EARTHVILLE NETWORK

Earthville works to cultivate human and planetary flourishing worldwide through a global network of local-scale projects and initiatives. The principal goals shared by all of these endeavors are:
1. To educate, sensitize, and empower compassionate agents of change, working locally and globally.
2. To provide opportunities for people of diverse backgrounds to put compassion into action by engaging in win-win collaborations for human and planetary flourishing.
3. To develop effective, sustainable, and resource-efficient models for education and change-making.

The Earthville Network’s fundamental strategy is cultivating an international network of local, human-scale projects and initiatives providing interdisciplinary education, personal and professional development programs, and meaningful opportunities to make positive impacts in the areas of ecological sustainability and social welfare. This includes both in-house projects and a constellation of partnerships and incubated projects across the globe.

Our in-house projects include two flagship educational institutes (one in the USA and one in India) that serve as our core learning communities and as showcases for solutions for sustainability solutions integrated with social welfare programs. We provide our program participants with rare opportunities to study human and environmental issues while actively working to address them in the real world, in a contemplative and reflective environment that provides support for their evolution as sensitive humans and effective leaders. We also engage our participants and other stakeholders at the operational and leadership levels, so that all dimensions of our organization's work become real-world learning labs for them. This creates uplifting ripple effects throughout the communities that our participants and alumni serve through their lives and their work.

We believe — and our successes have proven — that this kind of real-world education for altruistic action, by its nature, generates a force-multiplier effect, magnifying our impact exponentially.

Our international, multicultural, interdisciplinary team has a twenty-five-year track record of building exemplary learning communities and service projects from the ground up on the slimmest of budgets. Four of the keys to our success are:

1. Our multi-disciplinary team aggregates the knowledge, skills, and sensitivities to design and build both the “hardware” (our eco-campuses and facilities) and the “software” (our organizational culture, programs, curricula, etc.) and optimize all the elements to work together harmoniously and sustainably in ways highly responsive to the unique needs of each particular context where we work. This fact in itself attracts much interest and support.

2. Creativity and resourcefulness. Decades of experience doing big things on tiny budgets has forged our knack for doing more with less into not only a specialization but also a way of life. We are very nerdy about optimizing efficiencies through stacking functions, synergies, and cross-pollination — "feeding many birds with one seed."

3. Holism: Understanding the whole person and the whole problem to create whole solutions. Strong systems thinking feeding into our design thinking, warmed by human feeling.

4. The strength of our commitment to practice integrity, generosity, and kindness, which makes the experience of working with us rewarding and inspiring rather than taxing or toxic. We love a good win-win, and that, too, makes people want to work with us and bring their best.

We have founded, incubated, or meaningfully supported over a dozen charitable and educational projects in eight countries and counting.

We have established two flagship educational institutes: one in the US and the other in the Indian Himalayas.

We have changed countless lives through educational programs for sustainable and compassionate living in the US, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

We have trained several hundred interns and students in vocational skills such as ecologically sensitive natural architecture and earthen building, wise leadership, teaching and facilitation, permaculture and organic gardening, sensitive and compassionate activism, and more.

We have provided meaningful service-learning opportunities for many thousands of people of all backgrounds from dozens of countries in all corners of the world, and that work has, in turn, impacted thousands more.

Our current focus is developing our new 640-acre eco-campus in Colorado and building capacity to leverage the new campus for optimum impact on human and ecological flourishing, especially in the Four Corners region of the US.