Empower Weavers: Willamette Valley Listening Tour

Andra Vltavin is organizing this fundraiser.

Donation protected

The Willamette Valley Listening Tour is a two-week journey during which 15-25 community weavers will visit a variety of land projects, organizations, natural sites, and people who embody alternative, regenerative ways of being in relationship with the land and each other. We are offering service and labor to sites we visit as we receive the stories they have to share, all while documenting our process along the way to share widely with people throughout the ecoregion. The tour is happening in early September of 2025.

Building on-the-ground relationships is integral for creating solid bridges of trust and mutual benefit between folks doing regenerative work in the Valley. We are especially prioritizing building bridges between cultures and identities through this tour. We need to deeply listen to the story of the Willamette Valley from a diversity of perspectives to more holistically understand how we are continuations of this story. Understanding the context of our place informs how we can be stewards of it.

Sharing our stories and perspectives of the Valley is what allows us to understand how our work, passions, and struggles are intertwined. This strengthens our network and movements by allowing us to align our work to mutually uplift each other. Collaborating between cultures, communities, and projects in this way allows us to collectively allocate resources more effectively and to create replicable models of communication, governance, and stewardship that can be used and molded by other ecoregions and groups.

This tour will make it possible to do the following:

Continue to build a collaborative directory of regenerative projects throughout the ecoregion aligned around values of food sovereignty, cultural restoration, mutual aid, ecological harmony, communal knowledge, community care, and creative reuse
Listen to under-represented voices in the community and hear what projects they want funding for
Position ourselves to weave together organizations doing similar work so we reduce duplicated labor
Share resources among groups so we can mutually uplift each other, especially by identifying portfolios of related projects that, together, can be funded as keys to systems change
Help grassroots organizing efforts connect up with novel funding sources
All of this is in alignment with bioregional organizing principles and frameworks. We will integrate ideas about bioregional organizing with people’s visions and needs in the network and will create tangible next steps in Willamette Valley toward bioregional organizing.

Current sites partnering with us to support this tour include the following:

Tryon Life Community Farm
Indigenous Traditional Ecological and Cultural Knowledge (ITECK) Center
Lost Valley Education Center
PROUT Institute
Dharmalaya
Center for Rural Livelihood
P:ear mentor
Regenerate Northern Willamette Valley
Kindness Farm
Rhythm Seed Farm
Hummingbird Wholesale

This work is integral for our collective healing and resilience, and we need your community support to make it happen. Our budget is $60,000 to equitably cover the costs of labor that has been/will continue to be put into this project and for logistical costs, such as stipends for the sites we will visit on the tour, food, transportation, etc. This budget also allows us to have stipend spots available for BIPOC weavers who will travel along this tour and to have a videographer who can document this work for future organizing efforts.

At a time when this weaving work is urgently needed to help shift our reality to one that is more just, equitable, and sustainable, we are so grateful for community resourcing to allow the Willamette Valley Listening Tour to actualize through your support.