A web of people
While ten is an awkward mess of the more-than-human, the Otherwise, and animate agencies beyond our current frames and concepts, many of the ten projects and landscapes of inquiry are seeded and stewarded by… human beings! We are tricksters of the edges!
We are passionate about projects and initiatives that make visible what is occluded, invite new stories about our place in a world of excess and overflow, and re-describe agency in terms of entanglements. For us, what is urgent is not simply about finding solutions to our crises, but finding new questions to ask about our frameworks for making sense of those crises. We come from around the world, from diverse worldviews and cosmovisions and each of us adds our own particular flavors and ingredients to the ten soup.
Organism Organs
The ten organism is composed of three operational, administrative and governance organs: a Core Team, an Advisory Board and a Visionary Council. While there are no rigid, fixed lines clearly defining each of these entities and we leave room for healthy ambiguity, each of these organs does have a set of specific functions. Down bellow, you can find the Legacy Entanglements.
Báyò Akómoláfé
Visionary Founder, Germinator, Chief Curator and Executive Director, Rocking Chair Beetle, Advisory Board, Convener of Visionary Council
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Báyò Akómoláfé, PhD, rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak.
Báyò Akómoláfé is the Founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide initiative that seeks to convene communities in new ways in response to the critical, civilizational challenges we face as a species. He is host of the postactivist course/festival/event, We Will Dance with Mountains. He currently lectures at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California. He sits on the Board of many organizations including Science and Non-Duality (US) and Ancient Futures (Australia). In July 2022, Dr. Akómoláfé was appointed the inaugural Global Senior Fellow of University of California’s (Berkeley) Othering and Belonging Institute. He is also the inaugural Special Fellow of the Schumacher Centre for New Economics and the Inaugural Special Fellow for the Aspen Institute. He has been Fellow for The New Institute in Hamburg, Germany, and Visiting Critic-in-Residence for the Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles (2023).
The Core Team
The Core Team is like a collection of microbes, coordinating the different parts of the ecosystem and managing day-to-day administration and decision-making that supports the needs of the whole. They help manifest the visions and inspirations from the other organs and the ten communities into tangible projects and opportunities for wider engagement as well as tending to ten’s bedrock of values and shared principles. They oversee the gathering of resources in collaboration with the Advisory Board and Visionary Council. They move fluidly between the multiple layers of the system noticing needs and connecting needs to nutrients.
Aerin Dunford
Chief Basketweaver, Curator, Wilds Beyond Climate Justice Dream Team, Underground Custodian, Dung Beetle, Lead Weaver
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Aerin Dunford is a network-weaver and connector of people, ideas and organizations. She’s a writer, upcycling artist, urban gardener and yoga instructor. Aerin is the great-granddaughter of Mormon pioneers and the daughter of baby-boomer parents who discovered that Mormonism wasn’t really their thing, leaving her a state of semi-exile given the religio-social-cultural backdrop of her childhood. Over the years, Aerin has been claiming her weirdness (a rare mix of prudishness with explosive experimental impulses) more and more. She believes that the work of unlearning and unpacking Western value-systems and indoctrination, and decolonizing the mind are vitally important in these strange end-times. Aerin is an independent consultant at Coquixa Consultores using El Arte del Liderazgo Participativo and other participative approaches as a basis for her work with organizations and groups of all kinds. Since the death and stillbirth of her son in 2018, Aerin has been called to work with grief in new ways; she has been reflecting, writing and convening others to metabolize loss together. She has also been the Community Weaver and Course Support Shepherdess for the carnival-course, We Will Dance with Mountains since 2017.
Links:
- Blog: https://rafasname.net/
- Coquixa: https://coquixa.com/
- Arte del Liderazgo Participativo: https://adlpmexico.com/
- We Will Dance with Mountains: https://www.dancingwithmountains.com/
Pooja Kishinani
Elemental Schemer
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Pooja Kishinani is a wanderer, dreamer, and writer based in India. She holds a degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics and is the co-author of ‘Student Guide to the Climate Crisis’. She has worked with the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, the RSPB, Manchester Centre for Youth Studies, and Policy@Manchester on research projects and campaigns exploring the intersection of climate, economic, and social justice.
