Healing Our Movement Ecosystem (HOME) Jam 2019
May 19-24, 2019
Quaker Center, Ben Lomond, Santa Cruz Mountains
The HOME Jam brings together 25-30 environmental change-makers from diverse backgrounds, passions, ages and regions for five days of connecting, growing, dreaming, and deep learning. As individuals we gather to restore the transformative potential at the heart of our projects and organizations, so often under tremendous stress, pressures and vulnerable to burnout. The Jam aims to strengthen the synergistic ecosystem of our greater movement, healing fragmentation and factionalization through communication and connection. Building relationships and deep community, we strengthen our ability to trust, bridge, and act collectively.
As a culture, we gather to change the system at the root through questioning our own assumptions and world-views. We strive to take our learnings home to transform our efforts and our lives.
We invite you as a key leader in this movement to participate and to bring all you have. Let’s be the change we wish to see.
Apply now!
Priority deadline: February 18, 2019
Final deadline: April 12, 2019
What’s a Jam?
In music, a jam is a creative, live gathering of musicians who together spontaneously create a new sound, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Similarly, YES! jams are places where diverse leaders and visionaries bring together their passion, openness, and unique perspectives. In spontaneous connection, we weave layers of experience, wisdom, heart, and spirit to create some real magic. The jam asks that all the players are present and ready to listen deeply to each other.
To date, more than 150 jams have been held on six continents, bringing together young and intergenerational leaders from more than 85 nations.
The HOME Jam is co-organized by a diverse group of leaders (see below) working in service of environmental justice, with the support of YES!
What is the HOME Jam? Why gather? Why now?
The environmental and social crises of our time are present, real, and daunting. Increasingly, our changing climate is manifesting itself in catastrophic events, lives lost, lives at risk, and all life challenged to cultivate resilience and adapt under unprecedented and mounting pressures.
Some of the same capitalist and separatist ideologies that are destroying the earth’s living systems are also permeating our movement cultures, creating misunderstanding, infighting, disenchantment and burnout. Our own experiences and interviews with people working across the environmental sector reveal common challenges with sustainability in our personal and organizational work to heal ourselves and the earth: lack of time, overstretched capacities, and limited resources. At every level, we call for healing and renewal, but it’s rare and challenging to find the time and space to come together with folks from across the environmental movement in a spirit of healing for personal, interpersonal, and systemic transformation.
We need new venues, new modalities, and new conversations to lift disparate and marginalized voices, catalyze the collective, and re-imagine solutions for our planet together. This is the purpose of the Jam, and the root of our interest in “healing our movement ecosystem.” In the HOME Jam, we share in a lived experience of the transformative potential at the heart of ourselves, our organizations, our movements, and our world.
We are guided by these inquiries:
- How can we honor our own unique gifts and develop practices to empower creative expressions in our movements?
- How can we shift the desecration and fragmentation in the external world — the “environment” — and in our internal world? How can and does our personal healing impact collective liberation, and vice versa?
- How can we apply our collective wisdom to join forces across boundaries and catalyze transformation at all levels?
What is the HOME Jam structure?
A jam is not a conference, seminar, or a typical meeting. It offers multiple opportunities for deep, holistic exploration, in which each person has something to offer and something to receive. Through activities like facilitated dialogues, sharing circles, artistic expression, games, movement, participant-led workshops, outdoor adventure, community play, and lots of free time for spontaneous interactions amongst the participants, we will explore our own experiences, questions, and dynamics together.
We will draw upon the power of collective visioning, new storytelling, self-awareness, breath and movement, systemic analysis, and integrative practices. Through activities, exchanges, and just plain hanging out together, we get a chance to take stock; to see things from new perspectives; to activate our imaginations, creativity, and curiosity; to align our vision and values; to face our fears and overcome our blocks. We get to heal and to find new friends and partners in our journey. Ultimately, a jam is the fire where connections are forged. The support of genuine and deep community allows us to forego intellectualization and allows us to explore the depths.
