Community and personal resilience begins with you. Be prepared for when the lights go out and the grid goes down. Practical, educational and attitude skills to survive and actually help your family or neighbor in the event of major disasters, when the usual industrial infrastructure is off-line, for shorter or longer times. Basic tactics and tools for owning your own light and electric, no matter what the circumstance. Applicable for individuals and small community groups, no matter the disaster situation or social breakdown.

Presented By: Chaz Peling

It is important to know who’s in the room and what amazing projects they are working on. This workshop will give us a chance to do just that, perhaps leading to connections that will stregthen your project and make friends to last a lifetime.

Presented By: Hannah Apricot Eckberg

Regenerative and collaborative Leadership as a means to support full purpose realization for all participants of a system.
What the world needs is people who have come alive ~Howard Thurman.
Unpacking concepts from Systems Theory (Bowens emotional nuclear systems, Social Dominance Orientation, Systemic oppression), trauma recovery and spiritual technologies, consent and council, methods of facilitation and modes of creative thinking (divergent, convergent, and emergent), as well as learning styles and needs assessments.

Presented By: Sahar Muhsin

You’ve heard that these times are dire and urgent, right? So isn’t it time we had some fun? Back due to popular demand, this hands- hearts- and bodies-on workshop returns for the second year to explore play and sacred clowning as tools for social permaculture. Endless urgency and intellectual seriousness are symptoms of a mechanistic, burn-out activist culture. Social sustainability requires different skills than those practiced within the Western capitalist paradigm. Forget those creepy clowns from childhood nightmares – come learn how to use the craft of clowning and play to bring life and joy into our movements. Play facilitates honest cultural critique and creates space for creative alternatives. And, it’s very fun. Notes: No experience necessary. Come especially if you have no experience.

Presented By: Annie-Rose London

This panel assumes that water rights equate to the most basic human right to life. We will be looking at concepts that have lead to a global water crisis, where 1 in 4 people lack access to safe drinking water to be able to live.

“Right to Life” is defined not just for humans but for all life, including plants, animals, ecosystems, and microorganisms. Viewing policy reform not as a political entity but as an essential component to creating change.

A social, ecological and human rights perspective exploring themes such as environmental racism, social and environmental justice, landscape resiliency, and environmental, ecological, social, political, and structural repair of the water cycle in the modern day.

This panel intends to explore the frontlines of environmental consciousness: cultivating mindfulness in our relationship to water and discuss action steps that could lead toward a revolution where all beings have an absolute right to clean water.

Presented By: Water Now

2018 Convergence Panelists: Cheryl Angel, Cleve Steward, & Karuna Warren

Certified permaculture caretakers is a program that offers training in permaculture and access to land with a focus on single mothers and women of color. It is designed to be nested into a larger comprehensive back to the land movement and create a network of continued skill building and opportunities with in the emergent culture.

Presented By: Alexa Bernard

Brandi Mack, AKA, Mama B, will share her 5 steps to Resilient design that support people and the planet, with and infuses on highlighting melanated women and children.

FRIDAY Keynote Presented By: Brandi Mack

Intro to permaculture course taught by Bay Area urban gardener and urban ecologist, seedsman and seed librarian, community gardener and community organizer Christopher Shein. He brings 17 years of teaching a PDC at Merritt College, many more years of teaching in community gardens and public schools, and knows he doesn’t know everything about permaculture or teaching or …
Christopher brings the most diverse students together (race, class, gender, etc…) to build the most plant and species diverse public gardens in the commons in urban SF East Bay. www.wildheartgardens.com, www.merrittlandhort.com

Presented By: Christopher Shein

“How I became a contractor to save the world, the lessons I learned from all my mistakes, and how we are still growing and not giving up.”

Marco Barrantes of La Loma Development Company will share stories from the trenches, instructions on ways to start a design-build company as a successful Permaculture contractor, and photos of La Loma’s diverse projects in Los Angeles. Topics will also include his experiences with urbanite, natural pools, public works, and school campus greening.

Learn how to become a contractor (or work with a contractor) to implement Permaculture design, and influence the trillion dollar landscape construction industry.

Presented By: Marco Barrantes

Join us for a panel discussion on the future of the intentional communities movement. Where have we been, what is happening now, and how do we imagine the role of intentional communities into the future? Learn from community founders and network leaders. Bring your questions to this exploratory conversation.

Presented By: Cynthia Tina

Join us for an engaging conversation as we explore the skills and practices to empower and sustain your leadership in an increasingly complex, interconnected world. We believe leadership starts within. By practicing self care and living aligned with one’s purpose and values, we can have a transformative effect that ripples out from our lives and organizations into our broader community, moving us towards the systems change our world needs.

We will work with the skills of reflection, self-renewal, and the power of choice as the first ripple in strengthening one’s personal leadership. Participants will discuss and reflect on how to apply one’s values and strengths to affecting more potent and inspired change in the world. We’ll discuss what emergent leadership looks like, how we can foster environments for co-creation, and what key competencies are needed to model truly collective leadership for a just and sustainable future. At Daily Acts, we believe that every choice we make matters and that personal transformation is essential to affecting transformation in our lives, communities and world. We also recognize the critical importance of healthy, sustained leadership given the immense challenges of our time. We are excited to offer this workshop as a way to share the insights from our Leadership Institute for Just and Resilient Communities 10-month training program.