Since July 2023, Pooja has slowly drifted away from academic and policy circles, following her curiosities about the power of the collective imagination as a tool of resistance, co-liberation, and dreaming new worlds into being. She lives and breathes stories, and can almost always be found at her local library immersed in the wor(l)ds of Ursula K Le Guin or scribbling away in her notebook.
Links:
- Substack: https://poojakishinani.substack.com/
- Academic research and other writings: https://linktr.ee/poojakishinani
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/poojakishinani/
The Advisory Board
The Advisory Board is made up of organizers, consultants, artists, postactivists, administrators and network weavers. The Board is the primary governing body of ten and serves as its practical guardian. The Advisory Board is responsible for monitoring and supporting ten’s financial health and sustainability; working with the Core Team to set ten’s goals and strategic direction based on the maps, dreams, and ideas laid out by the Visionary Council; and offering council and recommendations when sought after by Core Team members.
Nuno da Silva
Germinator, Curator, Rocking Chair Beetle, Advisory Board
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Nuno da Silva is co-founder of LUCIDA, resourcing people and organisations to think from a living systems perspective and work with regenerative development processes. He is also an educator in regenerative development at the Regenesis Institute for Regenerative Practice, a trainer for the Council of Europe, and part of the pool of trainers for the Transition Network. He is a co-founder of The Emergence Network.
Nuno has a pre-Bologna degree in Economics. He dedicated the first decade of his career to being an educator, trainer of trainers and youth workers in experiential, collaborative and participatory learning methodologies in Portugal, Europe and around the world, on topics such as Participation and Citizenship, Global Education, Peace Education, Intercultural Learning, Human Rights, Diversity and Inclusion, Organizational Development and Project Management.
He has worked with various national, international and intergovernmental entities from the public, private and civil society sectors, such as: National Youth Council, Secretary of State for Youth, North-South Center, European Commission, Council of Europe, Asia Europe Foundation, World Bank, United Nations Development Program.
Links:
- LUCIDA: www.lucidathinking.com/en
- Regenesis Institute: https://www.regenerat.es/
Gaby Franco
Curator, Earthworm, Lōma of the Advisory Board
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Gaby considers herself a midwife of new possibilities. She is from Mexico and was originally trained as an economist, and later transformed into a holistic scientist at Schumacher College. Gaby has also delved deeply into Ayurveda, Yoga Therapy, Permaculture, and Regenerative Design. She is passionate about ‘seeing with new eyes’ and understanding how we can activate our potential individually and collectively. Gaby also designs processes that allow people to develop this potential, generating greater well-being for all. She has collaborated with organizations around the world, from Bhutan to Mexico, facilitating processes that reconnect us to our humanness and our will, enabling us to engage with the emergent world from our unique essence, while activating our individual and collective agency. Gaby began her professional career in the corporate world as a Brand Manager at Procter & Gamble. Later, she led Corporate Sustainability initiatives at HSBC until transitioning into independent consulting for various organizations, such as the Gross National Happiness Centre in Bhutan, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Save the Children, The Hunger Project, Giftival, and several indigenous communities in Mexico. Gaby joined ten in 2016, deeply inspired by its vision as a co-curator of Sanktuaree.
Karen Leu
Chief Custodian of Admin & Tech, Wilds Beyond Climate Justice Dream Team, Underground Custodian, Rocking Chair Beetle, Advisory Board
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Karen aspires to serve life through her life and death. Karen loves toddlers and hates writing her own bios.
Alex Rodríguez
Wilds Beyond Climate Justice Dream Team, Dung Beetle, Advisory Board
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Alex W. Rodríguez (he/him) is a left-handed writer, organizer, educator, and trombonist working at the confluences of music, spirituality, and social transformation. Most recently, this led him to co-found Mirlo, an online platform for supporting and sustaining creative musicians. Previously, he co-founded Catalyst Cooperative Healing, a mental health worker cooperative. He has trained in Deep Listening through the Center for Deep Listening and is deepening his practice in consent-based governance through Sociocracy for All. He holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from UCLA, where his research focused on jazz clubs and the communities that sustain them in California, Chile, and Siberia. His writing has appeared in Geez Magazine, Lion’s Roar, NPR Music, LA Weekly, and the Newark Star-Ledger. He has been traveling in ten circles since the spring of 2020, when he joined the organizing team for the Wilds Beyond Climate Justice. The bizarre and inspired combination of care, silliness, earnest experimentalism, and revolutionary struggle that he has found here has compelled him to stick around for the foreseeable future.
