“The People’s Food and Farm Project” is a multi-stakeholder effort growing across the San Francisco Bay Area to address gaps and injustices in the food system. What will it take to build food sovereignty across the region? What policies can be enacted to ensure all residents are nourished? What is working well that should be invested in? This community visioning process may result in a ballot initiative for a new public funding mechanism that would support a bioregional governance entity for regional food and farming. This session is for you if you are a resident of the Bay Area, if your work is related to food, or if you simply have a desire to contribute to a vision for a just and sustainable food system! Join Julian Mocine-McQueen and Kristin Rothballer, Senior Fellows with Center for Whole Communities and community engagement leads for this effort, along with other members of the broad coalition behind this effort.

Bioneers brings together a very diverse, discerning, engaged and reflective community, and the curated conversations around crucial topics we have been hosting recently (“Converstaion Cafes”) have proven highly popular and stimulating. Each session begins with a very brief presentation by one of the conference presenters as a “conversation starter” to frame the topic, followed by structured group discussion.

In this session poet/artist Alixa Garcia will use what she calls “Creativity Infused Somatic Practices” to help us start our process as we delve into the imaginal spaces within and all around us. We will seek to make a home for our intuition and invite our inner visionary to come out and play as we move through a somatic experience designed to help anchor our soul commitments throughout our three bodies: emotional, sensing, and energetic. We will then debrief as we engage in stimulating collective inquiry. Facilitated by Amy Lenzo and David Shaw.

Come join a guided conversation to explore how surviving and thriving in these difficult times requires expanding our ability to be present with grief and find support in community. Since Bioneers last met in person we have all experienced grief, be it from losses in our efforts to save species and ecosystems; in our work for social and environmental justice; or in our personal lives from COVID and systemic violence – all within a mainstream culture that numbs pain, denies death and hides mourning. Through contemplative exercises, intimate sharing and guided group conversation, we will reveal the gifts of connection and healing available to all of us when we take time to honor our losses and tend to our grief in community. Facilitated by death doulas/end-of-life guides Anneke Campbell and Birgitta Kastenbaum.

As the world continues to grapple with the reality of the changing climate and the ever-more evident destructive consequences of capitalism and colonization, it is normal to feel an increase in anxiety about what our future may hold. This is even more true for Native people. Indigenous peoples are responsible for protecting and maintaining some 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity as part of their deep cultural and spiritual connections to many of the lands, waters, species and biomes of the planet. Colonization didn’t just bring the displacement of First Peoples; it led to intense degradation of the critical ecosystems they were intrinsically connected to. As the climate emergency exacerbates this threat, Indigenous communities find themselves experiencing a more visceral and different form of eco-anxiety. Join Eriel Tchekwie Deranger as she invites us to explore holding this reality, yet also to discover how Indigenous ways of knowing can be a salve to these powerful tensions, as they can point the way to climate solutions and help us move from anxiety to inspiration. What might it look and feel like to live in a world where Indigenous peoples were thriving? How can we work through this collective emergency and crisis together with healing in mind?

Bioneers brings together, online, a very diverse, discerning, engaged and reflective community, and the curated conversations around crucial topics we have been hosting recently (“Community Conversations”) have proven highly popular and stimulating. Each session begins with a very brief presentation by a noted thought leader as a “conversation starter” to frame the topic, followed by structured group discussion. At the end, a talented spoken word artist “harvests” the essence of what was said in a poetic synthesis and performs it for the group.

In this session, conversation starter Rupa Marya, MD, will draw from her work with Farming is Medicine (a program of the Deep Medicine Circle) to explain how food grown on stolen Indigenous land by exploiting labor cannot generate health and how we must begin to heal the wounds of colonialism to achieve genuine health and wellbeing. We will then engage in conversation about how we might work toward this transformation of a system of colonial capitalism into one that once again situates people in healing relationships to one another and to land. Facilitated by Amy Lenzo and David Shaw; with “harvester” Jason Bayani, spoken word poet, youth educator and community arts organizer.

