About RW Institute
Research. Training.
Community.
Built for the people doing the work.
The Vision
Designing volunteer experiences that create lasting psychological, convictional, and behavioral shifts in participants.
Built for the people doing the work.
The Vision
Designing volunteer experiences that create lasting psychological, convictional, and behavioral shifts in participants.
The gap between what volunteer programs measure and what actually matters is where we work.
Most corporate volunteer programs are designed for participation. People show up, do the task, take the photo, go home. By any standard metric, those programs succeed. Headcount is up. Hours are logged. The report gets filed.
But here's what those metrics miss: did anything change for the people involved?
RW Institute exists because the answer, almost always, is no. Not because the intentions are bad. Because the design is incomplete.
We focus on what we call transformative volunteering: the practice of designing volunteer experiences that create lasting psychological, convictional, and behavioral shifts in participants. Not team building. Not morale boosting. Actual identity change, the kind where a person starts to see themselves differently and acts on that new understanding.
That's a big claim. We back it up with behavioral science, two decades of field work, and a community of practitioners who pressure-test everything we teach.
RW Institute grew out of decades of consulting work with corporate volunteer programs across five continents. The founders worked inside the system long enough to see its limits clearly: good programs producing good feelings that didn't go anywhere.
The question that kept coming back was simple. If well-designed experiences can change how people think and act, and the research says they can, why are most volunteer programs designed to avoid exactly that?
RW Institute was built to answer that question. Not as a consulting practice (that work continues separately), but as a research, training, and community organization dedicated to advancing the field. We publish the thinking. We train the practitioners. We build the tools and communities where this work gets better.
Three things make our approach different from what most of the industry offers.
Transformative learning theory. Prosocial identity development. Construal level theory. Intergroup contact research. These aren't decorations on a brochure. They're the foundation of every framework we teach and every lab we run. When we say something works, we can point to why.
The Makerspace model means practitioners don't just consume what we create. They co-develop it. Genome Labs produce industry tools built by the people who will actually use them. That's not a focus group. It's collaborative construction.
Our research, frameworks, and resources are freely available. No email gates. No paywall. The field gets better when people can find and use the best thinking without friction. We earn revenue through labs and training, not by locking up knowledge.
RW Institute is led by a small core team and supported by a growing faculty of researchers, practitioners, and field experts.
Co-founder & Partner
Chris Jarvis is a co-founder of Realized Worth and RW Institute. For over twenty years he has worked with some of the world's largest companies to design employee volunteering programs that produce genuine prosocial identity change. He is a leading voice on transformative volunteering, the psychology of prosocial behavior, and the application of behavioral science to corporate social impact.
Co-founder & Partner
Chris has spent two decades working at the intersection of behavioral science and corporate social impact. He co-founded Realized Worth in 2008 and later RW Institute, designing the frameworks that underpin both organizations' methodology. Before that, he consulted with Fortune 500 companies across five continents on volunteer program design. He thinks in systems, writes in plain language, and believes the hardest problems in this field are design problems, not motivation problems.
Co-founder & Partner
Angela Parker is a co-founder of Realized Worth and RW Institute. She brings deep expertise in organizational change, stakeholder engagement, and the design of systems that support human flourishing. Angela is a sought-after speaker and advisor on CSR strategy, employee engagement, and the future of corporate citizenship.
Co-founder & Partner
Angela co-founded Realized Worth in 2008 and RW Institute, bringing deep expertise in corporate citizenship strategy and practitioner development. She has worked with global organizations to build volunteer programs that go beyond participation metrics and into genuine behavior change. Her focus is on making the science accessible and the tools practical for the people who run programs day to day.
Idealist in Residence
Tim is Senior Advisor at Idealist and serves as Idealist in Residence at RW Institute. He has spent his career working at the intersection of civic engagement and organizational change, and brings a deep practitioner's knowledge of what motivates people to show up for their communities. At RWI, he works alongside Chris Jarvis on the Makerspace, helping shape how the Institute builds and sustains its learning community.
Faculty
Jake brings a practitioner's perspective to RWI's training and community work. He co-hosted the Disorienting Dilemma podcast, exploring what it looks like to act as if the world we want already exists. His work focuses on the gap between intention and practice in social impact.
We publish the thinking. We train the practitioners. We build the communities where this work gets better.