Support Earthaven's Climate Resilience Campaign

Earthaven: Rooted in Resilience — Fundraiser for Climate Resilience

Last fall, Hurricane Helene swept through Western North Carolina with devastating impacts that are still being felt. Earthaven Ecovillage came through it better than most — because we have been building resilience into our community for decades. But we took heavy hits to our roads, bridges, creekbanks, and other infrastructure. Our vulnerabilities were laid bare — and so were our strengths. As a living laboratory and educational seed bank for a sustainable human future, we have a calling to not only rebuild, but to design for climate resilience, to regenerate this land, to fulfill our educational mission by offering our learnings to a world in crisis.

Earthaven Ecovillage invites you to support Rooted in Resilience, our fundraising campaign to uplevel our recovery effort from merely rebuilding to regeneratively rebuilding with future climate resilience in mind. As we rebuild, we aim to experiment, learn, model, and share climate resilience strategies that can help other communities fare better in the climate events — storms, wildfires, floods — that are becoming the norm.

Please help us raise $60,000 to support our post-hurricane ecological restoration of our riparian zones, other climate resilience strategies, and hands-on and remote learning opportunities to help others become more climate resilient.

Your donation supports:

For 30 years, Earthaven Ecovillage has been evolving as a living experiment in regenerative culture. We've learned to live more deeply in relationship with the land and one another. We’ve harvested sunlight for solar and creek currents for hydroelectric power. We’ve grown and preserved much of our own food. We built our homes on the gentle slopes instead of in the floodplain. We’ve built a participatory democracy and communities of care. We’ve deepened our capacity to live in conscious, compassionate, and celebratory relationship with each other and the earth.

These practices served us well in Hurricane Helene. We were able to mobilize quickly, cooperatively, and effectively, not only for our own well-being but for the surrounding communities as well. Only one home was seriously damaged. Even though we are mostly off-grid, and the roads into town were blocked by landslides and treefall, we never fully lost power, water, or food. Our networks of extended community helped us and we helped them. These are resilience factors that other communities can cultivate — before a crisis.

Earthaven has always aimed to be a living laboratory—a place where we try things out, learn together, and live into the questions of our time. Our response to Hurricane Helene is an extension of that mission. Just as Earthaven has joined together in a community of care and common cause to live regeneratively and resiliently on this land, so other communities can find ways to become more resilient to the changes ahead. It's part of our mission to support that.

The solutions are clear, but they’re not cheap and they’re not easy. Do we reroute the road (our only access and egress) out of the floodplain? Rebuild the bridges on higher ground? Do we devote ourselves in earnest to riparian zone restoration and forest management? These are the kinds of climate resilient pathways that balance the needs of human communities with respect for the land—and ultimately serve our human needs better.

It's better than rebuilding. It’s renewal. It’s regeneration. It's resilience. And it’s born out of our greatest source of resilience: the living, breathing culture of care that held us through the storm.

Not everything we try works. But we believe in sharing the journey. When we do, we not only survive—we thrive.

How to Support: