Courses, Workshops & Events

For Upcoming Courses, Workshops, & Events in Permaculture, Ecovillage Design, Sustainable Living Skills, Appropriate Technology & More Click Here.

On-Line Course Includes:

By participating in this online course, you will receive:

6 sixty-minute live video seminars with Starhawk and her featured guests on July 2, 9, 16, 23, 30 and August 6. 

30 minutes of question and answer time in each seminar

Unlimited online access to videos and MP3s of all seminars.

Join us for this special opportunity to learn how to make the groups your participate in an example of the change you want to live in the world!

Tuition & Registration

1. •Early Bird Special: $100, through June 14. Use coupon code: COLLABORATE
   

2. •Standard Tuition: $129
   

Schedule

This 6-session course takes place on Tuesdays starting July 2 - Aug 6, 5:00 p.m. PST, 8:00 p.m. EST.

You will be part of the discussion, able to ask your questions on camera, just like a Skype call. If you can watch a YouTube video, you can take part in this course. Each week will include time for students to ask questions and receive mentoring on issues in their own groups. Special guests will also join Starhawk for certain classes.

July 2: Introduction

5:00 p.m. San Francisco • 8:00 p.m. New York

Why we need collaborative groups, and why groups of equals face unique problems.  What factors need to be in balance for a group to be both empowering and high-functioning?  Developing a group vision, a mission, and short and long-term goals, examining group agreements and norms, spoken and unspoken.

July 9: The Balance of Power and Responsibility

5:00 p.m. San Francisco • 8:00 p.m. New York

Guest: Pandora Thomas

Power comes in many forms:  Power-over, power-from-within, and social power, earned and unearned.  We explore the different types of power, their positive and negative aspects, and how to balance power with responsibility.

Unearned social power is privilege, and to create diversity in groups we must be willing to examine and relinquish privilege in favor of true empowerment.  Guest speaker Pandora Thomas helps us look at factors which can increase our diversity, and at practices to make us better allies for one another.

July 16: Communication and Trust

5:00 p.m. San Francisco • 8:00 p.m. New York

This week we learn and practice a palate of tools for clear communication: constructive critique, text and subtext, nonviolent communication, and more. How do we build trust in groups?  What can we do when trust is broken?   How do we test our assumptions, and what are the agreements and practices that can help us prevent conflict and resolve disagreements?

July 23: Empowering Leadership

5:00 p.m. San Francisco • 8:00 p.m. New York

Guest: Joanna Macy

This week, we look at a spectrum of leadership styles and their positive and negative sides.  What are the different leadership roles a group needs, and the different ways we can fill them?  How do we hold leaders accountable, and still support one another in stepping forward and taking on responsibility? Guest author Joanna Macy joins us to talk about her work moving groups from despair through to empowerment.

July 30: Conflict, Trauma, and Dealing with Difficult People

5:00 p.m. San Francisco • 8:00 p.m. New York

Guest: Diana Leafe Christian

Who are the difficult people? We all are, some of the time, but some of us have patterns of behavior that can undermine and destroy groups.  This week we look at conflict transformation, how groups can develop resilience and challenge attackers and spoilers, and consider trauma as the root of many of our attempts to undermine and control.  How do we make our groups truly healing spaces?

Guest, author Diana Leafe Christian, who writes about intentional community in her books Creating a Life Together and Finding Community joins us to share her observations and experiences around leadership and power.

August 6: Meetings and Facilitation

5:00 p.m. San Francisco • 8:00 p.m. New York

Meetings are the working organs of any group—how do we make them empowering and efficient rather than ponderous and painful?  Starhawk explains the five-fold path of productive meetings: right people, right container, right process, right facilitation, right agenda. 

