Eight Capabilities for Partnering with Lifesheds
(and how we help you do this)
Explore Your Truth
Who are you? What matters to you? What are you here to do at this time in the world? How do you want to be with the land?
These are huge questions, and it can be hard to find your answers. We use a holistic process to help you discern how you want to partner with the land and your communities in the short term and for decades to come. This becomes the “north star” that guides our process together and grounds you throughout your life and work.
Listen to the Land
Your land is a complex living system! To nurture its ecological health, you need to understand its current condition.
We can provide you a clear picture through our robust site assessment and analysis practices, including professional mapping services that illustrate the fuller context of your site; understanding the land’s history; and walking the land with you, examining infrastructure and current systems, how water moves through the landscape, plant ecology, soil conditions, and other relevant data.
Design & Plan
Partnering with the land requires humans to design for the well-being of ecological and social systems—and their evolution.
We take the wealth of information that we have gathered together so far, and lay out for you the right level of design and detail so you have a clear path forward. See our gallery of designs here (link to Gallery).
Learn & Grow
Building relationships with the lifesheds that sustain us—and learning how to nurture them back to full vitality—is a lifelong and rewarding process.
We are long-time, hands-on educators, so we love to support you to understand and apply the foundational skills for working regeneratively with the land. In Land School, you learn how to develop land practices for assessing and nurturing the web of life in your place—including soil health, clean water as life force, the ecological relationships between plants & animals, how to support the regeneration process in an ongoing way, uplifting human systems, and more.
Connect to Networks
The quality of social connections often determines the success of your land-based endeavor.
We have often found that land partners don’t know about the resources available, including training, funding, or even, meeting like-minded folks. Our extensive professional relationships extend to you a wealth of connections and resources so you tap into additional support that is available to accomplish your goals—including resources related to regenerative agriculture, understanding government programs, working with county agencies, beginning farmer education, permaculture, land back initiatives, and more.
Establish Systems
We can’t change complex systems overnight, but we can identify and make key interventions that prepare the ground for future growth.
Regenerating ecosystems requires working with natural cycles and building resilient community relationships. Building relational resilience with other people takes time. We guide you in developing a phased implementation that works for your time and financial considerations, and allows systems to grow more robust over time.
Work Mindfully
Your day-to-day investments of your precious time, energy and money are what bring your larger aims to life—make sure you are working where it counts, and enjoying it.
You need to get seeds planted, or structures built at the right time, and work with people and equipment to get the job done. We get it, we’ve worked hands-on, in the dirt on real working farms and permaculture sites. We can help you plan and optimize your work so it gets done at the right time, and you can sleep at night knowing you have a plan.
Reflect & Evolve
The hallmark of living systems is that they evolve, so we adapt our approaches as we learn from the land.
By working with us, you develop the skills to observe and monitor the health of your systems, and a holistic approach to work regeneratively with the land, so you can adjust and change your practices as the natural and human systems grow and evolve.