There are about 125 of us living at Earthaven in rural Western North Carolina carving out land-based lives in the forest.
Earthaven Ecovillage started in 1994 and for over 25 years has been experimenting with physical, social, and economic systems that embody a different way of being.
Different from how most of us grew up.
We are forging new neural pathways about how to be together. Individually and collectively.
And sometimes that’s not an easy path. As my dear friend Lee Warren says, “it’s not a matter of ‘if’ we’ll have conflict, it’s a matter of when.”
If you’ve always wanted to know more about the tools we use to navigate the joys and challenges of daily life in an ecovillage, this is a great opportunity.
All of our educational programs benefit our educational non-profit, the School of Integrated Living.
NikiAnne (she/her) was born and raised on a horse and cattle ranch on the ancestral lands of the Salinan people in the Central Coast of California. She currently lives at Earthaven Ecovillage on unceded lands of the Catawba and Cherokee (Tsalagi) people. Her ancestors come from Eastern and Western Europe — France, Germany, and English Isles as well as Belarus, Lithuania, and Russia, from Ashkenazi Jewish heritage.
Throughout the last two decades, NikiAnne has been immersed in community and in service to a wide range of educational endeavors focused on nature connection, personal empowerment, and community resilience. NikiAnne considers herself the grease and glue – that which helps things run smoothly or holds things together. Before co-founding SOIL in 2012, she worked and traveled through much of Asia, the Americas, and Europe, which made her formal education at George Washington University in International Affairs come alive in ways that can only happen through personal experience and relationships. Collectively, these experiences have undeniably shaped her cooperative cultural values and commitment to supporting leaders to think, feel, act and design from a foundation rooted in interrelationship. No matter what she’s teaching, NikiAnne is always on the same mission: to raise awareness of our whole selves – gifts, passions, blind spots, shadows – and help those whole selves find and fill niches in their communities. This is how the web of life is woven, and the fabric of culture repaired. She’s especially eager to support those in transition – between vocations, stages of life, and stories of world and self. Within this context, she is particularly passionate about community grief tending and death care midwifery.
