Turtle Island Regional Gathering of the Ecoversties Alliance!We will be hosted at the Atlan Center, located in the Cascadia bioregion of the northwest this July 19 - 23rd, 2024

Want to join us? Please begin by filling out this interest form .

We will follow up with those who express interest to confirm.

Our focus is to bring together people who are deeply involved with reimagining education — working within and beyond the modern education systems — as well as in locally-rooted learning spaces that are regenerating community, ecology, local economy, and a sensibility of coming back home. Many of these places are connected with different grassroots, social, and ecological movements, indigenous communities, and others.

During the 5-day Turtle Island Ecoversities Alliance gathering you can expect to:

• Immerse yourself in a mezcla of group sessions, dialogues, and moments of stillness surrounded by an enchanting ecology of the White Salmon River watershed

• Share ideas, practices, and dreams for unlearning and relearning

• Get inspired by the richness and diversity of learning initiatives taking place in the Turtle Island region

• Make and deepen friendships with like-minded souls and increase capacity for solidarity across our region

• Celebrate the unique awareness each one of us brings to the tapestry of our collective journey of re-imagining education and life

• Be introduced to the Ecoversites Alliance, and discover different possibilities with the network

Logistics Overview (Details here)

• Dates & Travel: July 19 (Evening) through 23rd (Afternoon) at Atlan Center which is located in White Salmon, WA* within the Cascadia bioregion

• *The closest major airport is PDX in Portland, OR

• July 24: Option to visit learning centers in Portland

• Contributions:

• We encourage everyone who attends to consider yourself a contributor. What gifts do you have you can bring to share? What questions that you hold may guide our explorations? What longings may open our collective imagination?

• Financial contributions are welcome, and we are seeking to source grant funding to subsidize individual costs.

• Hard costs for this experience are estimated to be $150-250 per person including food, basic accommodations, and group ground travel from Portland. We are intending to offer some financial assistance, cost sharing, and gifting.

About Atlan Center: Atlan is a living and learning village dedicated to the artful co-creation of healthy living systems celebrating the connectedness and diversity of all Life. Atlan provides sanctuary for the creation of sustainable culture through the holistic integration of healing, art, and design.Atlan community stewards 151 acres and integrates with neighboring residences just northwest of the city of White Salmon, Washington. The land has beautiful southern slopes with year round streams. It hosts stands of second growth Douglas fir, riparian transition zones, and oak savannah, providing a rich variety of flora and fauna and a place to grow our vibrant future!

About Ecoversities: The Ecoversities Alliance is a trans-local learning community of 200 transformative learning spaces from more than 40 countries around the world who have been meeting and working together since 2015 through international and regional gatherings, learning exchanges, campaigns, workshops, learning journeys, film festivals and publications.We strive to cultivate human and ecological flourishing in response to the multitude of urgent and critical challenges of our times. Since 2015, the Ecoversities Alliance has hosted 6 international gatherings and regional networks have been active in Latin America, India, Asia, Pacific Region, Europe, Africa and the Arab World.Our vision
The Ecoversities Alliance seeks to transform the unsustainable and unjust economic, political and social systems/mindsets that currently dominate many societies. We wish to do this by actively transforming the ways we learn, the tools we use to make sense of the world, and the ways we create and share knowledge.

Our mission
- To support learners and communities around the world to reclaim their own processes of un/learning, knowledge co-creation and community building.
- Inspiring, nourishing, connecting and giving visibility to diverse ecoversities initiatives worldwide.
- Building solidarities, collective inquiries, inter-cultural dialogue and new experiments in education
- Nurturing an ecology of knowledges, radical pedagogies and learning commons to expand human consciousness and cultural and ecological regeneration

Questions can be sent to: emwalz@gmail.com

What is a “Porchfest,” you ask? It's a music festival throughout the Overlook neighborhood where participating neighbors have offered up their porches, front yards, and driveways as a stage for a wide set of performances.