The Place Corps Regenerative Design Fellowship at Hawthorne Valley
The Regenerative Design Fellowship is a year-long residential fellowship for changemakers, designers, and leaders who want to do good work in their places. Based on a regenerative homestead at Hawthorne Valley Farm, the fellowship applies a whole systems, place-based learning approach that challenges fellows to design and experiment with alternative models of living and working. Fellows gain experience in design, facilitation, collaborative leadership, regenerative agriculture, and more.
Who is it for?
- Students moving from theory into action
- Professionals ready for a radical venture shift or wanting to change systems in existing organizations and enterprises
- People looking to learn alternative ways of living in this world
DATES: JANUARY 16TH-NOVEMBER 19TH 2021
STATUS: OPEN AND ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS ON A ROLLING BASIS
AGES: 21-34
CAPACITY: 8 FELLOWS MAX PER YEAR
This competitive fellowship provides housing in an 1800’s eyebrow colonial on our regenerative homestead at Hawthorne Valley Farm, a food stipend, gear for a wilderness camping trip, and experiential learning and training throughout the year to support collaborative leadership and practical skills for radical living. To learn more about program fees and scholarships, visit the website.
CURRICULUM
Place Corps is a progressive learning institute that designs and develops place-specific transformational leadership programs and curriculum rooted in the lineage of many educators, thinkers, activists, artists, and change makers. The Place Corps Regenerative Design Fellowship at Hawthorne Valley is led by facilitators holding higher education degrees with years of experience, as well as lives that demonstrate their integrated practices. The Regenerative Design Fellowship provides professional training, college accreditation options and, for some, the fellowship acts as a non-traditional Master’s Program.
A LETTER FROM PLACE CORPS
We are in a time of change in which climate change and ecological destruction impact us all, laying bare the fragility and inequity of our global economy and society. When coupled with the current political landscape, continuing to live as we do now is, in short, untenable for humans and all other living beings with whom we share the planet.
While this is understandably cause for alarm and despair, it is also an opportunity—an invitation to come together in our communities and do what is needed to restore our places and to reconnect to ourselves, one another, and the Earth. To seize this opportunity, however, means that we need people equipped to do so, and, sadly, most of us are not well prepared to meet and transcend this moment.
This is, in our opinion, a problem of education.
From a young age, we are taught to think like industrialists when really we should, as Adrienne Maree Brown suggests, be training for adaptability as emergent thinkers and designers. Conventional education may have worked incredibly well to further the capitalist engine, but has not prepared us to actually do the good work that is needed today. David Orr, the ecologist, educator, and author, rightly points this out in a speech he made in 2001:
The skills, aptitudes, and attitudes necessary to industrialize the earth are not necessarily the same as those that will be needed to heal the earth or to build durable economies and good communities. Resolution of the great ecological challenges of the next century will require us to reconsider the substance, process, and purposes of education at all levels…
To that end, Place Corps develops transformational leadership programs that equip future leaders to usher in a more just, joyful, and resilient future.
Place Corps is excited to continue to expand and evolve its work cultivating young adults’ calling, courage, and commitment to meet this moment and lead us forward.
What does this actually look like? It (can look) like eight young people (that’s us!) living in a communal home, stewarding a garden, and collectively participating in a bunch of courses/workshops/trainings with educators from the bioregion. The ten months together offered us a chance to explore a huge variety of ecologically regenerative practices — including natural building, regenerative agriculture, cooking, food processing, permaculture design, biodynamic farming, herbalism, foraging, & medicine making — alongside a breadth of socially regenerative practices — anti-racist organizing, regenerative economics, shared leadership and cooperative movements, nonviolent & relational communication, spiritual/ancestral healing modalities, and many more.
The two words that I would use to (reflect on my time at Place Corps) are divine intention.
Divine intention is the definition of love that I came across recently and I think about the work we’re doing here at Place Corps, and that we’re all hoping to foster into the world, as being very intentional but also modeling and mirroring the inherent divinity that exists within us and all the beings around us.