Links:
- Mirlo: https://mirlo.space
- Personal website / newsletter: https://alexwrodriguez.com
- Mastodon: https://social.coop/@arod
Sofia Batalha
Dung Beetle, Advisory Board, giggling council
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Sofia is a graphic designer by training, a teacher by chance, a writer by visceral need, and an independent (re)searcher by natural curiosity. Mammal, author, unschooling woman-mother, and question weaver one day at a time. Awkward prose-poet with no grammatical knowledge. Pilgrim through inner and outer landscapes of wild Iberian Mythology, re-membering ancient earth practices, in radical presence, active listening, ecopsychology, eco-mythology, art, ecstasy, and writing.
Author of nine books, editor of the free online magazine, Wind and Water – questioning extractivist and phallo-anthropo-centric narratives through ecosystemic perspectives {we speak, write and feel outside the violent illusions of control and perpetual economic growth.}; Re-member of the Bones Podcast; and Beyond the Sea Conversations, and organizer of the first Eco-Mythology Gathering in Portugal – all in Portuguese.
Links:
- Website: https://www.sofiabatalha.com/ or https://www.serpentedalua.com/
- Substack: https://sofiabatalha.substack.com/
The Visionary Council
The Visionary Council is a convening of visionaries, thought leaders, artists, thinkers, and actors who are provoked by the call of postactivism and want to help it take root and become resilient. The purpose of the Visionary Council is most similar to the village shaman or spiritual elder: the Council holds the prophecy, vision, and ethos of ten and provides wisdom and counsel on the overall direction and philosophy of the network. It is responsible for listening to the otherwise, dreaming, and setting the frames that guide and support ten in navigating its work to do in the world.
The Visionary Council listens for the prophecy, vision, and ethos of ten and the Advisory Board supports the Core Team to translate that into grounded decision-making.
Alnoor Ladha
Earthworm, Rocking Chair Beetle and Visionary Council
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Alnoor’s work focuses on the intersection of political organizing, systems thinking, structural change, inner/outer mirroring and narrative work. He was the co-founder and Executive Director of The Rules (TR), a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers and others focused on changing the rules that create inequality, poverty and climate change. TR started in 2012 as a time-bound project and an experiment in temporary organizational design, exploring new ways of how to work, play, and make trouble together.
Alnoor comes from a Sufi lineage and writes about the crossroads of politics and spirituality in troubled times. His work has been published in Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Truthout, Fast Company, Kosmos Journal, New Internationalist, and the Huffington Post among others. He is a board member of Culture Hack Labs, a cooperatively run advisory for social movements. He is currently the co-director of the Transition Resource Circle and co-author of Post Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse.
