Fellowship Schedule & Structure

Groundwork’s fellowship is an environment that promotes curiosity and a lifestyle conducive to connection with community and place. We get our hands dirty and stay physically active while tending the gardens and orchards. And we dig deep, exploring radical thought from the world’s foremost thinkers outside of the mainstream capitalist ecosystem.

Daily Schedule

Monday through Friday, the fellowship has a steady weekly routine that balances time working on the farm with more intellectual inquiry and land-based projects and practices. Please note that this schedule is tentative and may shift with the seasons, with the scheduling needs of community partners, and in response to the needs and goals of the farm and fellows.

6:30 – 7:30 Breakfast & optional mindfulness practice (join a daily community practice or practice yoga, journaling, or nature observation on your own)
7:30 – 12:30 Farm work with lessons on food systems, seed growing, & farming.
12:30 – 2:30 Lunch & rest time
2:30 – 5:00 Farmers’ market, afternoon workshops, & seminars (see weekly schedule below)
5:00 – 7:00 Afternoon farm chores, community dinner prep, & free time
7:00 – 8:00 Community dinner (not mandatory to attend, but fellows are expected to be present at least 3-4 days a week to maintain the community feeling)

Monday afternoons: Food and seed projects

Monday mornings are the big harvest day on the farm, and Monday afternoons are a time to create. We’ll process our harvest into hot sauce, kimchi, sauerkraut, jams, pesto, and preserves. We’ll dry herbs and fruit, process seeds, and get a feel for what to do with produce that’s abundant at every point in the season. Mondays are a day for us to create products to bring to market on Tuesday, to study traditional seasonal food systems, and to prepare components of our meals for the rest of the week.

Tuesday afternoons: Paonia farmers market

Paonia’s farmers market is on Tuesday evenings from 5pm–8pm. Our Tuesday schedule is a little different than other days, with an extra hour for lunch, and fellows and staff leaving at 3:30 to set up the market stand. Typically, we are finished cleaning up from market by 9pm. During the market season (mid-May through mid-October), Tuesdays are very long days, with people working from 7:30am–9pm with the 3-hour lunch break. Typically, fellows will work 2-3 markets per month, and have the other Tuesday afternoons and evenings free.

Wednesday afternoons: Weekly seminars

We’ll read and discuss some of the foremost thinkers on regenerative and place-based culture, anti-capitalist theory, and post-industrial futurism. For more information, see our page on curriculum.

Thursday afternoons: Crafternoon—exploring origins and place-based lifeways

Past fellows have lovingly been called this day “crafternoon”, and Thursdays have been a highlight for fellows. Crafternoon is focused on building a hands-on understanding of the place where we live and people’s relationship with the land. This afternoon focuses primarily on harvesting local materials to experiment with more place-based lifeways. Focuses may include:

• Willow Basketry: harvest and process basket willows from the farm, learn basic basket-weaving techniques, and weave your own harvest basket.
• Natural Tanning: use traditional techniques and all-natural materials to tan a sheepskin or deer hide.
• Wild Clay: harvest clay from local soils, and focus either on earthen construction or pottery. Possibilities include making sun-dried adobe bricks, studying basic adobe construction, making clay-based paint, and hand-building pottery.
• Local Fiber Textiles: In our eco-region, we can source fiber from sheep, yaks, alpaca, flax, yucca, and dogbane. Local weavers and knitters create textiles from locally-sourced and naturally-dyed fiber, and we can join in to learn the basics from soil to textile. Options include processing fiber, spinning, dying, and weaving.

Friday afternoons: Community meeting, tidying the farm for the weekend, and community potluck

Friday afternoons, we meet as a community to check in, wrap up loose ends from the week, and create a plan for the following week. This schedule lets us get out to the fields early for the Monday harvest instead of sitting down for a Monday morning meeting. After the meeting, we clean our communal spaces and finish any projects that need completing. Friday evenings we host a potluck, inviting friends from the community for an evening of food, fun, and music! Past fellows have liked to skip the potluck some weekends, taking off for a weekend in the mountains.

Weekends: Free Time

Fellows have weekends free, with some small chores that need to be coordinated among everybody living on the farm (like moving irrigation systems and feeding chickens). We’ll create a schedule to make sure at least 2 people are on the farm through the weekends for daily chores.

Five Components

Hands-On Experience in Local, Organic Food Systems

Fellows spend 5 mornings a week on the farm: watering, weeding, seeding, transplanting, and harvesting. These morning sessions are 5 hours per day with a small break in the middle. Groundwork’s farm grows organic produce and seeds, so you’ll learn how a local, organic food system works from seed to table. With our seed production, you’ll learn the multi-generational side of agriculture, understanding food systems from seed to seed. Fellows should finish this experience being more than qualified to work as an assistant farm manager on any organic farm or to run a community garden.

Seminars & Discussion

The fellowship is a collaborative learning environment, where we all engage in a curriculum focused on creative critiques of mainstream approaches. Our academic component combines readings, discussions, and seminars. Click here for more about our curriculum.