Instructors

Starhawk

Starhawk is a veteran of progressive movements, from anti-war to anti-nukes, and is deeply committed to bringing the techniques and creative power of spirituality to political activism. Her work in progressive movements spans over 30 years. She has organized, trained protesters, and been on the front lines of antinuclear actions at Diablo Canyon, Livermore Weapons Lab, Vandenberg Air Force Base, and the Nevada Test Site, among others. She traveled to Nicaragua with Witness for Peace in 1984 and made two trips to El Salvador to give ongoing support for sustainability programs. She continues to be a witness for peace on the front lines of the Palestine/Israel war, working with Palestinian and Israeli peace activists. A main focus for the last several years has been the global justice movement; Starhawk has taken part in many of the major actions, including those in Seattle, Washington DC, Quebec City, Genoa, New York City, Cancun, Mexico, and Miami. She co-founded RANT: Root Activists' Network of Trainers, and teaches non-violent direct action trainings for groups throughout the US, Canada, Mexico, Europe, Palestine, and South America. She is active in the revived American peace movement, and works with Code Pink. Starhawk also works on countless environmental and land use issues, and is a founder and active member of the Cazadero Hills Land Use Council in western Sonoma County.

Starhawk consulted on and contributed to a trio of popular films, the Women's Spirituality series (directed by Donna Read).

Starhawk and Donna Read formed their own film company, Belili Productions. Their first release is "Signs Out of Time" (2004), a documentary on the life of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, the scholar whose discoveries sparked the Goddess movement.  Watch Starhawk’s short videos on Permaculture -  Tabor Tilth: Permaculture in the City, and Permaculture Principles at Work. Starhawk and Donna are at work on her next film, an Introduction to Permaculture. Starhak is currently working on a screen play and film for the film for her visionary best selling book - The Fifth Sacred Thing. http://fifthsacredthing.com/

Starhawk lives part-time San Francisco, in a collective house with her partner and friends, and part-time in a little hut in the woods in Cazadero, California, where she practices permaculture in her extensive gardens, and writes.

Host & Lead Instructor

Pandora Thomas

She is co-founder of Earthseed Consulting LLC, a holistic consulting firm whose work deepens the impacts of environmental advocacy in the lives of diverse communities.  Most recently she led a group of youth on a cultural exchange to Indonesia for an environmental leadership program, as well as having co-created and directed the Environmental Service Learning Initiative based in 5 San Francisco schools. Both programs aim to reconnect youth to the environment using innovative strategies.

Her education has sought to link issues such as global affairs, women's rights, the environment and sustainability, racial justice and youth empowerment.  She studied at Columbia University’s School for International and Public Affairs, Teachers College, and Tufts University.

Pandora is a credentialed multiple subjects teacher, a naturalist and outdoor education instructor, as well as a certified green building professional and permaculture teacher who has created and delivered curriculum to pre-k through adult international audiences around multiple themes including human rights, environmental justice, and outdoor and environmental education. She has lectured extensively around issues of social entrepreneurship, diversity, women's leadership, the environment, and human rights. Her writing includes a children's book, various curricula and a green-building manual for youth. 

Pandora has studied and lived in over ten countries and some of her other achievements include presenting at Tedx Denver and SF, being awarded fellowships to Columbia University Human Rights Program and Green For All’s Green Fellows Program.   Her volunteer work includes serving as a Global Peer to four Nigerian women working to bring safe water technology to their communities and co-facilitating an environmental literacy course with the men of the Green Life Program in San Quentin.

Guest Instructor - July 9

Joanna Macy

Photo by Adam Shemper Her wide-ranging work addresses psychological and spiritual issues of the nuclear age, the cultivation of ecological awareness, and the fruitful resonance between Buddhist thought and contemporary science. The many dimensions of this work are explored in her books Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age (New Society Publishers, 1983); Dharma and Development (Kumarian Press, 198); Thinking Like a Mountain (with John Seed, Pat Fleming, and Arne Naess; New Society Publishers, 1988; New Society/ New Catalyst, 2007); Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory (SUNY Press, 1991); Rilke's Book of Hours (1996, 2005) and In Praise of Mortality (2004) (with Anita Barrows, Riverhead); Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World (with Molly Young Brown, New Society Publishers, 1998); Joanna's memoir entitled Widening Circles (New Society, 2000); World as Lover, World as Self (Parallax Press, 2007), A Year With Rilke, (with Anita Barrows, Harper One, 2009); and Pass It On: Five Stories That Can Change the World (with Norbert Gahbler, Parallax Press, 2010).

