Our Story
Reclaiming Alignment started as an online 7 day retreat in the fall of 2020 as a place of refuge and release for black, brown and native organizers experiencing burnout, grief, and overwhelm by the impact of both the covid pandemic and violent epidemic of the racism and bigotry in our country we were facing.
Accessible yoga accompanied by a live sound healing score, guest workshops and talks each evening by elders and wisdom keepers to resource and equip our participants with skills to care for themselves and love were some of the offerings shared.
The online retreat was produced by the then Song of the Spirit Institute. An online learning community for learning global Indigenous languages, sciences and spiritual arts.
In the fall of 2022, forty-five earth stewards, organizers, educators, artists, teachers and staff of color, were brought together for our first in person retain collaboration with land stewards Deepa Iyer and Victor Anagli of Ayeko Farm in Enumclaw, Washington.
The retreat’s intentions were made real and visible to us during this shared time together as a rich and diverse community. Through the grace, care and investment in relationships those who gathered made to ourselves, one another and our time with the earth, we birthed the Reclaiming Alignment Organizing Framework (protocol, practices and curriculum).
In 2023 we welcomed back to Ayeko Farm a second group of 45 now earth stewards (farmers, water protectors, food and land justice organizers and environmentalists) of color from the Pacific Northwest and across Turtle Island.
The collaboration and friendship deepened at Ayeko, cementing our partnership and the shared vision we had to sustain and transform our ways of being in community and our movement.
Now in our third year the initiative will expand to three additional land projects and offer a young adult organizer retreat. Reclaiming Alignment is now an initiative of Black Earth Wisdom—a co-operative, eco-justice, social activist brand supporting eco-preneurs of color.
The Reclaiming Alignment framework
It is inspired by the wisdom shared through the study and relationship building founder B. Anderson has done with Global Indigenous elders, scholars and communities as their life practice.
The framework invites us to consider how our WAY of being with the Earth, that which animates life, ourselves and purpose and our kinship with all beings, can be what protects and sustains our planet as it has been for our elder communities around the world for millennia.
WHAT WE BELIEVE and ARE COMMITTED TO
Our Purpose
As a mutual response initiative for climate, food and land organizers, Reclaiming Alignment helps to sustain and transform our environmental justice and social change movement, one community at a time.
Our offerings provide accessible, adaptable and applicable resources to help recenter and right balance the care and well being of our organizing ecosystem that includes our people, our planet and ourselves, as one.
We believe that when we can sustain our movements and transform the ways we organize, we can create the cultural and systemic changes needed to protect our collective future.
Our Vision
To sustain our organizing communities by reducing burnout, stress related disease/illness, suicidality, organizing silos, and resource depravity across our environmental and social change movements.
OUR EMBODIED PRACTICE and CORE VALUES
Honoring the Earth
We acknowledge the earth as our foundational relationship and as the building block for our collective liberation, freedom and wellbeing. We also recognize our varying and for many, complex relationships to land due given historical, generational and current day traumas. Through our gatherings and offerings it is our hope that we can be a bridge to support the healing, connection and repair needed to reimagine alongside our kin our orientation each of us to our beloved planet.
Honoring Solidarity
Reclaiming alignment believes that the well and whole future for our planet and all beings is a future where we all across race, gender, class, cultural background, spiritual or religious beliefs and geographic location move in more alignment and solidarity with one another. A future wherein our front lines dissolve into the other as we see more of the interconnected nature of all solutions to fundamental root challenges of our world's problems as one.
Honoring Our Diversity
We celebrate that people of color or the “Global Majority” are not a monolith and among us have a multitude of identities. Reclaiming Alignment is devoted to co-creating spaces where all of us are welcomed, have space to practice and honor our ancestral/cultural traditions and can exist within our identities in a community committed to causing no harm, being accountable to the harm that arises, while working towards the liberation of ourselves and one another with care. Honoring Accessibility - We practice, organize and live with the value of disability justice and access centered stewardship as the guiding praxis for what we offer, how we work and our ethos. Ensuring all can participate without the hindrance of cost, access to space, or creating undue harm to the participants and caretakers of the space.
Honoring Our Relations
By celebrating and honoring one another we commit to lift and identify the historical and cultural context, the people of origin of each teaching, our teachers/benefactors and our relationship to the practice shared on retreat.
Black Earth Wisdom
Black Earth Wisdom (B.E.W.) is a co-operative eco-justice, social activist brand, supporting earth stewards and eco-preneurs of color.
We are a community of farmers, entrepreneurs and environmentalists who:
develop earth reverent sustainable products for the global market to support local economies.
reclaiming natural indigenous industries led and co-owned by our communities
support local and global climate initiatives that disproportionately impact global indigenous and communities of color.
and center the care for the future of our planet and its people by co-creating spaces of respite and restoration for those protecting our earth.
