Classes & Events
Earthaven Ecovillage’s School of Integrated Living (SOIL) is the nonprofit organization that runs our educational events. Most of the links below will take you to SOIL’s website for more information and registration.
We offer in-person tours, in addition to the following virtual tours, online and in-person classes, and events:
Virtual Earthaven Tour
There’s nothing like experiencing ecovillage life first hand, but taking a virtual tour of Earthaven is a close second!
The tour highlights ways in which Earthaven is striving to be a holistic, sustainable culture. The introductory overview tour examines the concept of sustainability at Earthaven through social, ecological, and economic lenses. Not only will you get a glimpse of what has worked through time, but also hear about what has been challenging. And you will have a chance to ask questions!
Home Funerals, Green Burials
A half-day introduction to death care at Earthaven. After experiencing eight deaths in eight years, along with extensive study with our mentors, we are sharing out experiences with others who want to feel empowered to care for and honor their dead from their homes with their family and friends. Learn your rights and options.
REALationship 101 Online Workshop
Join us for an experiential course in conscious connection, including self-awareness (distinguishing between one’s thoughts and feelings), moving through fear, the power of vulnerability, and heart-centered. Participants will have the opportunity to address issues in their own lives with the group’s support.
REALationship 101 7-week Online Workshop
Join us for an experiential course in conscious connection, including self-awareness (distinguishing between one’s thoughts and feelings), moving through fear, the power of vulnerability, and heart-centered. Participants will have the opportunity to address issues in their own lives with the group’s support. Online only.
Sociocracy for Communities, Part One
Have better meetings, get more done, be better organized, and create more harmony and connection in your group.
Sociocracy is an especially successful self-governance and decision-making method that instructor Diana Leafe Christian, community consultant and author of Creating a Life Together, now highly recommends instead of consensus. Learn the concepts and practice the skills in this lively, online workshop.
Part One covers Proposal-Forming, Consent Decision-Making, Evaluation, Shared Values, Vision, Mission, and Aims.
Thriving in Relationships — Five Tools for Success
Join Steve Torma in this deep dive to learn five key relationship tools: gratitude & appreciation, empathy, honest expression, needs-based negotiation, and relationship repair. These tools can improving all types of relationships, including with friends, family, co-workers, community members, and even within oneself.
Sociocracy for Communities, Part Two
Working Effectively with Community Conflict — Interpersonal Conflict, Structural Conflict, and “Especially Challenging Behaviors”
Learn practical, workable solutions to resolve or contain three types of group conflict.
Join communities expert Diana Leafe Christian in this lively workshop for people in communities of all kinds who may have felt confused, baffled, or even hopeless about ongoing conflict in their group and seek grounded, field-tested solutions. There are things you can do!
Earthaven Ecovillage Experience Weekend
Learn skills, gain insights, and get to know the Earthaven community. Get an inside look at the radical social and ecological experimentation that has taken place in this land-based community for over 27 years by joining us for Experience Weekend.
Ecovillage Action Week
Be an active participant in the everyday rhythm of life and work at Earthaven Ecovillage. In this hands-on, service-based program, you’ll work side-by-side with residents, making meaningful contributions while exploring Earthaven’s neighborhoods, and expanding your ideas of alternative living.
Earthaven Ecovillage Experience Week
Join the homesteads, farms, and businesses of Earthaven Ecovillage for a hands-on, skill-building immersion in sustainable and climate-resilient community life. A residential service learning immersion in our unique community laboratory.
Compassion Camp
Our annual event focused on Nonviolent Communication, featuring classes and experiential learning. An experience designed to foster compassion and connection in our hearts, communities and world, and to spread the seeds of justice and love.
The Re-membering Retreat
Explore what it means to Belong. An intimate journey reconnecting to the deepest parts of ourselves, to ignite more authenticity, meaning, and pleasure in all our connections. Set aside the hustle and drop into a ritual space where we can re-collect what is most meaningful and tend to our grief, our longings and our relationships in ways that are nourishing, grounded, and life-giving.
Storytelling Concert and Dinner with Doug Elliott
Of Ginseng, Golden Apples, and the Rainbow Fish.
Enjoy dinner and an evening of stories, songs, and lore celebrating our human connection to some amazing wild critters. The program is flavored with lively tunes, fantastic folklore, natural history fact stranger than fiction, and more than a few belly laughs.
