Groundwork

Mission

Groundwork is a place-based education program working to deepen our society’s relationships with land, food, and water and to cultivate generative and regenerative ways of living and relating. Our mission is to inspire the cultural shifts needed for a sustainable future.

Vision

Rising to meet the challenges posed by climate change, ecological decline, and environmental injustice requires more than new technologies and policies. At Groundwork, we believe it also requires profound shifts in the ways we relate to one another and to the world around us. Groundwork offers educational programs and publications that seek to shift the foundations of the ways we understand ourselves and our place in the world, in order to work towards more just and sustainable shared futures.

A culture, like our planet, is a living ecosystem, constantly shifting and changing based on the values, attitudes, and practices cultivated within a particular community. Groundwork creates spaces to critically reflect upon, challenge, experiment with, and create anew those building blocks of culture. Our offerings create opportunities for the emergence of new kinds of relationships and ways of being within the human and more-than-human world.

We believe that reimagined relationships and practices—in essence, emergent cultures—are the foundations of systemic change.

Jan 02, 2025
Internship- Paid
Groundwork Paonia, CO, USA
Through the farming season—April through October—fellows live on our Colorado farm, tending the land in the mornings and devoting afternoons to projects and seminars focused on one central question: how can we live so that future generations might see us as good ancestors? Since 2021, this fellowship has been a powerful space to explore ways of being outside the boundaries of the modern, industrial, capitalist culture. At Groundwork, sustainability is not about a techno-utopian vision of solar panels and electric cars. It’s about deeper questions: what it means to be a human being alive in an unraveling world; replacing a life of commodity with community, extraction with reciprocity, and practicing coming home to ourselves and to the land. The fellowship covers a lot of ground: •Practicing farming skills as you tend our organic vegetable and seed farm and study local food systems •Learning to save seeds and step into an intergenerational lineage of seedkeepers...