Links:
- The Rules: http://www.therules.org/
- Culture Hack: http://www.culturehack.io/
- Transition Resource Circle: https://www.transitionresourcecircle.org/
- Post Capitalist Philanthropy: https://www.postcapitalistphilanthropy.org/
Links to sample work:
- The Poverty of Progress in New Internationalist (with Martin Kirk): https://newint.org/features/2020/02/24/poverty-progress
- From Green Growth to Post Growth in Truthout: https://truthout.org/articles/from-green-growth-to-post-growth/
- What is solidarity? in Kosmos Journal: https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/what-is-solidarity/
- Deschooling Dialogues: On Initiation, Trauma and Ritual (with Francis Weller) in Kosmos Journal: https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/deschooling-dialogues-on-initiation-trauma-and-ritual-with-francis-weller/
- Indigenous people’s guard the lungs of the planet in Al Jazeera (with Felipe Viveros):
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2020/6/15/indigenous-peoples-guard-the-lungs-of-the-planet-for-all-of-us - Psychedelic Communities, Social Justice, and Kinship in the Capitalocene in Kahpi.net (with Martin Kirk): https://kahpi.net/psychedelic-communities-social-justice/
Sergio Beltrán Arruti
Curator, Earthworm, Rocking Chair Beetle, Visionary Council
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Sergio Beltrán Arruti – better known as Yeyo – was born and raised in México City. He moved to Oaxaca in 1997 to support and learn from indigenous communities. Yeyo is a co-founder of Universidad de la Tierra (Unitierra) in Oaxaca and Herramientas para el Buen Vivir, AC. He studied and then walked out of his undergraduate program in Latin American Studies at Mexico’s national university, UNAM. From 2004 to 2005 he was a grantee of the UNESCO program, Search and Research. In 2010, Yeyo was part of the pioneering team for the first Art of Hosting Meaningful Conversations training in Spanish and has hosted, designed, and organized multiple intercultural encounters around the world.
From 2020 to 2021 he acted as the interim Executive Director of Puente a la Salud Comunitaria, and he continues to serve on the Board of Directors for this nonprofit. Yeyo is a fierce seeker who stands for peace and the rights and capacities of people everywhere. Currently, he focuses on promoting and supporting alternatives for real learning, and gift culture practices through the Ecoversities Alliance and The Emergence Network, helping people to recover the capacity to create the future they want to live in.
Links:
- Herramientas para el Buen Vivir: https://buenvivientes.org/
- Ecoversities Alliance: https://ecoversities.org/
Geci Karuri-Sebina
Curator, Rocking Chair Beetle, Co-Convener of Visionary Council
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Geci is a South Africa-based homesaviour-scholar-practitioner who does her best at all of these – sometimes with modest successes, but mostly with many leaky holes and ever-expanding cracks.
Geci’s work has been at the intersection between people, place, time, and technological change mostly in Africa, seeking meaningful spaces for finding and nurturing wisdoms, compassion and, hopefully, joy. She is currently mainly working on academic and civic projects, and is also co-curator of Vunja, a project of The Emergence Network. Geci’s interests are many, her appetites for exploration vast, and her capacity to smile through all kinds of shit – infinite.
Most of Geci’s time is spent between the University of Witwatersrand’s School of Governance (Johannesburg), the African Civic Tech Innovation Network, and the African Centre for Cities (University of Cape Town). She has given up on world domination and world peace though.
Links:
- Conjuring_X: https://www.instagram.com/conjuring_x/ (exploratory engagements about cities with Geci Karuri-Sebina and Thiresh Govender)
Jiordi Rosales
Fellow, Curator, Rocking Chair Beetle, Visionary Council
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Jiordi is an errant mime caught somewhere between processes of combustion and photosynthesis. Traced by Jewish and Mexican lineages of the Northern Sonoran desert and Eastern Europe, Jiordi is fluent in nonsense and loves the interspecies gossip of rural communities. Attentive to birds, patterns and forms of learning that most permit laughter, mystery, and contradiction, Jiordi’s life work orbits crafting pedagogies for crumbling futures. When he isn’t busy chasing goats across impassable terrain, Jiordi offers creative direction for We Will Dance with Mountains and co-curates programming for climate-mutation at the School for Inclement Weather in Northern California with his beloveds.
If the times were gentler – he would live quietly, building stringed-instruments in his workshop. But alas, through the guidance of the Kashia Pomo Jiordi has been trained as a prescribed fire-practitioner and forest technician to support the return of fire-knowledge and practice back to Kashia tribal territory. He loves to watch the glow of fire in his peoples’ faces. Also known as Janus, the two-faced janitor cleaning up after whiteness, standing at thresholds to watch in both directions, Jiordi loiters awkwardly in doorways between sanctuary and heaps of smoldering trash.
Photo by Ciara Ali Khan.
