Seeding Change
Creative Leadership Incubator
Seeding Change is a new creative incubator leadership/mentorship circle for informed eaters, visionaries, seedkeepers, emerging food justice leaders and lovers of life, guided by Rowen White of Sierra Seeds and Indigenous Seedkeepers Network who want to continue to nourish their growing edges and capacities to sow seeds of hope and action into the world.
This circle will be a nourishing community where we share innovative tools, strategic leadership models, compelling stories and a diversity of embodied experiences to share the benefit and invite a wide diverse collective of voices out there teaching and sharing seed stories and reseeding imaginations of what well-nourished communities of culture can look like.
“Seeding Change” will share a diversity of tools to help uplift and empower those wishing to share their story and experiences through group facilitation, public speaking, and participatory teaching, as well as cultivating their community organizing and ways to sow seeds of seed and food literacy in community.
We guide and mentor curious, engaged, receptive, creative, intuitive, solutions-oriented, innovative heart-centered humans who are making radical change in their community and home-based food/seed systems through a multitude of pathways.
Who is Seeding Change designed for?
The times we are living in are inviting more of us to be empowered as leaders and mentors who have a beautiful vision of what the future can hold for our next generations. Seed work is intergenerational work, and with it comes the responsibility to the legacy building in our communities by not only growing good seeds but growing other seed stewards around us.
By nature of accepting the responsibility of carrying our seed bundles, we accept the responsibility of ensuring we teach someone who will help us carry our seed bundles when we are unable to. These seeds will outlive us, and so we must do our due diligence to share our knowledge with the next generation who will carry your embodied knowledge through the generational threshold of memory.
Some of us are literal seedkeepers, with our hands in the earth. Yet all of us are deeply connected to seed because we are nourished every day by the generosity of a seed.
We all can play a beautiful part in cultivating seed and food literacy and reverence with our communities around us, it’s part of the original agreements we carry in our blood and bones, of being connected to a deeply nourishing reciprocal relationship with food and seed. This means not only seedkeepers and farmers/gardeners, but artists, poets, storytellers, activists, parents, chefs, community leaders and lovers of life.
What can you expect?
You will bring the fertile work and ideas that you are tending in your own community, and nourish them in this space. This will be equal parts creative incubator for your own projects and equal parts a fertile learning space where we can share tools, ideas, dreams, and fill our tool basket with all sorts of useful skills that empower us as changemakers seeding the vision of the future we want to see.
What are some of the projects that can be nourished in this space? Create a workshop that you want to teach in your community, develop a curriculum, map out your new emerging initiative or entity, seed art, love letters to the earth, bring your farm to table dreams to life…all of it is welcome! You will receive support and guidance in a way that allows the teachings to become embodied in the work you are tending in your life.
That way it’s not simply more information, tools, and skills; the design of this creative incubator is to help you move forward with the ideas you are gestating and carrying in the world.In this time we need your brilliance and your offerings! Even if you aren’t quite sure what those gifts and offerings are yet. Come to plant seeds of ideas that will sprout under the shade tree of this nourishing community.
We are here to uplift you in your creative endeavors to nourish and support the restoration of relationships to food and seed at the community level. We are here to empower you to find your voice and strengthen your confidence as an emerging change-maker and visionary.
Like a seed planted in fertile soil, come join us as we plant and nurture the seeds of our visions, ideas and projects for new ways of nourishing our communities; together we rise.
How will we gather?
We will gather once a week for 3 months ( March, April and May). This is the first opening of this learning circle. This will open up to a wider group in June.
You will have the option to continue as we create an on-going circle of learning and sharing. This first 3 months is where will be focused on helping you hone in the ideas of what is asking to be moved through your creative hands as an emerging leader and offering the skills and systems that support your ideas moving into form and action.
We begin with reclaiming our own story and the heart of why we have felt called to be in service to life.
Let’s create a nourishing space where we can be held and healed as we work to sow seeds of hope in our communities.
There will be a virtual gathering space in our course platform Ruzuku, where all call recordings will be held, as well as any teaching materials. There will also be a Community sharing space where links, resources, ideas etc can be shared among our peers.
There will also be a WhatsApp chat group that will connect us outside of our Seeding Change weekly circles, for those random moments of connection that keep our spirit fire kindled around the projects and ideas that we are tending.
Each month for 3 months, we will host:
1- 90-minute video call
Guided teaching by Rowen, in realms of leadership, mentorship, facilitation, and other helpful skills. These will be tailored to the needs of the participating group and the projects being cultivated.
2- 90-minute co-working sessions
There will be peer to peer mentorship and space to nourish the projects that often get back-burnered in our busy lives.
1-90 minute Sharing Circle
W will help hold each other in each phase of our creative incubation of the project we set intention to work on during our time in Seeding Change…this will be a chance to get a diverse array of feedback and ideas on what you are working on, and also create powerful accountability to keep tending and nourishing these dream sprouts.
Plus as a bonus…
Over our three months together, we will be hosting a 60-minute guest teaching from a circle of folx I know and love in the diverse field of possibility, who will help us fill our tool basket of skills and inspiration, with a particular focus on unique and innovative tools for self-care for social justice. For every 3 months of the Seeding Change Cohort, we will have one guest join us to share.
What a powerful endeavor to gather together among a circle of hopeful humans who wholeheartedly tend the fires of regenerative nourishment, reverent curiousity, and dignified resurgence. We invite you to join us in this creative learning circle to nourish your capacity to make lasting change in your community food systems, as we step into our higher selves in service to life.
I know that making an investment like this might feel vulnerable, but these times we are living in are asking us to be brave, creative and innovative in our quest to be good future ancestors and responsible descendants! You don’t have to go it alone.
We strive to be a safe space, with shared values of anti-oppression and radically open and direct communication. We are committed to healthy, constructive dialogue about ways we can heal our diverse culturally appropriate food systems from the inside out.
The Seeding Change community is a place to tend seeds of hope that will empower a new chapter of nourishment for our communities and families.
I’m so excited for what is gestating right now in this community building around seeds and the healing conduit they provide for our communities. Excited to continue to grow with you all in the coming season!
This model of Creative Incubatorship was deeply inspired by my work with mentor and friend Anya Hankin. I birthed the idea of this offering while engaging in her amazing Catalyst Cohort.