Presented By: Trathen Heckman & Kerry Fugett

Anchoring The New Dream of Earth
Since 2005

ANCHORING THE NEW DREAM OF EARTH is a large group visionary stewardship process that activates us into our bliss and sense of connection with one another and all of life so that we can create new “blueprints” for earth Life.

From this place of harmony and mutual cooperation. People from all walks of life and religious traditions are invited to participate, with the understanding that we are celebrating our Unity in our Diversity, and connecting with the Universal Power and Presence of Love in non-religious yet intrinsically “spiritual” ways that are non-exclusive.

THE PROCESS FOLLOWS PARTICIPANTS’ PASSIONS ABOUT PARTICULAR EARTH-LIFE TOPICS, FOR EXAMPLE:

• How could our children’s education be the most loving, empowering, confidence building, joy inducing experience possible for them?
• Could politicians be World Servers?
• What do you want the environment to be like?
• How do people get well?
• Can all corporations become Earth Stewards, creating with sustainable technologies?
• Can all our technologies to be sustainable?
• What does it look like? What does it feel like?
• How could government be in its highest aspect based on harmony and love?
• How could international relations be at their highest level of harmony and mutual sustainability?
• And more.

The group discovers their passion for topics of earth life that are most alive for them at that present moment of the workshop.

WHAT’S YOUR VISION FOR THE BEST OF THE BEST POSSIBLE FOR LIFE ON EARTH?

Participates learn to retrieve Source Sanctioned Visions for Life on Earth and/or their Organization or Community in this Visionary Stewardship Playshop. Accolades for the experience have come in since its inception in 2005. Pods co-create a visionary theater piece to express this new vision for earth life, with the most fun ever! Dynamic, synergistic Reality Creation at its best.

Presented By: Chireya Dharma

City Repair has over 20 years of experience with grassroots, community-initiated placemaking in Portland, Oregon. Our model for building place-based empowerment is inspiring communities across the nation and even globally from countries like Canada, the UK and even Australia. Here in Oregon, however, our biggest learning edge is integrating a social justice lens to ensure that the people and the places that we are working with provide benefit to some of the most vulnerable groups in our community. For us it has meant working with People of Color in one of the most ethnically Caucasian cities and also with folks experiencing houselessness. We will share stories of placemaking with these communities and how they contribute to what we are calling Place Justice.

Presented By: Ridhi DCruz

This is an open a discussion and council on what it means to be an “Ally” in today’s day and age. This is more than race or color, sex, gender, orientation, faith, nationalism, ability, classs, beliefs… this is about all of that AND a deep desire to dissolve that which separates us by being heard, seen, and empathized with. When we come together in the shared space of council we see the experiences that unite us, we connect through differences, we empathize with challenges, and we support and resource one another in ways we couldn’t do on our own, because we’re not alone in our efforts to create change. This intensive will offer tangible dos and don’ts, tools and wisdom to walk away and step into the inner and outer actions needed to be a ally, which is really just doing the right thing.

Presented By: Luna Love

Envisioning a Decolonized Feminist Movement.
Where we decolonize knowledge and build an anti-capitalist society.
For all of us to have Equity in order to be FREE.

Presented By: Pilar Mejia

Come join Town and City Permaculture as they facilitate another interactive and invigorating workshop. That will implore participants to really delve into the question “What is Permaculture?” and how can the community use it a diverse and dynamic tool for building ecological economies of environmental equality.

Presented By: Sasha Shankar & Troy Horton

This experiential and interactive workshop will have you learn about, experience, and embody the “New Masculine.” We will cover powerful perspectives and frames that will give you access to new ways of seeing and experiencing yourself, being in relationship to your growth, and expanding your potential for leadership and influence in your family, communities, the world. You will leave the workshop with tools, processes, and structures that will directly impact your confidence, embodiment, influence, purpose, direction, and level of communication, that will radically alter the way you live and express yourself.

Presented By: John Taylor

Our human form is experiencing very similar imbalances as the earth itself. If we can learn to listen to the elemental symptoms of our bodies, perhaps we can better support the environment around us.
Why reinvent the elemental health wheel, when so many amazing cultures have already figured it out? Let’s back up and look at how we are all brilliantly designed maps, unique in nature, and be willing to listen to ourselves and act accordingly for the sake of balance and shared space.

Presented By: DeAnna Batdorff

Introduction and exploration of sustainability practices that both repair broken parts of the water cycle, and increase water resilience in communities and villages to be prepared, conscious, and motivated to change the current pattern amidst an unknown future. Systems/Themes to be explored include: Setting up rainwater catchment systems on a micro level and also efforts made in whole villages, the importance of grey water systems, and water filtration systems to eliminate plastic water bottles practices to reduce water consumption. Discussion on the importance of soil health as it pertains to groundwater.

Presented By: Karuna Warren