In this 90-minute experiential session, Kerry Brady, founder of Ecology of Awakening, and Joshua Sylvae, PhD, Somatic Experiencing® teacher and founder of (r)evolve, will introduce you to practices that draw on the self-organizing nature of the mammalian nervous system to support us in being clear and effective agents of change. By collaborating with the regenerative wisdom of our biology, we awaken our innate resilience and build our capacity to stay present and available—to ourselves, each other, and the whole. The presenters will offer an initial theoretical framework, and then invite an embodied exploration of skills and capacities to encourage our most creative selves to arise on behalf of our world and all its inhabitants.

Bioneers brings together a very diverse, discerning, engaged and reflective community, and the curated conversations around crucial topics we have been hosting recently (“Conversation Cafes”) have proven highly popular and stimulating. Each session begins with a very brief presentation by one of the conference presenters as a “conversation starter” to frame the topic, followed by structured group discussion.

In order to meet the temperature limit of the Paris Agreement there need to be broad changes to multiple sectors of society. In this session, conversation starter Ashoka Finley will start us off by sharing an overview of where and how these interventions might need to be implemented and what that would require, and in our subsequent conversation we’ll explore how we might collectively build a roadmap of necessary action. Bioneers offers us a unique setting in which to convene a diverse set of changemakers to create more possibilities and build towards collective action. Facilitated by Amy Lenzo and FireHawk Hulin.

While many of us are awake and seeking to respond to our dire ecological and social crises, a large portion of our population is still focused on self-centered needs, enmeshed in a false reality, numb to the existential challenges confronting our world. This societal narcissism which we’re swimming in is perilous to us, to our communities, and to the Earth. In this experiential session, we will examine the patterns of this collective narcissism, their relation to our stories, and how we may be able to transform them for the wellness of all sentient beings. Participants should be prepared to engage in meditation, movement, and interactive dialogue, as well as to work with the surfacing of heavy emotions.

Storytelling, one of our species’ most ancient and powerful tools, has been used since the dawn of time to impart wisdom, share knowledge, pass on cultural touchstones and traditions and help communities bond, but we are living in a period of breakdown when our storytelling is fractured and desperately in need of revitalization. In this workshop we will explore what a meaningful story is and how to engage with storytelling as a sacred art that has a capacity to repair and restore. We will explore six considerations for how to heal the climate narrative, and by the end of our time together, we will be equipped with practical skills that will permit us to leave behind destructive and broken narratives and spot and nurture the stories that bring us healing and new, life-affirming, life-enhancing visions.

Bioneers brings together a very diverse, discerning, engaged and reflective community, and the curated conversations around crucial topics we have been hosting recently (“Conversation Cafes”) have proven highly popular and stimulating. Each session begins with a very brief presentation by one of the conference presenters as a “conversation starter” to frame the topic, followed by structured group discussion.

There is a very real chance that we might not make our climate targets in the near term, resulting in unprecedented changes to life on this planet. In this session, conversation starter Ashoka Finley will explore how we might build additional resilience in the infrastructure and systems we rely on for our survival to face this reality. In our subsequent conversation we’ll seek to collectively build a roadmap of necessary action in the face of missed climate milestones. Bioneers offers us a unique setting in which to convene a diverse set of changemakers to create more possibilities and build towards collective action. Facilitated by Amy Lenzo and FireHawk Hulin.

Bioneers brings together, online, a very diverse, discerning, engaged and reflective community, and the curated conversations around crucial topics we have been hosting recently (“Community Conversations”) have proven highly popular and stimulating. Each session begins with a very brief presentation by a noted thought leader as a “conversation starter” to frame the topic, followed by structured group discussion. At the end, a talented spoken word artist “harvests” the essence of what was said in a poetic synthesis and performs it for the group.

As a conversation starter, Indigenous musician, scholar and community organizer Lyla June will share some reflections on pre-Columbian food systems in the Americas—their characteristics, corresponding land management practices and the value systems that upheld them—and how understanding the real story of our pre-colonial food systems can change how we envision the future of food. With: Amy Lenzo; David Shaw; and “harvester” Jahan Khalighi, spoken word poet, youth educator and community arts organizer.