The mission of the Center for Partnership Studies is to catalyze movement towards partnership systems on all levels of society through research, education, grassroots empowerment, and policy initiatives. CPS’s programs focus on promoting human rights and nonviolence, gender and racial equity, childhood development, and new metrics that demonstrate the financial contribution of the work of caregiving.

The Center for Partnership Studies was founded in 1987 in response to the demand of readers of Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future, hailed by Princeton anthropologist Ashley Montagu as "the most important book since Darwin's Origin of Species." A U.S. bestseller, The Chalice and The Blade is now in 26 foreign editions (including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, and most European languages) and used in universities worldwide.