programs
Forest Restoration
Cultural
Strategy & Art
Community & Retreat Center
Forest Restoration
Healthy communities require healthy forests, which serve as homes to innumerable beings that support life on the planet. Furthermore, restoring our forests and the carbon they store is a critical piece in mitigating climate change – representing approximately 1/3 of what is needed to avoid catastrophic climate collapse.
Yet, colonial states have failed to properly care for their forests. Under settler occupation, forests have been reduced to tools for resource extraction. Current forest management excludes Indigenous peoples and their ways of knowing and land tending, practices developed over 15,000 years of direct experience.
Shelterwood’s forest stewardship centers “right relations”, drawing on Indigenous cultural practices and centering Pomo Kashia wisdom through ongoing partnership. With multi-year state support from CalFIRE, we are returning good fire to the landscape, removing invasive species that threaten ecosystem health, and controlling erosion to support the habitat of endangered coho salmon who live in the creeks on this land.
We see ourselves as one node in an expanding network of BIPOC-led land projects, documenting learning as we restore balance between fire and water. We are also nurturing the next generation of BIPOC and Queer land stewards through summer fellowships, stewardship residencies, and volunteer workshops.
Volunteer for Forestry Workshops
cultural strategy & Art
If we as a society hope to adapt to and mitigate the climate crisis, fundamental cultural shifts are required. With roots in art, content production and cultural organizing, Shelterwood Collective contributes to new climate solutions narratives, replacing damaging myths that tie progress to domination, oppression, and extraction.
Artists of all disciplines are creating work that inspire humanity to move towards a just and ecologically aligned world, and we see them as critical partners in envisioning a climate resilient future. We currently host artists for brief retreats to rest, rejuvenate, and create new work. These pilots are helping us envision a future artist residency program that will grow as our cultural strategy and retreat center is built. We will host underrepresented artists creating content focused on climate activism that is nurtured through a deepened relationship and connection with land. We will also focus residencies and programming on hosting BIPOC disabled organizers and activists whose liberation dreams align with the collective, and develop educational resources on eco-ableism.
As a collective, we contribute to narratives that shift the culture and climate movement from “protecting pristine places” to centering the role of Queer, Indigenous, and folx of color as stewards, tending land to heal interconnected ecosystems as a pathway towards climate resilience and adaptation. We work with partners and across multiple platforms to help our stories transcend the forest edge and reach wider audiences creating a new culture.
Finally, our internal cultural work provides us another opportunity to explore right relations. As a collective, we are experimenting with horizontal community governance structures that guide the ways we work as a team, listen to the land and care for each other. By focusing on our interconnectivity and collective health, we hope to engender an outward ripple that creates a radically inclusive, healing, and accessible culture for all visitors to the land.
Community & Retreat Center
Shelterwood will soon launch a capital campaign to build a community and retreat center where guests can find refuge and healing within an ecosystem that is simultaneously being returned to ecological balance.
Our multi-year renovation project will transform the deteriorating buildings of the former youth church camp into a multi-functional retreat and community center. In our first year on the land, we engaged over 150 people - including local residents, representatives from social justice organizations; and climate and cultural strategists - to inform the design.
We are also partnering closely with Yomi Sachiko Young, a Black disabled freedom dreamer, writer, trainer and organizer based in Oakland. Yomi is grounding our work in the understanding of disability as rooted in colonialism, which established an ableist hierarchy that values land and bodies as tools of labor. To redress this colonial legacy, we affirm the sacred right of all bodies to experience and connect with nature, recognizing the isolation and disconnection from outdoor spaces that so many disabled kin experience. Shelterwood is grounding our infrastructure design in the tenth principle of Disability Justice, Collective Liberation, in which we hold the question “How do we move together, leaving no bodymind behind?”
We look forward to the time when our infrastructure is fully developed so that we may host social change leaders in a safe and restorative space. We aim to welcome organizations who want to host retreats, gatherings, celebrations, and ceremonies that advance community healing and liberation. We will also be offering space for individuals and families to connect with themselves, the rest of nature, and find safety amongst the redwoods.
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