Our journey together began in 2018, when a small group of humans were seeking to re-wild and re-story our relationship to land and life. We found a place to plant our roots deep in the wilderness that challenged every fiber in our beings. We established what is known as River Rising, and two years later acquired the adjacent farm property that would become Farming Futures. 


By turning away from troubled cities and attuning our senses to the fertile forest, we are remembering what it means to feel healthy, to offer and receive care, to grieve loss, and to share in our capacity for love.  We have been crafting models of cooperation, interdependence and autonomy by fostering relationships that are transformational, rather than transactional.

In 2022, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts Strategic Innovation Fund and the Ontario Arts Council, the Becoming Community project officially launched two years of research and experimentation with a handful of organizational partners and hundreds of community members.  Together we explored artistic, relational and ecological systems through deep dives into regenerative food systems, Indigenous relations, education and leadership, solidarity economics, skill-sharing, natural building, conflict navigation, and rituals of belonging.  Our digital platforms will become a hub of tools, maps, models, videos, creative hacks, and land-led art and culture for this time of great transition. We invite you to join our network of humans daring to design livable futures in the cracks of modernity.

As a land based project in solidarity with life and all relations, we acknowledge the land that holds us, teaches us, and continually challenges our assumptions about what we think we know. This land asks us to slow down, to listen deeply and to pay attention to all beings, seen and unseen. We also recognize that while striving to embrace anti-capitalist stewardship over ownership, the land we are on was acquired through systems born of a colonial lineage that enabled and justified the removal of its original peoples. 

We do not pretend that our vision can undo the historical theft and violence but we are committed to remaining in a humble state of learning. We are in deep gratitude to those original and ongoing caretakers, the Anishinaabeg, the Mississauga, the Haudenosaunee, and the Huron-Wendat. We continue to ask what it truly means to be in honourable relationship and what reconciliation looks like as we sprout a sanctuary for community to gather, heal and celebrate in reciprocity with the great mystery and wildness of life.