Earlier this evening, I attended a community visioning and dreaming session with Shelterwood:
a Black, Indigenous, and LGBTQ-led community forest and retreat center, healing people and ecosystems through active stewardship and community engagement. As a collective of land and community protectors, we model how ecosystem health can only be achieved by communities who are in deep relationship with the earth and with one another. Shelterwood’s work extends beyond our forest edge through training & programming focused on antiracism, decolonizing conservation, inspiring resilient leadership, promoting artistic expression, and community health.
900 acres of unceded Kashaya and Southern Pomo territory are now in the hands of a new (and v queer) generation of stewards. We were able to glimpse the land, brainstorm what we’d like to see up to 50 years into the future for the community and even comment on design moodboards. I felt immense care pouring into the process of land protection, restoration, and communion. It’s beautiful to witness the early stages of a group of folks tending to a community liberated through land.
You can feel the vastness of this work, not just because it’s 900 acres strong, but because we are witnessing the application of a dream forest retreat for those who have historically not had access to nature, or have been forcibly removed from their land. This vastness is invigorating because dreaming big, as they urged us, gives way to big realities.
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Shortly after we closed out the session, I got this notification:
It’s time.
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Sharing some links in the hopes that you might find inspiration, a future home/collaboration, or a willingness to gift their cause this holiday season <3