Rising Earth Immersion Curriculum
Below please find a sample of past 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.
Core Curriculum
Week 1: Orientation Week
Week 2-3: Typical Weeks
Week 4: Permaculture Foundations (10-week program only)
Weeks 5-6: Typical Weeks
Week 7: Sabbath Week (10-week program only)
Weeks 8-9: Typical Weeks
Week 10: Integration Week
Orientation Week
The Rising Earth program begins with Orientation Week, delivered by our Core Facilitators. Each session has 2-3 Core Facilitators, who each bring their own unique sets of skills, life experiences and interests. Click to meet some of the past (and current) Core Facilitators: Topher, Psalms, Cortina, Kasey).
Orientation Week involves a number of experiential, tone-setting workshops on topics such as consent, social identity, consensus, and emotional resilience. The group also develops rhythms for living in community: daily Farm Chores and the weekly Logistics Meeting and Garden Cooperative, as well as learning the basics of farm-to-table culinary arts.
Orientation posters by REI Core Facilitator Cortina Jenelle
Typical Weeks
Typical Weeks involve a wider range of guest teachers and workshops, with more room for rest, creativity, and play. See weekly modules and guest workshops below for more specifics.
Permaculture Foundations (10-week program only)
Permaculture Foundations is a weeklong intensive exploring the principles and strategies offered by the system of permaculture. Participants receive a certificate of completion at the end of this week.
Sabbath week (10-week program only)
Sabbath Week is entirely planned and directed by the group, and might involve a trip and peer facilitation. It’s an opportunity for increased leadership, restoration, collaborative planning, and getting out to see some of the amazing natural phenomena that North Carolina has to offer.
Integration Week
The final week of the program, Integration Week, is a mirror to Orientation Week, which facilitates reflection, distilling and synthesizing the program, expressing celebration and gratitude, and exploring the reintegration process. Throughout the Core Curriculum, individuals are focused on a central question to catalyze their energy in service of the larger community and world.
WEEKLY MODULES
COLLECTIVE LIBERATION
After Orientation, Core Facilitators offer a module we call Collective Liberation twice weekly for the duration of the program. Collective liberation is a concept used by the feminist bell hooks and adopted by anti-oppression organizers as a way of understanding that no matter our set of identities, each of us has a stake in dismantling interconnecting systems of oppression. These lessons explore the intersection of internalized oppression, institutionalized violence, and climate disruption. These sessions integrate practices which serve to engage participants in a wide variety of learning modalities; i.e. mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually/imaginatively.
Topics of these modules include:
non-violent communication
bystander intervention
archetypes of activism
authentic relating
personal mythology
media literacy
leadership styles
generative conflict engagement
These modules are supported and deepened by central texts by Octavia Butler, adrienne maree brown, and Walidah Imarisha, among others, and enhanced by the unique facilitation backgrounds of the Core Facilitators.
GARDEN EDUCATION DAYS
One morning block a week digs into foundational knowledge for regenerative agriculture: basic botany and soil science; interpreting zones and planting calendars; how to build, prep, and plant a bed; mushroom foraging and farming; plant health and harvest techniques; as well as a number of homesteading skills like foraging, fermentation, herbalism, and beekeeping.
Spiritual Ecology
“As the world grows more and more out of balance, we urgently need to regain a relationship with the planet based upon the understanding of the world as a sacred and living whole, and to reclaim a consciousness that is centered in that understanding. Only if we redeem the problem at the root can we hope to heal and come back into balance with our environment.”
—Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee in Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth
Spiritual Ecology is about our spiritual response to the ecological crisis we face together. Readings from thought leaders around the world and discussions of their ideas are complemented by group practices and simple rituals for reconnecting with our living world. Spiritual Ecology culminates with a Council of All Beings, which, in the words of our friend and teacher Joanna Macy, is "a communal ritual in which participants step aside from their human identity and speak on behalf of another life-form. A simple structure for spontaneous expression, it aims to heighten awareness of our interdependence in the living body of Earth, and to strengthen our commitment to defend it."
