Groundwork Folk School

Humanity’s future is less industrial.

At Groundwork, we believe that a livable and just future must be a less industrial future. For that future to happen, people of all backgrounds need to begin exploring what it looks like to live outside of systems that rely on industrialism, capitalism, and consumerism. The Groundwork Folk School is a step towards that future, teaching skills that pre-date industrial culture and creating spaces of joy, wonder, creativity, and hope for a beautiful future. Groundwork Folk School’s mission is to facilitate the preservation and teaching of traditional and non-industrial skills, crafts, and lifeways.

Fall Schedule 2024

Notes on Cultural Appropriation

For the past decades, pre-industrial skills have been taught amongst North America’s non-indigenous communities at skill share gatherings called “ancestral skills gatherings,” “primitive skills gatherings” or “Earth skills gatherings.” Each of the gatherings is unique, and each is run with varying degrees of consideration for cultural appropriation. At best, these gatherings are wonderful communal spaces where people from all walks of life come together joyfully to explore the skills that humanity relied on until the past one or two centuries. They can be incredible, but sometimes they are short-sighted; one of Groundwork’s past instructors described some gatherings at their worst as “Native American cosplay.”

We recognize that learning ancestral and traditional skills can appropriate indigenous cultures. People with privilege can freely learn skills that were violently suppressed during genocide and assimilation processes. We believe that it’s possible to explore, study, and practice ancestral and traditional skills in respectful ways. How do we do this? At the founding of the school, Jeff Wagner, our executive director, wrote a piece that attempts to define a non-appropriative ethos for the Groundwork Folk School.

Read Groundwork’s Stance On Cultural Appropriation

Mandy Bishop

Mandy is a ritual artist, nature-based mentor and guide, and also the founder of Old Ways Wisdom—a place where ritual art, ancestral skills, and Sacred Storywork weave together to bring us back into relationship with ourselves, the land, and the wisdom of our ancestors. Born and raised in the Front Range of Colorado, Mandy has a deep relationship with and life-long apprenticeship to the plants and the wisdom of the land. For most of her life, Mandy has been intimately involved with the wild ones in many forms, including foraging wild foods and wildcrafting medicines, weaving baskets, carving gourds, tanning hides and apprenticing to fire. Mandy is in service to the remembrance of our wild selves; to a partnership between nature, creativity and soul; and to the wisdom carried in our bones waking us up to what is most important in our lives. Outside of guiding and teaching, Mandy fills her days with homesteading, crafting, ceremony and adventuring in the wilderness.

Jenna Bradford

Jenna grew up in the Sacramento River delta in California, swimming, climbing trees, searching for animals along the water’s edge, studying their ways, and always looking for excuses to be outside. She received her B.A. in Environmental Studies and Bioethics from Loyola University in Chicago. Before becoming a teacher, Jenna worked on farms in Colorado, designed and sewed clothing, and studyied plants through an herbalism apprenticeship with Wildroot Botanicals and an ethnobotany immersion with Raven’s Roots Naturalist School. Jenna taught 5th and 6th grade at Paonia’s North Fork School of Integrated Studies. She is excited to continue with some of her current students on this adventure. Jenna loves teaching because she loves learning and loves to share that enthusiasm with others.

Forrest Gillies

Forrest was fortunate to be raised at one of the oldest intentional communities, nestled into the red sandstone foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Being surrounded by wilderness, sustainable agriculture and abundant community shaped him into a human inspired to share these gifts with a world starving for land based connection. Guided by the question of how to create and sustain real, viable culture, Forrest found answers in the seeds. After studying Ecological Agriculture: Seeds, Bees & Soil at the Evergreen State College, he discovered the ways in which seed, subsistence agricultural systems and traditional life-ways create the foundational framework for real culture to emerge. Forrest has managed multiple regenerative farm and education projects including Siskiyou Seeds and White Oak Farm, offers nature connection programs for youth and is apprenticing in natural building. Rooted in reverence for the human & more-than-human world, Forrest walks in service to a more beautiful world we all know is possible. Forrest is a certified Wilderness First Responder.

Wild The Woodworker

Wild is a woodworking artisan creating custom-made tree furniture with reclaimed materials and local hardwoods. Wild left a career as a wildlife biologist to pursue woodworking, and has developed his craft to rely as little as possible on the timber industry, opting instead to use discarded orchard wood, fallen trees, and other reclaimed materials to create his beautiful furniture. You can see a gallery of his work on his website, Menagerie Woodworking.

Pieter Van Winkle

Pieter is a father, husband, hobby rancher and youth mentor. He has worked in the business world as an executive coach, sales manager and real estate investor. Pieter believes passionately in the power of youth mentorship — in particular nature-connected, community-supported rites of passage. He is committed to helping foster experiences for our valley youth that helps prepare them for the rapidly changing world they will soon inhabit, lead and transform. Pieter is also a potter who uses clay he gathers from the Earth and processes himself. He lives in Paonia with his wife Emma and their son Wendell.

Jeff Wagner

After a university education didn’t provide sufficient answers, Jeff began seeking answers to the big questions that weren’t answered by academia: how we might reimagine U.S. society in the age of climate change, and what it means to be a responsible human in an unraveling world. For over a decade, Jeff sought answers outside the mainstream: living at wolf sanctuary in the Colorado mountains, leading NOLS expeditions across North America, and facilitating cross-cultural semesters in the Andes, the Amazon, the Himalaya, and the great Mekong River Basin. Jeff’s biggest focus has been teaching to the cultural roots of environmental issues, and helping students both experience and examine different ways of life that can be applied as cultural activism at home in North America. As a person dedicated to questioning the mindsets stemming from settler-colonialism, Jeff finds inspiration in the communities working to maintain and strengthen relationships with the natural world and with the sources of food, water, clothing, shelter, and meaning. Jeff likes walking slowly, weaving fabric and baskets, and growing beautiful varieties of heirloom seeds. Jeff founded Groundwork to help people pursue the goal of becoming ancestors that their descendants will be proud to tell stories about. Jeff is a certified Wilderness First Responder.