Legacy Project in January 2025. He and I have worked closely together for the past 22 years. Thank you, Blake, for continuing on, in partnership with Skye Levy, Managing Editor. Thank you, Skye, for bringing your years-long commitment of mastery and good cheer to our team. We deeply appreciate past and present teachers and students of the healing arts who continue building the Windhorse tradition. We are grateful to our many generous supporters for sharing your wealth of advice, funding, and friendship. May all of this continue for a very long time.

A.  Publishing:

  1. I continue to work with the writing group of Joanne Greenberg, author of I Never Promised You A Rose Garden, and Chuck Knapp, a Windhorse co-founder. We are writing a book about the essential principles of recovery from extreme states. We are now in the final editing phase of the publishing process. The Legacy fund is investing in my time and share of the expenses for this book project, which will be repaid with earnings from the book.

  2. Blake and I are consulting with a British scholar who is doing research in our archive. He is writing an intellectual biography of Ed Podvoll.

  3. We continue to build our public website under the www.windhorseguild.org site. In September, we published a new paper by David Stark, a peer counselor with Windhorse Northampton: “The Journey Through Extreme States Shows Us Who We Really Are, Always Human, Sometimes More” (https://windhorseguild.org/legacy-project-archives/2024-the-journey-through-extreme-states-shows-us-who-we-are-always-human-sometimes-more

We are building a section on Recommended Resources, and publishing all of our seasonal Announcements on the site. This year to date, our website has hosted 3,800 website visits from 70 different countries, including Kuwait, Mexico, Pakistan, India, and Russia. We have 756 active subscribers to our mailing list

  1. Jeremy Andersen and I completed a paper: “Words Charged with Significance: A Commentary on Slogan Practice in Windhorse Intensive Psychotherapy.”

  2. We published Dr. Podvoll’s books, Healing Discipline in 2020 and Joining Mindfulness and Awareness in 2022, which continue to be freely accessed world-wide. In June, we published the final three episodes in the first season of our Legacy Project podcast of Dr. Podvoll’s nine audio recordings of Healing Discipline. These final episodes explore the topic of patterns of deep change in contemplative psychology—including teachings on the Bardo and the Mandala Principle.

 B.    Developing Windhorse Teachers:

  1. The Legacy Group has disbanded after ten years. Thank you, Polly Banerjee Gallagher, Matt Allen, and Blake Baily, for showing courage in walking the path of student-healer.

  2. I continue to mentor seven senior Windhorse teachers. These are key culture-carriers for the future of Windhorse.

 C.   Supporting the Windhorse Centers International Network:

  1. We continue to build the “Legacy Drive: An International Windhorse Library,” an online resource center confidential to the Windhorse international community. This will contain the accessible archive of Edward Podvoll’s work, of other Windhorse teachers’, and confidential resource materials. This library will archive and provide easy access to our clinical knowledge base for generations of our teachers, students, clients, and families to come.

  2. We continue to foster the integration of the ten Windhorse treatment centers through dialogue and consultation; encourage and publish the writing of staff, clients, and client families; facilitate the two monthly Windhorse world councils comprised of representatives from each center.

  3. Sent seasonal update Announcements to our growing Legacy community of 756 subscribers.

D. Active Dialogue with Our Field:

We continue to make our knowledge resources more known and available world-wide. Adapting the core principles and methods of our clinical paradigm to other treatment settings is an ongoing challenge. We remain in dialogue with others in our field. Together we are evolving the world-wide recovery movement, which is moving the paradigm shift toward whole-person medicine rooted in each person’s intrinsic health and sanity.

Jeff Fortuna