Empower Weavers: Willamette Valley Listening Tour
Donation protected
The Willamette Valley Listening Tour is a two-week journey during which about 20 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 ceremony 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.
There will also be large tour events that any member of the public can join. Namely, there will be a big public event at Green Anchors in Portland on September 14th at 6 p.m.
This is part of a larger bioregional effort by organizations such as Regenerate Cascadia and the Design School for Regenerating Earth to listen to stories of place and begin to build resilient networks of food sovereignty, ecological restoration, restorative justice, and more.
The tour is happening September 2-17, and if you would like more information about how to join part or all of the tour, please visit https://willamette.earth/wiki/Willamette_Valley_Listening_Tour
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 among cultures, communities, and projects in this way allows us to collectively allocate resources more effectively and create replicable models of communication, governance, and stewardship that other ecoregions could replicate.
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
- r3.0 (providing funding for bioregional confluencing efforts happening globally at the same time)
This work is integral for our collective healing and resilience, and we need your community support to make it happen. Our budget is set 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 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.
Organizer
Andra Vltavin
Organizer
Portland, OR