Ethos and Impact of the Jam
In the Jam we will address three interconnected levels of transformation: the internal, the interpersonal, and the systemic. Our aim for gathering is to:
- Rejuvenate – At the internal level, we aspire to give ourselves space to reflect on our personal stories, learn and unlearn, take off our masks, seek our next growing edge, recharge, and renew. We want to nurture our own spiritual and emotional health, to fire our activation and work in the world.
- Build solidarity – At the interpersonal level, we want to make and take time for authentic conversations to emerge, to discover common ground, and to celebrate differences. By taking an honest, loving and transformative look at our conflicts, we seek to move beyond collaboration and allyship towards deep friendships that will sustain us over the long-term.
- Foster collective liberation – At the systemic level, we aim to link issues that are not commonly linked, to find new intersection points and to gain a clearer vision of the whole. We want to critically examine the tools and lenses we apply in our work in order to decolonize our imaginations and to examine the ways in which our individual liberation is contingent on the liberation of the whole, and vice versa.
After five solid days, we hope to emerge renewed: bringing back grounded passion, spiritual fortitude, new relationships, and re-imagined solutions for our home communities and projects.
Who We are Looking For
We are looking for diverse leaders in the environmental sector and strive for intergenerational participation, approximately between the ages of 20-70. We welcome indigenous voices, members of displaced communities, environmental resource managers, clean energy engineers, food justice advocates, social entrepreneurs, environmental lawyers, policy wonks, members of communities affected by environmental racism, conservation biologists, community organizers, biomimicry designers, social permaculturalists, brujas, high-tech wizards, queer ecologists and anyone who wants to be the change in how the environmental sector operates and the planet heals. We look for a vibrant diversity in:
- Identities and worldviews (e.g. class, race, religion, sexuality, gender, age, dis/ability, ethnicity, etc.)
- Experience (from “just starting out” to “been at it for years”)
- Roles (from “person on the ground” to “founder and director”’)
- Passions & focus (waters, forests, wildlife, energy, economy, climate change, waste, etc.)
**To leverage the movement-building impact of the jam, we encourage applicants to identify other individuals and organizations with whom you would like to collaborate more effectively and encourage them to apply as well.
Who is organizing this year’s HOME Jam?
Ashoka Finley works on issues concerning energy, food, and sustainability community scale. He works both locally and internationally in an effort to find shared best practices. In his life and projects, he seeks to connect diverse groups of people along common lines with dialogue and inclusiveness. His dedication to the empowerment and liberation of all people makes him determined to develop greater capacity within himself to be open and caring in every endeavor in his life.
Jodi Lasseter grew up in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina and currently lives in Durham, NC. Jodi is a trainer, facilitator, community catalyst and ritualist. She is the Founder and Co-Convener of the NC Climate Justice Summit and ongoing Resilience Hubs – an intergenerational process rooted in popular education, cultural work and frontline community engagement around the intersection of economic, social and ecological issues. In her previous positions as national program director with the Engage Network and director of organization development for the Amazon Alliance, she worked closely with hundreds of grassroots leaders in the U.S. and abroad. She continues to consult with environmental and climate justice organizations at the local, state and national levels. As a Social Change Fellow at Clark University, Jodi completed her master’s degree in International Development, Community and Environment. She delights in community singing, walking in the woods, playing frame drums and taking a dip in her favorite swimming holes.
Kyle Lemle is a community forester, musician & organizer working at the intersections of environmental justice and culture shift. He is a Spiritual Ecology Fellow, and co-founder of LeadtoLife.org, which is transforming guns into shovels to use in ceremonial tree plantings at sites impacted by violence in Oakland, Atlanta and beyond. He also serves as GreenFaith’s Bay Area Organizer, with whom he mobilized thousands of people of faith to RISE for Climate Jobs & Justice this past September. Kyle has also served as a SustainUS Youth Delegate and US People’s Delegate to the UN Climate Talks. Merging music with activism, Kyle is founder and co-director of the Thrive Choir and Thrive Street Choir.