Hub Time
Hub Time is when we invite a member of our extended community currently working on the frontlines of eco-social justice for a 90-minute sharing of their personal story and their project or organization. Hub Time exposes participants to the myriad ways that activism and livelihood intersect.
Past Hub Time speakers have included ethnobotanists, documentary filmmakers, community herbalists, natural building specials, spoken word artists, and leading thinkers in alternative economics. Some example include:
Valerie Rivas, Inanna’s Delight & Herbalists without Borders
brontë velez, Lead to Life
Della Duncan, Upstream Podcast
Group Rhythms
Weekly modules are supported by group rhythms such as:
Morning Practice: a personally-curated and nature-based daily mindfulness ritual
Logistics Meetings: a weekly circle for practicing democratic organizing, collective ideation, and the consensus process
Council: a quiet, ceremonial gathering for entering deeper conversation on a more emotional or spiritual level
Garden Cooperative: Tending to The Eco-Institute learning gardens alongside the wider community.
sample guest workshops from 2020 Program
These workshops are offered in addition to the Core Curriculum, mentioned above, and are specific to the Summer 2020 cohort.
The Heart of Activism
facilitators: Chérie Rivers Ndaliko and Petna Ndaliko Katondolo
Mama Chérie and Mzee are active art-ivists who have been thinking critically about the tensions between art and activism for years. Together they run a cultural center in the Democratic Republic of Congo called Yole!Africa. There and elsewhere, they teach a related workshop called Decomposing the Colonial Gaze, a practice of learning to see the world differently than from the lens of colonial logic. For Rising Earth, Chérie and Petna offer a critical, embodied, and anti-colonialist reckoning with the individualistic connotations of art and activism. Their approach confronts the roots of fundamental systemic change, nourishing them with collective ideation and community-driven action.
“Chérie Rivers Ndaliko is an interdisciplinary scholar, activist, and the Executive Director of the Yole!Africa cultural center located in Goma, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Ndaliko is currently Associate Professor of Music and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She holds a B.M. in film scoring from the Berklee College of Music (2005), an A.M. from Harvard University in Ethnomusicology (2008), and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in African Studies (2012), where she was a pioneer of the University’s Social Engagement Initiative.” [bio text from UNC Department of Music]
“The works of award-winning filmmaker and educator Petna Ndaliko Katondolo (Congo) are acclaimed for their provocative Afro-futuristic artistic style, which engages historical content to address contemporary sociopolitical and cultural issues. He is founder and Artistic Director of the Yole! Africa cultural centre and Congo International Film Festival. He is currently artist-in-residence at the Stone Center for Black History and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.” [bio text from IFFR].
Art-ivism Residency with Paperhand Puppet Intervention
Facilitator: Donovan Zimmerman
In this weekly residency we will explore the historical context for the use of arts, specifically puppetry, in many social/environmental/political movements. Then, we will begin constructing our own puppets, props, signs, masks and costumes. During our weekly check-ins, we’ll continue our conversation on how to be most effective and poignant with the work we are creating. Also plan for a collective action/performance.
Topics include:
Art (Puppetry and performance) in activism throughout human history and in the present.
Climate crisis, social justice, and intersectionality.
Creating safe, inclusive, and energized collaborative work spaces.
Cultivating good listening and exercising empathy “muscle” through puppetry.
Puppetry as a tool for both inspiring people and progressive paradigm shift.
Multi-disciplined artistic/creative approaches toward the bettering of humanity and the world.
“Donovan Zimmerman is the founder and director of Paperhand Puppet Intervention, a collective of artists who create giant puppet creatures, large mask characters, various costumes, painted flats, stilted figures, shadow puppets and much more.” [bio text from Duke Arts]
Earth Church
Facilitator: Reverend Lynice Pinkard
Earth Church is a nondenominational, loving, healing, creative and life-giving multi-faith container for spiritual formation, expression, interactive processing, song, and self-care. Participants are invited to co-create this radical, outdoor, spiritual space with Reverend Lynice Pinkard.
