Earthaven Ecovillage Experience Week
Exploring social connection and off-grid systems for community living
July 26 – August 1, 2026
Earthaven Ecovillage
Near Asheville, NC
Experience Week is a residential immersion into the community life of Earthaven Ecovillage. Experience Week will give you an inside look at the radical social and ecological experimentation that has taken place in this land-based community over the past 31 years. This is a rare opportunity for deep, focused time with cultural creatives who can reveal what has worked and not worked. Save precious time in your own journey of creating community by building upon lessons we’ve learned rather than starting from scratch.
Alongside an ecological crisis of rising sea levels, polluted air, toxic oceans, and mass extinction of species, many people are also experiencing a social crisis of disconnection, isolation, and loss of meaning and purpose. Although Earthaven doesn’t have ready-made solutions for healing all these problems, we are engaging in thoughtful, practical strategies that attempt to merge ancestral wisdom and technological innovation with earth- and community-centered ethics. As a community, we are grounding our visions in authentic connection to spirit and the land, in an effort to bring some order and beauty into this fragmented world.
For these reasons, this ecovillage provides the ideal setting for a whole-life skills curriculum — a place to see regenerative systems in practice and food production in action, and experience community living on an intimate level.
In addition to experiencing some aspects of the daily village life of Earthaven, participants can also experience community within their cohort by sharing meals, social activities, their experiences, and hearth-tending tasks. Many participants come to the program during or while preparing for a life transition — questioning aspects of their current lifestyle and curious about their options. Others come to the program for a retreat from their daily life — a chance to be in a different place around different people while enjoying wholesome food prepared by someone else. In the words of a past participant… “The community building we did as an Experience Week group was a wonderful surprise to me, and I made life-long friends and important contacts for my future as someone seeking intentional community.”
This is a unique and powerful opportunity for learning in a compassionate community setting with the intention of forging meaningful connections with ourselves, each other, and the natural world. Now, more than ever, the work of coming together is essential. Together, we discover creative and effective ways to act responsibly where and when we can.
Curriculum
The Experience Week curriculum encourages participants to examine sustainability through social, ecological, economic, and eco-spiritual lenses. The learning journey weaves large-group discussions and classes together with intimate hands-on experiences in the village and farms. SOIL instructors, together with the community at large, support participants to build important skills, foster awareness for global issues, empower the self, increase connection, and develop the resources required for an embodied life.
Organic Food Production and Natural Buildings
- See inside eco-friendly and consciously-built homes (tiny houses, stud-frame, cob, straw-bale, earthship, earthen plaster).
- Connect with our source of nourishment. See permaculture and agricultural experimentation in action on small-scale farms and homesteads.
- Connect with and give back to the land through service learning projects and work parties, an essential aspect of communal life.
- Learn how to identify, harvest, and prepare common wild plants for food and medicine.
- Sample wild edible plants and learn how to use taste to discern their actions on the body.
- Special focus on utilizing invasive species as a means of controlling their spread.
- Introduction to herbal energetics.
Renewable Energy and Off-Grid Utilities
- Learn about off-grid renewable systems in practice (photovoltaic, micro-hydro, radiant-floor heating, hot water diversions, wood-fired boiler).
- Make biochar, a charcoal fertilizer with energy-positive production.
- Explore the development of energy alternatives to meet the world’s impending energy crisis.
Resilient Community and Regenerative Culture
- Learn about successful ecovillages and land-based endeavors (both rural and urban).
- Work with the three-legged stool of sustainability — the social, environmental, and economic factors necessary for sustainable projects to succeed.
- Get an introductory understanding of Earthaven legal structure and governance.
- Learn how conflict and loss build intimacy and are essential to community resilience.
- Feel empowered to tend to your end-of-life and after-death care.
- Know your rights and discover what’s possible with home funerals and green burials.
- Hear about the realities of community living straight from the mouths of Earthaven’s members and residents.
- Get introduced to our local, community-supported commerce and creative economies.