Shilpa Jain is currently rooting herself in Oakland/Berkeley, CA, where she serves as the Executive Director of YES!. YES! works with social changemakers at the meeting point of internal, interpersonal and systemic change, and aims to co-create thriving, just and balanced ways of life for all. Prior to taking on this role, Shilpa spent two years as the education and outreach coordinator of Other Worlds and ten years as a learning activist with Shikshantar: The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development, based in Udaipur, India, where she worked on a number of urban sustainability initiatives. She is passionate about dance and music, organic and natural farming, upcycling and zero waste living, asking appreciative questions, and being in community.
Dr. Rene Henery is an ecologist, eco-geographer, and artist who holds a joint position as California Science Director for Trout Unlimited, the US’s oldest and largest salmon and river advocacy organization, as well as part time research faculty with the University of Nevada, Reno, Global Water Center. Rene’s work embraces water, diversity, connectivity and equity as pathways to resilient communities and ecosystems in his home state of California and beyond.
Anwen Baumeister is a regenerative farmer and is currently creating an urban permaculture farm in San Rafael, CA. She is passionate about food sovereignty and community resilience. She recently graduated from American University, studying International Studies with a focus on food systems. She has spent the past four years working for Rising Sun Energy Center, a green energy youth development non-profit in Berkeley, CA. She recently co-created a tea house in Marin County, fostering a place where community members can connect to each other and to local plants. She is currently studying to be a professional herbalist with the East West School of Planetary Herbology. She spends her time in modern dance classes, leading high schoolers on educational backpacking trips, cooking, yoga, and gathering with her community.
Elias Serras is a community consultant, event producer and facilitator who currently resides in Seattle, WA. Having spent much of the past decade living and learning in more than 25 Ecovillages around the world, he is working to apply lessons learned on the fringes to more mainstream and urban contexts. Elias is committed to a collective awakening into deep ecological consciousness. He has followed interests and done work in the realms of Men’s Work, Rites of Passage, Mindfulness and Humanistic Psychology. Originally from upstate New York, he has lived in many places picking up stories and perspectives. As an aspiring writer, filmmaker, and musician Elias believes in the power of storytelling to shift consciousness and transcend boundaries. During free time Elias can usually be found getting lost in the woods, jamming out on the piano, or reading a book in his hammock.
Dates, Venue, and Contribution
The Jam will be held from the afternoon of Sunday, May 19th, until the morning of Friday, May 24th, at the Quaker Center in Ben Lomond, Santa Cruz Mountains (90 minutes south of San Francisco). It is a naturally beautiful place, away from the hustle and bustle of modern life, both inspiring and rejuvenating.
It requires resources to organize this event, but do not let cost be a barrier; we will work out a solution together. The total cost of the jam is $900 per participant ($450 for food, lodging, and local transport; $450 for program costs, including organizing support, childcare, materials, and facilitator honorarium).
We ask that participants consider contributing a minimum of $450 to cover their food and accommodation. This may be still a significant expense for many people, and we do not want money to be an impediment to your participation. We can offer a monthly payment plan, as well as combination of scholarship and work-trade to make it work for you. We also encourage applicants to seek support from their organizations, as many people find a lot of leadership skills development and other professional development happens through their learnings and experiences at the Jam. And, if you are able to contribute more, wonderful! The extra amount will go towards our scholarship pool.
Also, we welcome children to the Jam; we love having whole families sharing the Jam experience. We will work out childcare (provided) and other expenses with you.
Apply today!
Priority deadline: February 18, 2019
Final deadline: March 25, 2019
Please feel free to contact us at <homeecojam@gmail.com> if you have any queries. We eagerly look forward to hearing from you!
With gratitude for who you are and what you do,
Ashoka, Elias, Jodi, Shilpa, Rene, Anwen, and Kyle