Reclaiming Nature Connection Annual Conference: Storytelling
Storytelling presenters Lia Grippo and Erin Dews will take participants on a storytelling journey to develop capacities for using stories as effective teaching tools for nature connection and beyond.
Place-Based Living at Earthaven Ecovillage: An Overview of Our Regenerative Systems
What does the journey from consumer culture to a rural, place-based life look like? This self-paced course explores the actual lived experiences of the past 25 years of building the tangible elements of our village. Discover where we live, the context of our project, and the many ways we’ve approached the complexities of land-based living.
People Care at Earthaven Ecovillage: An Overview of the Social, Emotional, and Relational Aspects of Village Life
Culture at Earthaven Ecovillage is both intentionally and organically created based on both the people who come together and the purpose they hold dear. This course exposes the invisible infrastructure that binds us to each other, to the land, and to the ecovillage project.
Village Economics: The Ins and Outs of Money and Wealth at Earthaven Ecovillage
A viable economy is a key component to the success of all ecovillage and residential community projects. Yet, in stark contrast to the predatory, industrial, and highly consumptive nature of our world economic systems, Earthaven looks towards a more elegant, fair-share design for economics that includes right livelihood, living wages, sustainability, cooperation, and village well-being.
Growing Women’s Circle or Red Tent — Creating Community With Women
Women’s Circles are an important way for women to connect with each other and with themselves. The Red Tent is a multi-generational woman-only space where women can honor the cycles of our lives. After taking this class, you will feel equipped to offer Women’s Circles and/or Red Tent Circles for the women in your life and have more structure for your own personal practice. Join Kaitlin Ilya Wolf in the Red Tent!
Introduction to Natural Building
Explore natural building methods and materials.
Inspired by the idea of building or remodeling with more natural and sustainable materials but don’t know quite where to start? In this workshop, you will gain an appreciation and understanding of what is possible with natural materials. There are no “cookie cutters” here — each place is different and each project reflects our best attempts to balance all our desires with realities.
Nature as Medicine — Gaia and Your Health, Vitality, and Spiritual Unfoldment
Learn how to take care of your body in a way that enables spiritual unfoldment and supports joyful living.
As our lives have become more complicated and organized around technological advances, our health has faltered. This series will look at how interlinked the health of our bodies is with the health of Gaia, and the ways in which genuine healing can address both.
Sobonfu Somé: On Grief, Forgiveness, and Ritual
Hear one of the foremost voices in African spirituality speak about grief in her culture.
Renowned teacher and mentor Sobonfu Somé was one of the foremost voices of African spirituality to come to the West. Mentored by her Dagara elders, she brought ancient indigenous African wisdom to our Western culture in a compassionate, loving, and joyful way. Sobonfu was in Africa when she died in 2017.
The Other Yoga — Beyond the Postures
Learn a systematic and life changing practice that can transform your consciousness and open doors into a new world of possibilities.
What is this “Other Yoga” that the vast bulk of the Yoga Sutra describes and explains? This workshop is based on new and more accessible commentaries and will uncover this neglected and powerful science that has guided the spiritual path of aspirants on their journey for eons.
Understanding Medicines — Alternatives to Pharmaceuticals
Gain an understanding of medicine systems so you can make an informed choice for yourself. In this series, we will identify and delve into five major systems of medicine, with the intent of enabling attendees to grasp the pros and cons of each, and to some extent to judge which will be their medicine of choice for a given ailment.
Wild Tales — Strange But True Tales of teh Natural World
Concert with Storyteller and Naturalist Doug Elliott.
Have you ever had a swarm of bees fall on your head, been swallowed by a snake, dined on coon, or read God’s handwriting on the back of a trout? Well, Doug Elliott has and he tells you all about it. This program is flavored with natural history, traditional lore, outrageous personal narratives, regional dialects, soulful harmonica songs, and more than a few belly laughs.
Recurring Events
Thursday Afternoon Dance Wave
5-6:30 p.m., Every Thursday
Free, at Earthaven Council Hall.Contact Julia Taylor at (828) 419-0907 or juliaanntaylorart~at~gmail.com.
Incident Report Form. At Earthaven, we are striving to create a safer space for everyone. If your personal boundaries are crossed or you experience harassment or assault of any kind while at Earthaven and would like to make a report and/or receive support, please contact the Consent Culture Team at or fill out our incident report form, which can be submitted confidentially.