About Bill Grace
Bill Grace is the founding steward and facilitator of the New Story Community. For more than five decades, his work has unfolded at the intersection of leadership, ethics, spirituality, and service to the common good.
Throughout his life, Bill has been guided by a persistent question: how people might live and lead in ways that serve something larger than themselves—especially in times of uncertainty, disruption, and change.
Formation and Path
Bill’s professional path began in higher education, where he worked from the mid-1970s through the early 1990s in roles focused on student development, moral and civic responsibility, service learning, and global citizenship.
During this period, his work brought him into sustained engagement with students and institutions navigating questions of responsibility, leadership, and the common good—often in moments of social and cultural transition. These experiences shaped his early understanding of leadership as something formed in relationship to real conditions rather than abstract ideals.
In 1991, Bill founded the Center for Ethical Leadership, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing the common good through ethical leadership, civic responsibility, and collaborative problem-solving. Under his leadership, the Center developed a national reputation for innovative programming and worked with organizations across the public, nonprofit, and private sectors.
Bill’s academic work included doctoral study in the administration of higher education, with a focus on the development of ethical leadership.
Alongside this work, Bill has written and spoken as a way of giving language to what he has been learning in practice. His writing explores ethical leadership, trust, and the spiritual dimensions of leadership in unsettled times. His books include Sharing the Rock, which has been used as a foundational text for initiatives focused on the common good, and Longing for a New Story: While Living and Leading Well in Liminal Space, which reflects an ongoing engagement with how people live and lead in conditions of uncertainty.
The Emergence of the Work
Over time, Bill’s focus shifted from what he has described as morally informed leadership toward a deeper exploration of spirit-inspired leadership. This shift emerged not from theory alone, but from long experience, reflection, and careful attention to the limits of human effort in the face of widening social, ecological, and civic challenges.
The New Story Community grew out of this recognition. It did not arise as a programmatic solution, but as a response to what Bill and others were noticing in lived experience: a need for spaces where people could learn how to remain grounded, attentive, and faithful when familiar frameworks no longer provided reliable guidance.
The work that has emerged is less about instruction and more about formation—about creating conditions in which wisdom can be received, practiced, and shared within a committed learning community.
How Bill Holds the Work Today
Today, Bill facilitates the programs of the New Story Community and continues to write and reflect on what it means to live and lead well in liminal space. He gathers regularly with participants online and convenes alumni periodically in person.
His role is not to offer predictions or solutions, but to hold a structure within which practice, reflection, and communal discernment can unfold over time. He does not claim authority over what is emerging, nor does he speak on behalf of the Sacred. He offers what has been received and invites others into sustained practice and shared attentiveness.
The work is shaped as much by listening as by teaching—listening to people navigating responsibility and complexity, to the signs of systemic unraveling, and to the quieter movements that become visible only through patience and care. He does not know when or how a New Story will take fuller shape. He knows only that people need support as they stand between what is ending and what has not yet fully formed.
The work continues through listening, practice, and response to real conditions.