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Community Resilience
As we gently slip into Winter time here in North Carolina, I write to offer a glimpse into this moment of The Eco-Institute from my perspective as Executive Director, including a decision to pause programs in order to engage in a focused time of reflection, learning, and strategizing.
The Eco-Institute’s Policy on Vaccination for Residential Program participants.
The Spring 2021 Rising Earth Immersion cohort joined in and walked for miles through rural NC neighborhoods knocking on doors and spreading awareness about the Mountain Valley Pipeline Southgate Extension. We were participating in the 100-mile, Indigenous-led Water Walk, resisting the MVP Southgate’s threat to precious water bodies and sacred Indigenous sites across ancestral Saura, Tutelo, Monacan, Occaneechi and Saponi lands in Virginia and North Carolina.
What has it felt like for me, as a Black woman, to participate in and then lead the Rising Earth Immersion? And what is now possible for BIPOC who are interested in joining this dedicated, healing-driven, ever-evolving community?
We sang a gratitude song before the meal, thanking the Earth and each of the meals’ contributors for their acts of generosity. It felt like a homecoming. I started attending the bi-weekly garden volunteer days, buoyed by the laughter and peace that come from the simplest of tasks in community: spreading mulch, pulling out tomato vines, or struggling to build a greenhouse. I showed up to the story nights, fire circles, and potlucks, reveling in this way of being so dramatically different and more fulfilling from what I had known before…
One highlight of 2020 for many people and organizations was the understanding that we are all interconnected, and that we do not exist outside of the political, economic and social systems in place, nor do we exist apart from the pain inflicted upon members of our society and on other-than-human beings of our beloved Earth Community.
Abbey Cmiel, graduate of the Rising Earth Immersion, sends an update, asking: how can humans be a beautiful and beneficial addition to the intricate web of life that exists?
Meet Psalms White: Rising Earth Core Facilitator
The reality is, there are few people who want the rainforest deforested, or racial injustice, or the deepening of poverty. But our economic structure, in which corporations have power over both the economy and the government, allows for limitless destruction.
In this post, you will find a sample of programming for the Rising Earth Immersion. First you’ll get a sense of the core curriculum, followed by guest programming, which varies session to session. Many of these examples are drawn from 2020, a year that brought a lot of curricular articulation and response to the cultural events of our times.
We would like to offer our thoughts on why we believe that the Rising Earth Immersion plays a valuable role in the movements for collective liberation. We hope that these reflections help you discern whether this program might be a good fit for you.
Meet Cortina Jenelle, Rising Earth Core Facilitator.
Meet Topher Stephens, Rising Earth Core Facilitator.
Meet Kasey Kinsella, Rising Earth Core Facilitator.
Unless we start to grapple with the white supremacy embedded in the soil of our culture, we stand little chance of surviving as a species (and sadly we will keep taking many other species down with us).
I write to you as a white mother feeling heartbreak, anger, and despair about recent acts of racialized violence, especially deepening in my knowing that this kind of violence has been woven into the fabric of our society since the beginning.
I also write to you as the Executive Director of The Eco-Institute at Pickards Mountain, where we are grappling with how best to stand on behalf of this organization against police brutality, systemic racism, inequity, and white supremacy.
We are moving forward with our plans to offer both summer and fall sessions of Rising Earth in 2020, and are maintaining attentive optimism about our ability to do so safely due to our unique location, infrastructure, small-scale adaptability and other resources we’re fortunate to have access to at this moment. This post contains details of our plan.
A Case for Alternative Education.
Want to help fight COVID-19 but don't know how?
Sabbatical, Retreat, Remote Workplace, Gardening Opportunity, or Simple Living Adventure!