Lynice came of age, during the mid-1980s, at the height of the AIDS and Crack Cocaine epidemics. In that devastating context, she began working, as a community pastor, grassroots organizer and community builder, to address the multiple and overlapping forms of injustice in poor urban communities in the Northern CA Bay Area. Her work focused on issues related to urban poverty, including, food insecurity, alcohol and drug addiction, lack of affordable housing, substandard schools, forms of environmental injustice, e.g., toxic waste dumping sites, domestic and community gun violence, health disparities, and police corruption, brutality and murder. Later, In the early 1990s, Lynice co-founded a church and several non-profits tasked with addressing the economic, social, political, and spiritual needs of L/G/B/T/Q/A/I communities, persons living with HIV/AIDS, addiction and mental illness. In 2000, Lynice shifted her focus to addressing the acute trauma of poor POC, in particular traumas associated with gun violence and acute sexual assault. Amidst her various work in Bay Area communities, she simultaneously pastored several Bay Area congregations and co-founded a number of non-profit organizations including, Share First Oakland, Seminary of the Street, Urban Sanctuary, and Creating Freedom Movements.
Lynice, recently moved from Oakland, CA, and now lives with her partner Erica in Efand, NC. She continues to serve as a pastor, teacher, writer, activist, singer and healer. Her current work and writing are dedicated to decolonizing the human spirit and to freeing people from what she calls "empire affective disorder."
don't wake the dreamer
Facilitator: zena carlota
through the process of rest and relaxation, our imagination and the realm of dreams have the capacity to guide us through challenges and make available tools to us that are not always accessible in our alert, waking state. using sound, story and collective visualization, we will navigate the terrain of our desire as we rest.
zena carlota is a storyteller, composer, multi-instrumentalist, poet, visual & theater artist working at the intersections of transformative art and psychotherapy. As a healing artist and graduate student of expressive arts and counseling psychology, she weaves the tenuous boundaries of matter and spirit into form through myth, embodied movement, visual arts, and live sonic ceremonies inspired by the folkloric traditions of the African Diaspora and beyond.
zena is also a beloved member of our Community Garden Cooperative.
Ousia Experience (oo-see-ahh)
Facilitator: Aubrey Griffith-Zill and Friends of Living Arts Collective
Ousia: essence; that which makes a thing what it is.
This is an introspective movement experience where all are welcome to express their authentic selves. We explore the integration of mindfulness and embodiment as pathways to access meaningful experience and wholeness.
Together we create a container for self-discovery through radical inner listening by tuning into natural cycles of growth and transformation.
Aubrey is a professional dancer, dynamic performer, and enthusiastic instructor who has trained and taught both in the United States and abroad. She is based in Durham, NC, and has been inspiring movement professionally for over a decade. She is inspired and guided by the life-work of her mother, Robin Zill. Robin studied health as something inseparable from the environment—plants, people, and place—often saying, “Nature is our greatest teacher.” She taught that health is attained through the personal journey of self-awareness, assisted by nature. Robin transitioned in 2007, but her work continues to be influential. Aubrey carries forth her mother’s teachings and knowledge as the foundation for her work at Living Arts Collective. L.A.C. has grown from a dream into a space and community where leaders, activists and artists launch their ideas, express, learn, exchange, grow, and receive recognition for their work.
“Like a river, the story of our times flows forward through individuals. This is not a passive happening; people who carry forward the story possess a special characteristic—they are open to change. They share the like-minded qualities of being willing to risk, grow, explore, and evolve. And they are willing to share what they’ve learned with others. The story is one of interconnected humanity, not the lone individual. It is the giving and receiving that keep us connected.”
– Robin Zill