Aparna Bakhle
Cosmatrix
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This waterlogged earthling known as Aparna Bakhle engages research-creation to trace how internal weathering comes to matter. Emergent practices of grief tending held with curiosity and desire draw her attention. Enlisted by the experimental, she listens for resonances with new ‘modalities of otherness’ to co-conspire with. Deeply affected by the urgencies of the metacrises, Aparna continues crack(l)ing in solidarity with ecologies of fugitivity. Her commitment finds expression with/in seeding and weaving cosmologies of care.
Fabrice Olivier Dubosc
Visionary Council, giggling council
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Fabrice is a clinical psychologist and would-be abtherapist. He’s a dabbler with words and pastels; lost and found in translation. Fabrice seeks sanctuary in the cracks and randomly gathers deep time fragments of remembrance from a number of previous lives within this one. He is thankful for kin and friends in this scattered transnational village; an adult son and a teenage daughter keep teaching him both to hold on and to let go.
As a researcher in decolonial postactivism he is also active in local and transnational eco-psycho-social fugitive undercommons and in education. He has published a number of books and articles, mostly in Italian.
Links:
- Clinica del la Crisi: https://clinicadellacrisi.home.blog
Links to sample work:
- Co-individuation as an open mandala: https://www.academia.edu/41474934/Co_individuation_as_an_open_mandala
- Onto fugitivity Grounding Sanctuary in the Cracks: https://www.academia.edu/105548864/Onto_fugitivity_Grounding_Sanctuary_in_the_Cracks
- THE LAMPEDUSA CONSTELLATION – The Great Immigrant Exodus and other signs of the Times: https://www.academia.edu/39289596/THE_LAMPEDUSA_CONSTELLATION_1_The_Lampedusa_Constellation_The_Great_Immigrant_Exodus_and_other_signs_of_the_Times
Erin Manning
Visionary Council
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Erin Manning studies in the interstices of philosophy, aesthetics and politics, concerned, always, about alter-pedagogical and alter-economic practices. Her practice moves between philosophy, movement and art. Recent monographs include The Minor Gesture (Duke 2016), For a Pragmatics of the Useless (Duke 2020), Out of the Clear (minor compositions 2022) and The Being of Relation (forthcoming Minnesota). 3e is the main direction her current research takes – an exploration of the transversality of the three ecologies, the social, the environmental and the conceptual. An iteration of 3e is a land-based project north of Montreal where living and learning is experimented. Legacies of SenseLab infuse the project, particularly the question of how collectivity is crafted in a more-than human encounter with worlds in the making.
Links:
- About Erin: www.erinmovement.com
- 3 Ecologies project: 3ecologies.org
Sherri Mitchell
Visionary Council
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Sherri Mitchell – Weh’na Ha’mu Kwasset – is an Indigenous attorney, activist, and author from the Penobscot Nation. She is an alumna of the American Indian Ambassador Program and the Udall Native American Congressional Internship Program. She’s the author of Sacred Instructions; Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change and a contributor to more than a dozen anthologies, including the best-seller All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis.
Sherri is the Executive Director of the Land Peace Foundation, an educational organization dedicated to the protection and preservation of the Indigenous way of life. She has worked with some of the largest NGO’s in the world on decolonizing relationships between Peoples and lands. She currently serves as a Trustee for the American Indian Institute, an Indigenous Advisory Council member for Nia Tero’s Indigenous Land Guardianship Program, and a board member for the Post Carbon Institute.
She is the recipient of several human rights and humanitarian awards, and her portrait is featured in the esteemed portrait series, Americans Who Tell the Truth. Sherri is the convener of the global healing ceremony, Healing the Wounds of Turtle Island, a gathering that has brought together more than fifty-thousand people from six continents to focus on healing our relationships with one another and with our relatives in the natural world.
