Mission
Groundwork is a place-based education program working to deepen our society’s relationships with land, food, and water and to cultivate generative and regenerative ways of living and relating. Our mission is to inspire the cultural shifts needed for a sustainable future.
Vision
Rising to meet the challenges posed by climate change, ecological decline, and environmental injustice requires more than new technologies and policies. At Groundwork, we believe it also requires profound shifts in the ways we relate to one another and to the world around us. Groundwork offers educational programs and publications that seek to shift the foundations of the ways we understand ourselves and our place in the world, in order to work towards more just and sustainable shared futures.
A culture, like our planet, is a living ecosystem, constantly shifting and changing based on the values, attitudes, and practices cultivated within a particular community. Groundwork creates spaces to critically reflect upon, challenge, experiment with, and create anew those building blocks of culture. Our offerings create opportunities for the emergence of new kinds of relationships and ways of being within the human and more-than-human world.
We believe that reimagined relationships and practices—in essence, emergent cultures—are the foundations of systemic change.
Approaches
Understanding Origins
“How many individuals, cultures, and histories are behind every seed sown? … Planting seeds with this depth of knowledge heals the past; healing the past heals the future. … Like all of us who have had our seeds burnt, our stories lost and pushed underground, our places of origins devastated, our organ of indigenous memory turned into a vestigial memory itself, we ourselves must become the origins of a people who would keep the seeds alive.”
-Martín Prechtel, The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic
All of our work seeks to illuminate more clearly the deeper origins of issues our world faces. We believe that in order to imagine and bring into being new relationships and ways of being, we must first understand how it is that our contemporary world came to be. Our programming has at its foundation historical and theoretical inquiry into the ways in which contemporary understandings of the self, other, nature, culture, growth, and development inhibit us from cultivating respectful relationships with the living world. Having understood the origins of extractive and exploitative ways of relating to other beings, both human and more-than-human, we can practice identifying, disentangling ourselves from, and replacing those habits and practices.
Practices of Belonging
“Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink, that build your body and fill your spirit. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in this ground. Here you will give your gifts and meet your responsibilities. To become naturalized is to live as if your children’s future matters, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend on it. Because they do.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
We see belonging as a foundational practice for any sustainable culture—coming home to place means building more accountable relationships with the communities (human and more-than-human) to which we belong. Belonging is at once deeply practical and deeply spiritual. It means eating what we grow and gather, living slowly, and cultivating a sense of peace in ourselves. Belonging means being an active agent in the ecologies, histories, economies, and policies that affect our local and global home.
Embracing and Encouraging Complexity
Embracing complexity allows us to have more substantive and realistic conversations about the issues facing our world today. We challenge the idea any single person or framework of ideas can present us with a universal solution. We encourage people to allow enough space to embrace and explore multiple ideas that seem contradictory.
Experimentation
It’s not possible to return to an imaginary, idealized past when humans lived in harmony with the rest of the living world. At this point, a livable future will be something entirely new—stepping forward while learning from the past. We create space for experimentation, trusting that each iteration will help us learn.
Gratitude: Acknowledging our roots
Groundwork’s roots lie around the world in the broad network of activists and educators who have influenced our work. Groundwork’s ancestors are the teachers, colleagues, and thinkers from whom all of us learned on our way to creating this organization. We want to acknowledge and share gratitude for some of the most influential ancestors to Groundwork:
- Sharon Sitling, Jon Jondai, and Valentina Campos: To these three mentors, thank you for effortlessly embodying and role-modeling alternatives to the modern, capitalist ways of thinking and being. Your humility, determination, and devotion helps us to see that change can grow from the smallest of seeds.
- Thich Nhat Hanh: Groundwork’s deepest roots lies in Buddhist teachings on creating societies of deep understanding, true love, and interbeing. For Thay’s example of how to love, find joy, and oppose destruction without becoming it, we are eternally indebted.
- Martín Prechtel: Thirteen thank yous to Martín for his wisdom and teachings on emergence and belonging. We thank him for his vision of the unlikely peace which we might still invite to sprout into our society to occupy the peace-shaped throne we are struggling to envision and assemble, piece by beautiful piece.
- Iván Nogales: For Iván’s innovative ways of being and decolonizing both the mind and body, we are eternally grateful. Siempre vivirá Iván en nuestros corozones. Jallallah!
We extend thousands of thank yous to the people who have taught us along the way and contributed the foundations of knowledge, values, ideas, and wisdom that have led to the emergence of Groundwork. A few others we want to thank: Shruti Kher, Kent Weber, Siwar Kenti, and Oscar Olivera. Groundwork would not be possible without your inspiration.