Watershed Way Summer Institute

TiLT will offer six months of “Watershed Way” Workshops & Skill Sessions in 2020: contact us for a detailed schedule!

 Local leaders will present workshops and events designed to bring dignity back to our home places, to local materials and local traditions, local skills and local lifeways, and to ourselves.

 
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Weekly workshops, held between May and October, will focus around four main themes:

  1. Earthen Construction Training for Secure, Affordable Housing

  2. Agricultural Training for Healthy, Local Food

  3. Personal Healing & Pathway Discernment

  4. The Watershed Way: Place-Based Spirituality & Community-Based Lifeway

With these workshops, we hope to foster greater confidence and collaboration across cultures, as well as foster gender, environmental, & economic justice in our local area.

Those who participate in these events will:

  •  Restore an adobe ruin as a Hope & Healing Center to transition from lives of addiction & incarceration

  • Construct a new 400 sf earthen storage structure

  • Build an horno [traditional adobe bread oven]

  • Hold a Harvest Festival & Handmade Marketplace

  • Learn to grow and use local food in traditional and innovative ways

  • Tell their personal stories of struggle, transformation & healing through various media

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Local leaders such as TiLT Wisdom Council members Melanie Baca, Angie Fernandez, Daniel “Ryno” Herrera, & Randy Martinez may facilitate these workshops, along with TiLT staff and local experts.  Each facilitator will bring skills & leadership, as well as place-based knowledge and relational wisdom to each session they teach. The workshops will provide important building blocks of self-reliant sustainable living and best practices that can be taught, shared & implemented all over this bioregion. Ideally, we’ll do a small part to  revivive a community of communities along the Rio Grande watershed, even among people with few financial resources.

“The values of the Watershed Way are not new. They come from my people who for generations have lived in this valley, gardening, farming, using the acequias to nourish the land and keep tradition alive. These workshops are going to help our local economy by giving basic life skills and positive attention through peer support, and traditional ways of building and restoring not only adobe structures but also rewiring yourself to help create new opportunities.”- Daniel “Ryno” Herrera, TiLT Wisdom Council

 “Because of TiLT, I have become a better leader in my community. I’ve helped to facilitate a few week long retreats, organized community events, rallied activists, built bridges between organizations with common goals and interests, and become more confident in my career goals and aspirations. Through these workshops I hope to have a chance to work with a larger section of my own people, to provide them with new skills and perspectives.” - Melanie Baca, TiLT Wisdom Council