Links:
- Land Peace Foundation: https://landpeacefoundation.org/
Madhulika Banerjee
Visionary Council
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Madhulika is both preceptor and disciple at heart, for whom a life of ideas, warm relationships, and artistic beauty – especially in the everyday – is primary. She thinks with her heart, which makes her head and hands functional as well. Madhulika’s karmabhoomi – as in the place where a significant part of the karma of her life plays out – is a large public university in Delhi, the watering hole and the nurturing forest of diverse students and teachers from India. Courtesy her parents, she has lived in the mountains, by the sea and in a large floodplain of India and courtesy her parents-in-law, in the beauty of its semi-desert parts. These gave Madhulika an undying love and respect for the bounty of nature and of people that know how to connect to and live with it. The depth and range of knowledges that arise from that connection have long fascinated Madhulika and her karma is to connect the academic space with those knowledges, so that academia can become more humane. Madhulika has come to believe that stillness makes possible the best action and love, the best resolutions. She has learned that to make a life which is about these two things creates a life that is most worth living.
Legacy Entanglements
Since ten’s inception in 2016, the network has danced and collaborated with many social artists, postactivist curators and project doulas. Our Legacy Entanglements and past projects have become the rich and loamy soil that nourishes our current endeavors.
Manish Jain
Earthworm
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Manish Jain is deeply committed to regenerating our diverse local knowledge systems, cultural imaginations and inter-cultural dialogue. Inspired by MK Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Ivan Illich, his illiterate village grandmother, his unschooled daughter, indigenous communities and Jain spiritual philosophy, he is one of the leading planetary voices for deschooling our lives and reimagining education. He has served for the past 25 years as Chief Beaver (ecosystems builder) of Shikshantar: The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development based in Udaipur, India and is co-founder of some of the most innovative educational experiments in the world: Swaraj University, Jail University, Complexity University, Tribal Farmversity, Creativity Adda, the Learning Societies Unconference, the Walkouts Network, Udaipur as a Learning City, the Families Learning Together Network, and Berkana Exchange. He co-launched the global Ecoversities Alliance with 500+ members in 50 countries. He is a senior advisor to the Economics of Happiness network for localisation. He has worked as a facilitator with Social Labs, Art of Hosting and World Cafe.
He has served as guest faculty for Schumacher College (UK), National School of Drama-Theatre in Education (India) and for the Peace Boat (Japan). Manish has been invited to give inspiring public keynote speeches on Reimagining Education in many countries such as the United States, England, Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, India. He has edited several books on Vimukt Shiksha (liberating learning) on themes such as hacking education, learning societies, unlearning, gift culture, community media, and tools for deep dialogue. Prior to this, Manish worked as one of the principal team members of the UNESCO Learning Without Frontiers global initiative in Paris Headquarters. He has also been a consultant to UNICEF, World Bank, USAID in Africa, South Asia and the former Soviet Union. Manish worked as an investment banker with Morgan Stanley. He has been trying to unlearn his Master’s degree in Education from Harvard University and a B.A. in Economics, International Development and Political Philosophy from Brown University. He and his wife Vidhi have been unschooling themselves with their 21 year old daughter, Kanku, in Udaipur, Rajasthan. Manish is passionate about masti yoga, urban organic farming, filmmaking, simulation gaming, bicycling, ultimate frisbee, trekking, compassionate clowning and slow food cooking.
Links:
- Shikshantar: https://www.shikshantar.org/
- Swaraj University: https://www.swarajuniversity.org/
- Jail University: https://www.jailuniversity.org/
- Ecoversities Alliance: https://ecoversities.org/
Toni Spencer
Curator, Underground Custodian, Rocking Chair Beetle
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Toni is an artist, educator and facilitator working across multiple disciplines. Her work explores how drawing together the personal, political and poetic can offer new ways of being together. She is the founder of ‘the pause’ which brings embodiment, presence and deep ecology together as “…a radical act, an invitation to stop in the midst of action, to disrupt our normal modes of being, to collectively fall silent and become aware of the moment we’re in.”
She is a curator with The Emergence Network, weaves Deep Adaptation and decolonial thinking through her work alongside inquiry based exploration including Living Deep Adaptation and Kissing The Void; Deep Adaptation and the Creative Spirit.
Toni has taught on the faculty of Schumacher College (Educational Practice, Ecological Facilitation as Leadership, Embodied Eco-literacy, Sacred Activism, Ethical Entrepreneurship) and at Goldsmiths, University of London (EcoDesign) as well as hosting The Work That Reconnects and other work in activist and community spaces. She is a tutor, trainer and mentor on Call of the Wild with Schumacher Collage/Wildwise.
