There is a particular kind of courage required to become yourself in a world that has already handed you so many instructions about who you should be.
At Encircle, we see that courage every day.
We see it in a young person walking through our doors for the first time, unsure whether there will be a place for all of them here. We see it in parents learning that loving their child sometimes means letting go of the future they had imagined so they can fully see the person standing in front of them. And we see it in our staff, who choose, day after day, to sit beside people in some of the most tender chapters of their lives.
That kind of work asks a great deal of the human heart.
It is one of the reasons our partnership with the Eckhart Tolle Foundation has become so meaningful to us.
The Foundation’s work is rooted in a simple but profound understanding: that our inner lives matter. That presence matters. That learning to meet ourselves and one another with greater awareness can change the way we move through the world.
For Encircle, those ideas feel deeply connected to our own work. Because long before someone can thrive, they need to know they are worthy of being here. And sometimes healing begins with something as quiet as finally having enough safety to hear yourself again.
The Eckhart Tolle Foundation has generously provided financial support to Encircle, helping sustain the programs, therapy, and spaces that thousands of LGBTQ+ young people and their families rely on.
We are enormously grateful for that generosity.
But what has made this partnership especially beautiful is that the Foundation did not only ask how it could support our work.
It asked how it could support our people.
Encircle staff have had opportunities for coaching and learning directly with Eckhart Tolle, along with retreats and additional experiences centered on presence, awareness, and emotional well-being.
There is something deeply moving about that investment.
People who spend their days holding space for others need spaces where they, too, can exhale. The people sitting beside someone else’s grief, fear, uncertainty, or becoming are human beings carrying lives and stories of their own.
If we want people to remain soft in work that can be hard, we have to care for that softness.
And when someone who serves others becomes more grounded, more present, more connected to themselves, that change rarely ends with them. It enters conversations. It changes the way someone listens. It creates a little more room around another person’s pain.
Care has a way of traveling.
The Foundation has also gifted hundreds of Eckhart Tolle’s books to Encircle homes, placing them directly into the hands of young people, parents, staff, and community members at no cost.
There is something fitting about books living in our homes.
Sometimes a sentence finds you before you know you need it. You underline it. Fold the corner of a page. Carry it with you for a while. And perhaps, years later, you still remember the first time someone gave language to something you had been feeling but could not yet name.
That is what we hope these books can become for people who encounter them at Encircle: not instructions for how to live, but invitations to become curious about the life happening inside them.
Because so much of growing into yourself begins there.
Not with having every answer, but with learning how to listen.
The most meaningful partnerships are not simply transactions between organizations. They begin when two groups recognize something familiar in one another.
With the Eckhart Tolle Foundation, that recognition has been a shared belief in human well-being and in the possibility of living with greater awareness, connection, and wholeness.
Encircle exists because we believe LGBTQ+ young people deserve more than survival. They deserve lives large enough for joy, friendship, family, purpose, love, and the ordinary freedom of becoming who they are.
And the people walking beside them deserve care, too.
That is what makes this partnership so special to me.
The Eckhart Tolle Foundation has invested in our programs, but it has also invested in the interior lives of the people carrying those programs into the world. In doing so, it has reminded us of something I hope we never forget:
Sometimes the most important work we do for another person begins with the quality of our presence beside them.
We are deeply grateful for what this partnership has already made possible, for the books sitting on shelves waiting to find the person who needs them, for the lessons our team will carry into rooms we cannot yet imagine, and for the young people and families who will ultimately feel the ripple of that care.
Some gifts can be counted.
Others keep moving from person to person, long after they are given.
Those are often the ones that change us most.