Phase 3: Sanctuary Studio
This will be a sanctuary of social support and collaborative learning, where we use social permaculture tools and practices to zero in on the energy of a particularly juicy stuckness/struggle within one of our projects and reap a harvest from it.
Contents
What does “reap a harvest” mean here?
- Practice narrowing scope/segmenting our projects and goals to make it possible to really obtain a yield
- Surface goals from inside the living ecology of our project, rather than goals that are imposed from the outside (this ecology always includes US)
- Show up as witnesses and observers who nurture the development of each other’s projects
- Experience the reward of movement arising out of stuckness – and experience ourselves as really learning how to make stuck projects move
- Gain insights about what insecurities or spirals of erosion lie at the heart of stuckness for each of us, and support each other in resolving these
Finding Juiciness
Each of us is already engaged in making social change happen at multiple levels in our lives.
Take a moment, close your eyes and think about all the ways you’re trying to foster currents of social change in your personal life, family life, neighborhood, workplace, community.
Are you experiencing any struggle or stuckness in the things you imagined in your mind’s eye?
We define “juiciness” as the energetic quality of a struggle that’s just waiting to burst into maturity. A point of stuckness that’s particularly promising. Not all our struggles are equal, after all. Some of them hold the keys to our forward progress more powerfully than others.
In Sanctuary Studio, we want you to listen deeply to your intuition around your own struggles and stuckness and choose the one that feels most juicy to you. Which one, if you were able to release it, would bring the most aliveness to your other work? Which one would give you a strong sense of accomplishment that you could carry into other projects?
The Map
We’ll use the Regenerative Social Design Canvas to structure and guide our work with our projects.
We’ll use a PATTERN to structure our time within the meeting:
6:00 – 6:15
Opening (drawing deeply on sensory, embodied, ritual practices)
6:15 – 6:45
Social Alchemy (activating the group field of our collective wisdom)
6:45 – 7:20
Council (breaking out into witnessing/advising councils)
7:20 – 7:30
Closing Yield (whole-group structured harvesting time; you can end here if you choose)
7:30 – 8:00
Deeper Dive (optional space to go deeper into SP richness; organically weave closer relationships amongst ourselves)
What we envision IS
- A place to work on an achievable, bite-sized project that’s currently alive for you in anywhere from Zone 00 (personal practices that you want to develop) to big social projects
- A place where being a witness is just as important as having a big project
- A hybrid between a studio course (e.g. a place to do focused project work with community feedback) and a support group
What we envision IS NOT
- A place to invent more work that will cause you stress
- Going to be centered around theoretical discussions
- About inventing something expressly for this space
Your Hosts
Maria Talero
Maria is a long-time educator and facilitator who believes that lasting social change arises from a deeper level than our fiery and righteous ideas of right and wrong – and that this level can be accessed by fostering empathetic and trusting relationships in organizations, workplaces and communities. She is a native of Colombia and was raised bi-culturally in the U.S., and is now raising two small kids and looking at the future through their young eyes. She partners with non-profits, faith communities, and educational and grassroots organizations in Colorado.
Drew Hornbein
Drew is an activist entrepreneur who believes that by remembering more equitable, democratic ways of working together we can solve the crisis of our time. He has worked within activist movements, mutual aid groups responding to disaster, income-sharing communes, radical self-directed K-12 schools, cooperatives, and non-profits as a participant, facilitator, and technologist. He is a high school (and art school) dropout. A self-taught programmer and recovering material realist turned aspiring mystic.
Commitment Details
Starting April 28*, we gather every other Wednesday for 6 sessions, ending on July 7*
* Start dates subject to change based on application survey feedback.
We are capping the studio at 13 people.
A background in social permaculture is required – Please let us know what your background is on the survey.
Cost
We are offering this sanctuary as a gift. Not a gift given freely like fruit from a tree – instead, think of this as a gift that opens a relationship and expects a gift that indebt us to you, in return. In other words, we’re inviting you to enter into sacred relationship of mutual indebtedness with us. This is a specific social technology that we believe fosters spirals of abundance in communities that practice it.
To facilitate this sacred value exchange we are asking you to give what you can, plus a little bit more.
What this means is that we open up the books to you, show you how much it costs us to put this on, how much we believe our hosting is worth, and show you what has been contributed. From there you choose how much you’ll contribute:
| Total hours | Our hourly rate | Total cost | Total cost per participant (13) | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 36 | $15 | $540 | $42 | minimum wage |
| $60 | $2,160 | $166 | solidarity rate | |
| $120 | $4,320 | $332 | market rate |
| Total cost per participant (13) | Rate |
|---|---|
| $42 | minimum wage |
| $166 | solidarity rate |
| $332 | market rate |