She has an Action Research based MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice and has trained in a diverse range of awakening practices, creativity and facilitation modalities, alongside many years of dancing, wild food foraging and ‘living life as inquiry’. She is a Trustee at ProcessworkUK.
Links:
- About Toni: http://www.tonispencer.co.uk/
Bhupender Sharma
Fellow, Town Crier
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Bhuppi is an old soul at heart who finds joy in life’s simple pleasures. His many facets – some seen, some unseen – converge in stillness, though not always. As an artist, listener, and facilitator, Bhuppi tries to create space for difficult things and the unexplored. With an eye for beauty and ugliness alike, he observes, wonders and senses deeply; he perseveres, and endures. It brings both blessing and burden. Bhupender’s sensitivity comes at a personal cost, so he protects himself, withdrawing when overwhelmed to avoid deep attachments, yet still he ends up forming strong bonds. Somewhere in this whole thing, Bhuppi has gotten good at cracking dad jokes and it happened without his consent.
Suélen Brito
Fellow, Curator
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Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1985, Suélen Brito has an art degree from the Escolas de Belas Artes da UFRJ and currently works as visual artist, art educator, cultural producer and social activist. Suélen also has a postgraduate degree in Cultural Management from the Centro Universitário SENAC. She has focused her skills as artist to help change realities in urban areas of high social vulnerability such as Complexo de Favelas da Maré, on the north side of Rio de Janeiro, where she was born and has lived during most of her life.
Suélen coordinates the Escola de Cinema Olhares da Maré – ECOM (Visions of Maré Cinema School), a project developed with children, young people and local women for creating new audio-visual narratives within the community networks of the neighborhood (Redes da Maré). She has been involved with the Redes de Maré since the project’s founding as a student, staff member, art educator and project coordinator.
She is also a partner in the Laboratório Experimental de Artes Visuais de Favela (Experimental Laboratory of Visual Arts in Favelas) which reflects life experiences in the area of informal education, especially in the Maré slum. This partnership has provided Suélen with the opportunity to co-create intense and innovative processes of transversal art education. Within the Laboratório, learning grows from the experiences, narratives and desires of each participant, planted and cultivated collectively within the context of the community. Suélen believes that each person is a potential seed and when we see ourselves as part of a whole, our local culture and memories can catalyze social transformation.
Owólabi Aboyade
Wilds Beyond Climate Justice Dream Team, Rocking Chair Beetle
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Owólabi Aboyade is a father, an MC, editor, life coach, and multidimensional culture worker from Detroit. He is a poet, essayist, and critic, a regular contributor to Riverwise, Geez, Therapeutic Edgelands, and Against The Current magazines. He collaborates frequently with AWE Society Press: as text editor of Bullet*Train and as author of the upcoming chapbook (2024), Lee, Young Lee (edited by Sherina Rodriguez-Sharpe). Owólabi is currently enrolled in Pacific University’s MFA program (nonfiction).
Owólabi is also a member of Motor City Mobile Wellness, a holistic abolitionist healing collective. He found that his patterns of “keeping feelings held back” magnified all his health challenges; now he works to express himself freely and creatively. He carries 20+ years of cultural facilitation and organization practice focused on environmental justice, disability justice, and New Afrikan sovereignty against material and spiritual modes of colonization.
Owólabi is a New Afrikan citizen and an Orisha priest with a passion for bringing the liberation lessons of Detroit to global audiences. He is allergic to genocide, but making the best of the hands we were dealt.
Owólabi Aboyade stands on the shoulders of those who came before.
Free Palestine.
Links:
- Creative Calabash (writing hq): https://creativecalabash.substack.com
- Detroit Bullet Train: https://detroitbullettrain.com/
Links to Sample Work:
- Mutation Mixtape: https://audiomack.com/will-see/album/mutationmixtape
- Take tha House Back: https://vimeo.com/171211732
- Writing and our Craft of Black Family: https://geezmagazine.org/magazine/article/writing-and-our-craft-of-black-family
Brontë Velez
Curator
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brontë’s work and rest is guided by the cosmology and promise of sabbath for black people and the land. As a black-latine transdisciplinary artist, trickster, educator, jíbare and wakeworker, their eco-social art praxis lives at the intersections of black feminist placemaking, abolitionist theologies, environmental regeneration, death doulaship, and the levity of absurdity.