Citizenship of Place

Slow living, unstructured time, and exploration form the backbone of your connection to the landscape of Western Colorado. The land here is rugged, dry, and diverse. The 14,000-foot peaks of the Elk Range rise to the east, while red-rock canyons of the Colorado Plateau sit just to the west. The dusty piñon-juniper forests, the lush aspen groves, and the towering cottonwoods all create their own magic in this landscape. Fellows will learn the local plants, animals, and landforms. Citizenship of place means engaging with place in multiple dimensions: personal, ecological, spiritual, historical, social, and political. It means yielding to the seasonal cycles of the land, like you are weaving your life into the land, rather than forcing the land to bend to your vision.

Traditional Lifeways

From food preservation to basket weaving, seed saving to local clay pottery, the fellowship is a space for exploring what life looks like outside of a consumer/industrial society.

Alternative Living: Slow Life in Community

As a cohort of young people facing down the world’s huge environmental problems, community is the backbone of what we do. Fellows live, cook, eat, create, and play together. We create a village-like environment, where there are always friends around, but there is space for personal time when you need. Fellows work together to manage everyday tasks like menu planning with farm-harvested ingredients, plan celebrations together, and collaborate on projects.

About The Farm

Groundwork rents farm space from The Lamborn Foundation, a spiritual foundation devoted to creating real-world embodiments of spiritual ideas. The Lamborn Foundation and the family who runs it are known for their extreme generosity and idealism. The Lamborn Foundation is Christian, but the farm as a whole and Groundwork as an organization are not. Several board members of The Lamborn Foundation often say that they feel more resonance with non-religious people of integrity than they do with many declared Christians. The 135-acre farm as a whole is a space that blends intention with practice: a place to grow. The farm hosts 4 separate nonprofits and 6 separate businesses. Only one of these ten organizations has any religious affiliation.

Being a spiritual space, Groundwork operates on a few broad agreements with The Lamborn Foundation:

• No alcohol or other substances on the property.
• We strive together to establish a space where different religious views and practices coexist and learn from each other, so long as they are reverent, kind, and prayerful in nature, seeking understanding and harmony rather than judgment, suspicion, or disunion. The farm is a space of open dialogue, where we seek common ground. For example, Greg Cranson, a farmer from The Lamborn Foundation gives a beautiful class on seeds that includes his view that seeds hold a special place in Christian cosmology. He does not intend to convert or correct others, but simply share his way of expressing love for the world. All such spaces of sharing have been highlights for past fellows, building understanding across difference.
• On this land, we work to limit practices that have historically promoted misunderstanding across difference, like certain rituals. No kinds of daily prayer or meditation fall into this category. If there is a practice you hold which you have apprehension about bringing to this space, please reach out to us. For our 2021 fellowship program, Groundwork hosted a much larger cohort than we do now, which included Muslims, Buddhists, Wiccans, Jews, atheists, and Christians, and all felt welcome. The intention of this agreement is to maintain a sense of respect and understanding. Simplicity, reverence, love, and kindness are the general feelings people find from our landlords on the farm.

Pedagogy & Philosophy

While we don’t like sticking to strict frameworks, we created this six-piece framework to help you understand a little more about how we work. These are less-tangible pieces that we center the fellowship around:

• Attention: Attention to the world around you will be a foundation of your fellowship. We believe that the art of slowing down and giving attention to the world around you is the foundation for a greater understanding of your relationship with the Earth.
• Intention: This fellowship is not a class where we are learning objective truths. At Groundwork, we recognize that your intention and mindset in engaging with ideas fundamentally shifts what you learn. We approach the land as humble guests, with the intention to understand how we might reconstruct and rehydrate our personal and societal relationships with the Earth, to reintegrate ourselves as a part of the living world. We intend to more deeply understand how broader cultures have shaped us as people, and our own personal roles in creating destructive cultures.
• Inquiry: Academic learning as a Groundwork fellow means constantly questioning assumptions and inquiring more deeply. We seek to learn from authors and leaders who speak truth to power. For more about our curriculum for academic inquiry, see our curriculum page.
• Wisdom: Listening to scientists is necessary, but not the only thing that will solve our world’s problems. We need to cultivate wisdom in order to act skillfully. Along with academic learning, we want to take a holistic approach: working together to build wisdom in ourselves. We don’t claim to be keepers of wisdom, but we establish the structure of the fellowship in a way that centers the pursuit of wisdom in our thoughts and actions.
• Expression: The fellowship embraces expression and creativity, especially in in the form of a final project. We see creative expression as a source of positive change in our world, and a fundamental piece of the movements seeking to create a livable future. We provide fellows with opportunities to share and publish their work, and to include their ideas into our projects.
• Action: Organizing gives power to ideas. Portions of the fellowship will focus on the roles and functions of non-profits and NGOs, potentially using Groundwork’s own project, governance, and finances as a case study. Fellows will finish their time with tools to work for environmental change and to work for an environmental non-profit.
• Complexity: This fellowship asks big questions that don’t have simple or easy answers. The ability to hold nuance and dynamic complexity in the face of such questions can often bring about a more profound experience of growth than answering the question. Some examples of the complexities we face as a program, and invite you to be in relationship with, are based around capitalism and right livelihood, hustle culture vs hard work, and contemplation vs action.

Much of the way we work is influenced by our friends at environmental centers around the world: Pun Pun Farm, The Mekong School, and Thai Plum Village in Thailand, Teatro Trono/COMPA in Bolivia, ABARI in Nepal, SECMOL in India, Bolad’s Kitchen in New Mexico and experiential education programs based here in the United States including Where There Be Dragons and NOLS.