About Us
What is the Earthrise Collective?
Who we are
The Earthrise Collective is a space for innovative, creative thinkers, activists, artists, healers, wisdom-holders, and visionaries to create new systems and ways of working, and to build new paradigms for the future. Our work is grounded in the Akan Twi and Fante Peoples’ idea of Sankofa: we draw from the wisdom of our ancestors as we chart our journey towards this future. Our activism embraces prayer and ritual, and holds all of life sacred.
In 2020, the Collective was born out of a small group of committed activists who had grown disenchanted with the limitations of fighting against injustice with rational, intellect-based strategies. The current world systems are crumbling; rather than attempting to reform those crumbling systems or to organize within their frameworks, we are imagining and building new systems. We commit ourselves to environmental, social, and cultural rebirth, grounded in ancient wisdom. Mixing the wisdom of our various traditions with the opportunities of the modern world, we shine new light on the challenges around and ahead of us. Healing ourselves and our communities, we tend to the natural world. We recognize that our efforts must combine the spiritual with the strategic: only by consciously working with the land, the waters, the mountains, our ancestors, and the plant and animal kingdoms will we re-imagine and create a flourishing future for the generations to come.
Our Vision
Earthrise’s Vision is of humans across the world combining innovative activism with land-, ecosystem- and ancestor-honoring ritual and ceremony, working collectively to create a new future based on profound relating with the more-than-human world. We envision collaboration across cultures, languages, beliefs, practices, faiths and species that forges a path forward towards alternative, more loving and respectful models of living together, making our livelihoods, feeding our families, and tending to the earth. We envision a future where humanity lives in service to the planet, stewarding and caretaking the land, the ecosystems, and each other as our indigenous ancestors did.
Our Mission
Our mission is to explore, support, and encourage new ways of living, relating, creating, healing, producing, and taking action that are rooted in ancient wisdom. We creatively imagine new ways of being, doing and living by braiding together activism, ancient wisdom, and alternatives.
We see activism, ancient wisdom and alternatives in a vibrant dynamic interplay, how Creation manifests and flows: in accordance with the organic emergence of the infinite forms of truth and beauty through which the Lifeforce expresses itself.
If ancient wisdom is the deep understanding of Life honed by our ancestors, then activism is the force of dharmic destruction and creation: human efforts to dismantle structures in disharmony with the Lifeforce or Wholeness and to create new ones that vibrate and shimmer in alignment with that harmony. Alternatives are the creative manifestation of new forms of social organization, agriculture, governance, business, culture, ceremony and livelihoods that radically transform and heal our relations with the planet and each other.
How We Work
The Collective aims to forge new solutions, create new systems, and build new paradigms for the future grounded in ancestral and indigenous wisdom. Through creative, post-capitalist, post-colonial, post-nation-state thinking – and efforts to heal our various personal and collective traumas – we are building a more beautiful world for future generations. Each act of learning and teaching we undertake is our best effort to begin to remember, repair, and heal our original intactness and union with the land and all its magnificently diverse human and nonhuman inhabitants.
Practically, this means that Earthrise offers itself as a host on both the physical and spiritual planes: we offer a breadth of programs, teachings and spiritual practices (online and in physical spaces around the world) for all who seek to enter into mutually respectful, stewarding relationships with the Earth and reverent conversations with all of Life. We curate talks, seminars, dialogues, and workshops designed to support the dynamic merging of activism and ritual/ceremony. We also steward a fellowship fund to support radical, forward-thinking initiatives that align with and implement our mission and vision.