The prayer of their life is to support safe and hilarious passage through climate collapse. They care for the crossroads of attending to black health/imagination, commemorative justice (Free Egunfemi) and hospicing the shit that hurts black folks and the earth through serving as creative director for Lead to Life ritual arts collective and adults program director/educator for ancestral arts skills and nature-connection school Weaving Earth.
They are currently co-conjuring a film with esperanza spalding in collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony and practicing pastoral care (in an ecological and ministerial sense) as a co-steward of a land refuge in Kashia Pomo territory in northern California. Mostly, brontë is up to the sweet tender rhythm of quotidian black queer-lifemaking, ever-committed to humor & liberation, ever-marked by grief at the distance made between us and all of life.
Penélope Baquero
Dung Beetle
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Penélope is Colombian. Magnolia, Acacia and Yarumo trees, Cattleya orchids, Andean condors and hummingbirds whispered in her dreams while she learned to be a human among middle class families from Bogotá who trained her to be a good girl. She became one indeed. She followed the paved road for a bit and earned a degree in International Relations during the day but at night, she unraveled her weaving to nurture her inner myth of connecting with ancestors, human and other-than-human. At age 17 the call to get lost moved her to make her way towards the furthest possible places, starting with the Amazon. From then on she followed el camino con corazón and devoted herself to allowing the messages of synchronicity and Pachamama. She has lived in seven countries. She has been a teacher, a theater person, a painter, a DJ, a gardener, a writer, a builder, a mother, a spouse, a dancer, a healer, an organizer, a founder, a director, and now, she is sculpting a dream of dispelling the myth of separation at the intersection of art, science and spirituality. She has been immersed in postactivist ideations and explorations in the Báyò-sphere since 2020.
Links:
- About Penélope: www.ecosapienevolution.org
- Current employer: www.turningthewheel.org/missoula
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/penelopebaquero/
Gayathri Ramachandran
Dung Beetle
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Some labels that capture Gayathri’s many selves: certified urban permaculture gardener and design-consultant; trained scientist (PhD, Biology) who chose to exit the formal halls of academia; resonant healing practitioner certified through Sarah Peyton; former ten Dung Beetle; member of the Vunja DJ crew and Care Team co-lead for We Will Dance with Mountains 2023; avid, almost-militant, compost-maker; zero-waste lifestyle aspirant, asymptotically-approaching the ever-receding goal of a fully-circular lifestyle; Kolam maker; earth-worshipper; Yoga practitioner of the Krishnamacharya school; daughter; sister; engaged in ongoing anchoring and rooting in the multiple, diverse spiritual streams of the Indian sub-continent, as a lifelong student of India’s indigenous wisdom and mythic traditions.
On a daily basis, Gayathri cooks delicious arusuvai meals with her mother, eats those meals with family, takes short/long luxurious naps, meditates, prays, reads, makes compost, tends her garden, greets tree kin, watches and converses with crows and squirrels, delights in the birds that seasonally-visit, works with clients and the help desk at Sarah Peyton’s organization, listens to a textured musical landscape and sings-aloud for some songs, and dances, as per her body’s whispered needs, as one way to process emotions. Languages Gayathri speaks – that bring the formless into form – include English, Tamil and Hindi.
Robert Wanalo
Dung Beetle
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Wanderer, hermit, secretary, lay comic.
Austen Smith
Curator
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Austen Smith is a spirit-forward visionary artist, writer, social researcher, and founder of Our Lunar Intelligence (OLi), a black-centered organization focusing on spatial justice and spiritual creativity. The ImaginationDoulas, an OLi project, uses ancestral reverence and dreaming techniques to restore the imaginations of systemically disempowered peoples.
Links:
- Our Lunar Intelligence: http://www.ourlunarintelligence.org
Photo by Kay Williams.