Personal Growth and Empowerment
- Identify your personal goals and resources through Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects.
- Connect to yourself, others, and the natural world.
- Explore what it means to be a responsible human living an authentic and meaningful life.
- Be supported in moving from inspiration and motivation into embodied and awakened action.
In addition to classes, discussions, and activities, you’ll enjoy meals and rituals with community members as well as the option to participate in yoga, meditation, and hiking.
This is hands-down the most authentic and interactive experience regarding ecovillage structure and regenerative living that I’ve had in 20 years of my interest in the subjects.
Program Schedule
This week-long program consists of expert lectures, fireside conversations, community celebrations, hands-on projects, journaling, tours, and interactive activities to provide an intimate, well-rounded, and powerful learning experience.
Sunday
1:00 Arrival
2:30–6:30 Welcome, Orientation, and Village Tour
6:30–7:30 Dinner
7:45–9:30 Opening Circle
Monday through Friday
8:00–8:30 Breakfast
9:00–12:00 AM Session
12:15–2:15 Lunch and Independent Time
2:30–5:30 PM Session
5:30–6:30 Independent Time
6:30–7:30 Dinner
7:30–9:30 Evening Activities
Saturday
8:00–8:30 Breakfast
9:00–12:00 Final Session and Closing Circle
12:15–2:00 Lunch and Departure
Families and Youth
We welcome families with children to attend and will do our best to support you and your children. We do not offer a child care for this program. Parents are responsible for their children during all portions of the program.
Some of the Experience Week curriculum involves focused, sit-down presentations, so attending with a younger child will likely mean being less able to participate fully in the program.
Experience Week is primarily designed for adults. However, mature young adults under 18 years old are also welcome. Please contact SOIL to discuss the enrollment of passionate individuals under 18 who would like to attend without an adult.
Logistics
Food
Delicious, omnivorous meals are prepared by talented culinary artists from the Earthaven community. Vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, and dairy-free options available. Snacks and beverages (tea, coffee) are provided. Participants are invited to help with meal clean-up. Many hands make light work.
As much food as possible is sourced from Earthaven and its surrounding farms and gardens, with some ingredients sourced from grocery stores. Our meals are created with seasonal, local, fresh, wildcrafted, humanely-raised, and organic ingredients.
***If you have dietary needs beyond the ones listed here, please be prepared to bring supplemental food to support your nourishment and well-being. Our kitchen cannot accommodate all diets.
*** Although we would like to know if you have any allergies, we cannot provide an anaphylactic safe meal. There is always the chance of cross contamination.
Click here for more information about food.
Program Specific Info
Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are included, Friday dinner through Thursday lunch.
Instructors
Earthaven Experience Programs Faculty Diana speaks at conferences, offers consultations, and leads webinars and workshops internationally on starting successful new intentional communities, how existing communities can resolve conflicts and become more healthy and thriving, and sociocracy, a self-governance and decision-making method she finds especially effective for communities. She is also an author and editor focused on these areas, and a Member of Earthaven Ecovillage.
Diana Leafe Christian
Since his arrival to EH in 1997, Chris has cleared his own farm field, designed and built passive solar homes using the wood from the trees he has killed (including his own Microhut), held leadership positions in the community, raised turkeys, grown vegetables, co-founded the Forestry Cooperative, designed and installed multiple off-grid energy systems, and a few other things. His newest excitement is dabbling in small-scale biochar production and wood gasification at Gateway Farm.
Chris Farmer
Monique is a Naturopathic Physician, founder of Elements Naturopathic Medicine, regenerative biodynamic gardener, homesteader, mother and dedicated community member who has lived at Earthaven Ecovillage since 2016. Her passion for food as medicine fuels her efforts to sustainably grow and raise much of her family’s food including a diversity of vegetables, fruits, berries, laying hens, broiler chickens, turkeys, and even rainbow trout!
