Fellowship Details

Name: Regenerative Design Fellowship

AWARD: Housing, Food Stipend, Materials, Mentorship

Duration: 10 months  

Age: 21 to 34

Capacity: 8 fellows max per year

Location: Place Corps at Hawthorne Valley, Ghent, NY

The Regenerative Design Fellowship is an award for promising changemakers. This competitive fellowship is a year-long place-based learning residency. It provides housing in an 1800’s eyebrow colonial on our regenerative homestead at Hawthorne Valley Farm, a food stipend covering the cost of three daily whole-food organic meals, gear for a wilderness camping trip and experiential learning and training throughout the year to support collaborative leadership, co-living, and practical skills for radical living. 

• Homestead/ living zero waste

• Co-Living, Collaborative Leadership

• Practical hands-on, outdoors place-based learning, university credit available

• Designing, thinking, making, building, creating, serving

This residential fellowship is for changemakers who exhibit promise to do good work in their places. Using a whole systems, place-based learning approach, fellows are challenged to design and experiment with alternative possibilities of living. Fellows engage with accomplished practitioners and organizations working at the forefront of social, ecological, and economic regeneration. Fellows are trained in facilitation techniques with the opportunity to design curriculum and be educators and mentors to summer Grow Radical residents. Fellows are active design contributors to the Place Corps program and enterprise through regular case studies and design reports. Fellows design and test collaborative models, learning skills related to cooperative living, leadership, and new economy. Fellows are mentored in their specific areas of inquiry and are provided ample time to develop portfolio practicum projects that illustrate their unique calling to know, love, and serve their places upon completion of the Regenerative Design Fellowship.

Curriculum

Place Corps offers learning for radical living rooted in Experiential Education. The brain remembers 10% of what it reads, 20% of what it hears, and 90% of what it does/simulates. The Association of Experiential Education offers a definition we share: “Experiential education is a teaching philosophy that informs many methodologies in which educators purposefully engage with learners in direct experience and focused reflection in order to increase knowledge, develop skills, clarify values, and develop people’s capacity to contribute to their communities.” Place Corps curriculum is led by educators holding higher education degrees with years of educational experience, as well as lives that demonstrate their integrated practices. Place Corps offers college accreditation options and for some the fellowship acts as a non-traditional Masters Program.

Study a variety of design processes:

• Social and ecological permaculture

• Biodynamics

• Whole Systems

Curriculum includes: 

• Place Education

• Arts as Activism

• Homesteading & Craft

• Regenerative Agriculture

• Green Building

• Leadership Development

• Entrepreneurship & New Economy

• Facilitation Training

• Portfolio Project Creation

• Whole-system Design 

• Climate Solutions

• Individual Study w/ Advisorship

• Communications: Interpersonal, Media, Public Speaking, Written

• Embodied Mindfulness

• Politics & Ethics

• Co-Governance

The Fellowship is for:

-Students moving from theory into action

- Professionals ready for a radical venture shift or wanting to change systems in existing organizations and enterprises

- People looking to learn a new way of living in this world

Sample workshops, presentations & classes:

• Natural Dye with Foraged Vegetation

• Hand Woven Basketry

• Oral History Training

• Design & Build a Tiny House

• Defining Silvopasture Principles & Benefits

• Personal Purpose Mapping

• Somatics + Embodied Practice

• Sensing Place + Site-Specific Relational Practices

• Anti-Racism Training

• The Greenest City: Climate Change as Opportunity

• The Artist is the City: Public Art and Urban Identity

• Building Sustainable Local Economies

Participation Requirements:

• Design and facilitate educational workshops during Growing Radical summer intensive

• Act as Mentor to Growing Radical participants

• Write Bi-weekly Design Reports

• Design and Create opportunities for Community EngageD Learning

• Facilitate Place Corps Programming for Highschool Students

• Manage Homestead with Place Corps Team Support

Also:

• Permaculture Certification

• College Credit

• Trainings & Conferences

• 5-Day Wilderness Camping Trip

• Workshops & Materials

• Homegrown Food

• Director and Guest Dinners

• Collaborative Professional Network

• Field Trips

See below for more info about our Regenerative Design Fellowship:

• Dates & Fees

• Activities & Excursions

• Past Residents and Fellows

• Photo Gallery

• Regenerative Design Fellowship Application