Many thousands of people around the world have participated in Joanna's workshops and trainings. Her group methods, known as the Work That Reconnects, have been adopted and adapted yet more widely in classrooms, churches, and grassroots organizing. Her work helps people transform despair and apathy, in the face of overwhelming social and ecological crises, into constructive, collaborative action. It brings a new way of seeing the world, as our larger living body, freeing us from the assumptions and attitudes that now threaten the continuity of life on Earth.

Joanna travels widely giving lectures, workshops, and trainings in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia. She lives in Berkeley, California, near her children and grandchildren.

Guest Instructor - July 23

Diana Leafe Christian

She publishes and edits “Ecovillages,” a free, bimonthly online newsletter offering news and inspiration about ecovillage projects worldwide. The newsletter is a project of the nonprofit CRSP organization in Los Angeles. Diana’s bimonthly column, “Ecovillage Roots,” is featured on the home page of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) website.

As an EDE trainer for Gaia Education, a GEN program, she teaches Ecovillage Design Education (EDE) courses internationally. She is also a GEN-Europe Ambassador, a US liaison to Ecovillage Network of the Americas (ENA), and a US liaison to CASA (Consejo Asentamientos Sustentables de las Américas — Council of Sustainable Eco-Settlements of the Americas).

In the early 1990s Diana published a newsletter, Growing Community, about starting new communities. In 1993 she became editor of Communities magazine, a quarterly publication of the nonprofit Fellowship for Intentional Community (FIC), about intentional communities and organized neighborhoods in North America. Her first book on communities was published in 2003 and her second in 2007. In October 2007, she stepped down from her post at Communities Magazine to found the bimonthly Ecovillages newsletter, a project of Cooperative Resources & Services Project. Previous writing experience included writing articles for New Age magazine, Yoga Journal, and East West Journal. She has also hosted radio interview programs in Hawaii and in northern California in the 1970s and 80s.

Diana Leafe Christian is the author of two books designed to help people who want to join or start their own ecovillages or intentional communities. In Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities, she uses success stories, cautionary tales, and step-by-step advice to cover typical time-frames and costs; the role of founders; getting started as a group; vision documents; power, governance, and decision-making; legal structures; finding and financing land; zoning issues; sustainable site plans; selecting new members; and good process and communication skills for dealing well with conflict. In Finding Community: How to Join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community, she covers researching, visiting, evaluating, and joining communities.

Diana speaks, leads workshops, and shows slide presentations on ecovillages in the United States, Canada and internationally. She has lead workshops or talks at the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm in Tennessee, Los Angeles Eco-Village, Lost Valley Educational Center in Oregon, O.U.R. Ecovillage in British Columbia, and Easton Mountain Center in New York. She has led workshops at the North American Cohousing Conference, Twin Oaks Communities Conference, and FIC's Art of Community gathering. Her articles on ecovillages and intentional communities have appeared in publications ranging from Mother Earth News to Canada's This Magazine. She has been quoted in The New York Times, Harper's magazine, and AARP Magazine, and interviewed by Vision magazine, New Dimensions Radio, NPR, and the BBC.

Diana lives in an off-grid homestead at Earthaven Ecovillage in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. She has introduced several processes she shares in her workshops to Earthaven, including the “Gifting Circle” feedback and bonding process; the “Graduated Series of Consequences” process to help community members stay accountable to group agreements; new accountability, orientation, and training processes for Earthaven’s membership process; and several new practices for its Council meetings and Council facilitation process.

One of Diana’s favorite pastimes is to eat dark chocolate, hang out with community friends, and enjoy lively, hilarious conversations about that endlessly fascinating topic—living in community.

Guest Instructor - July 30

Co-Produced With

For Upcoming Courses, Workshops, & Events in Permaculture, Ecovillage Design, Sustainable Living Skills,

& More Click Here.