Dr. Monique Mazza, ND
Rachel Fee
Instructor
Rachel is a clinical herbalist, farmer, and mother of four nearly grown children. She was in clinical practice for fifteen years, practicing her own system of “mutt” herbalism that synthesizes her background in Traditional Western Herbalism, Ayurveda, and Southern Folk Medicine. These days her greatest joy and purpose is found in tending the land collaboratively, raising animals for food, as well as herb and vegetable gardening. She’s especially passionate about building soil and creating diverse ecosystems of year-round forage for her animals, resilience of all kinds, and being of service to this wild experiment that is Earthaven.
In-person Programs Director, Faculty 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. 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.
NikiAnne Feinberg
Becky Boisvert
An inveterate adventurer, Becky (she/her) has grown to see life itself as the adventure. That life is made richer in community at Earthaven where Becky, her daughter Willow, and her co-parent Sanne moved in 2018. She loves bringing lofty, creative visions to life. In her first career as an educator, she taught at an arts-integrated charter school, mentored gap-year students in India and Guatemala, and created a holistic middle school. Since then, she has produced two documentary films, coached individuals and couples toward greater wholeness, and begun holding mediations.
Carmen Lescher
Assistant Director, Bookkeeper, and Faculty
Carmen is dedicated to learning how to be human on this planet at this time. She considers herself a generalist and has owned and operated a pasture-based poultry farm; worked on construction crews building passive solar, off-grid houses; and supported many small businesses with online marketing, administration, and bookkeeping.
Faculty, Earthaven Co-Founder Writer, editor, designer, process-oriented educator, Arjuna turned 75 in October 2021 and is celebrating having landed at Earthaven, helping to build a sustainable community and non-profit education center. She designed and helped build an amazing natural house, and is still evolving ideas and programs for The Natural Building School and other regenerative methods and tools.
Arjuna da Silva
Financial Co-responsibility and Scholarships
Because some people have more financial means than others, we have created a sliding-scale fee system to accommodate a range of economic realities. We offer several price tiers and leave it to you to select the most appropriate tier. The price range aims to take into consideration economic disparities, historical injustices, and personal circumstances. The system is designed for those with more resources to support those with less.
At Earthaven and through the School of Integrated Living (SOIL), we strive to practice a culture of financial transparency, authenticity, and generosity. Trusting each other to assess their needs, what is within their ability, and when to ask for help. We are excited to include you in our experiment with financial co-responsibility.
We are now offering self-selected scholarships for many of our programs. No proof of need, no questions asked. Just the clear intention of trust that registrants can assess whether the cost of a program is truly a barrier to attendance and the growth of self and community our programs seek to foster.
In addition, we offer partial scholarships (50% of the middle of the sliding scale) to black, indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) with financial needs who otherwise would not be able to afford to attend, even with the self-selected scholarships. We understand that BIPOC may experience more financial and institutional barriers to participation, and this is one way we are able to create more access. If you identify as BIPOC with financial needs and would like to receive a deeper scholarship, please contact us.
SOIL endeavors to support the healthy flow of all resources; whether that be monetary or the skills and information that seed cultural change; and widen the doors of accessibility to what we offer.
Cost
Adults
Tuition Sliding Scale: $725-1,075 per adult.
$525 scholarship rate.
$450 BIPOC rate.
Youth
- Toddlers (0-3 years): free
- Children and teens (4-17 years) attending with an adult: $450.
What’s Included
Tuition includes meals, instruction, and all materials. Camping and indoor lodging are available for an additional cost.
Registration
Complete the registration form once per participant. It takes 5-10 minutes, and you will complete your enrollment with a credit card authorization.
After your enrollment is processed, you will receive several confirmations…
- An automatic confirmation of receiving your registration form
- A payment confirmation from our card processor
- Confirmation that your registration has been processed
Please contact us before registering if any of these apply:
- You would like indoor housing and have an electrical device, such as a CPAP, that needs power overnight. The indoor accommodations for this program do not provide overnight electrical power.
- You have a service animal.
- You are bringing a trailer or vehicle longer than 25′. There are limited spaces to park large vehicles at Earthaven.