Center for Applied Cultural Transitions

Unlearning Systems

Cactus Collective is a deschooling platform for unlearning dominant systems and re-enchanting our relations and worldviews to midwife life-affirming futures. Amid ecological collapse and social fragmentation, we offer Earth-rooted approaches grounded in the wisdom of Indigenous knowledge keepers, movement leaders, and post capitalist thinkers. Through embodied, trauma-informed, ceremonial and relational ways, we nurture the ontological shifts (the way we see, think, relate to and understand the world) needed to move from separation to re-connection, extraction to regeneration and oppression to collective liberation.

Context

We are living through a time that is calling us to embody change  — from Eurocentric, colonial mastery education to what scholar Vanessa Andreotti calls depth education: the capacity to hold complexity, contradiction, and complicity with humility and care. This shift requires non-dual awareness: the ability to both hospice the end of capitalist modernity and midwife new-ancient-emerging systems.

Model

Through our organizational model, we embody what we call cultures of transition. As a not-for-profit cooperative, we are committed to healing and alchemizing the entity of money —from extractive, accumulative, and transactional to relational, generous, Earth-centered, and communal.

We are a tributary that flows into many rivers. Surplus resources are redistributed into the commons — to support human and more-than-human labor, and to nourish the land-based communities from which life-force flows.

Our offerings are accessible through a sliding-scale model, ensuring no one is turned away for financial barriers. We operate on a one-third revenue-sharing model: 1/3 for faculty, 1/3 for the production & operations team and 1/3 to be re-gifted to  land-based projects that are focused on post capitalist approaches.

Namesake

Cacti have evolved in barren, dry deserts as strong, resilient plants representing endurance, courage and beauty in the face of adversity. In many Indigenous cultures, the cactus is a coveted spiritual guide and healer through its medicinal and psychoactive powers. As the namesake of this portal, we evoke the reverence and humility to look to the more-than-human realms in these times of transition. 

Tierra Valiente also operates as a not-for-profit cooperative and distributes 25% of its surplus to other regenerative land-based projects that share principles of: decommodifying land, operating with cooperative economic models, protecting biodiversity, creating food sovereignty, and supporting bio-regional mutual aid networks.