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Abstract

This study focussed on how collective mindfulness contributes to resilience in non-profit organizations coping with crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Taking a Vancouver B.C. non-profit organization’s emergency food security response as a case study, it examines the role that mindfulness plays in non-profit organizations’ adaptations to the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of complexity science. Specifically, it identifies emergent mindfulness processes and their effects on organizational resilience within non-profit organizations. This qualitative research employs a responsive, phronetic-iterative approach to interviewing and analysis that is grounded in a post-structuralist paradigm; attempts to advance a complexity-based theory of collective mindfulness; and furthers complexity science as a comprehensive interpretive framework. Findings demonstrate that collective mindfulness may be enacted through interdependent processes of dynamic reflexivity, responsive self-organization, and flexible co-evolution, through which resilience may emerge.