The Great Turning Summit

Her wide-ranging work addresses psychological and spiritual issues of the nuclear age, the cultivation of ecological awareness, and the fruitful resonance between Buddhist thought and postmodern science. The many dimensions of this work are explored in her thirteen books, which include three volumes of poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke with translation and commentary.

As the root teacher of The Work That Reconnects, Joanna created a ground-breaking framework for personal and social change, as well as a powerful workshop methodology for its application.

Based in Berkeley, California, close to her children and grandchildren, Joanna spent many years in other lands and cultures, viewing movements for social change and exploring their roots in religious thought and practice.

Since the early 1980’s her travel was governed by invitations to teach the group work that she and a growing number of colleagues were developing. Many thousands of people around the world have participated in Joanna’s workshops and trainings. These methods, incorporated in the Work That Reconnects, have been adopted and adapted yet more widely in classrooms, community centers, and grassroots organizing.

In the face of overwhelming social and ecological crises, this work helps people transform despair and apathy into constructive, collaborative action. It brings a new way of seeing the world as our larger living body. This perspective frees us from the assumptions and attitudes that now threaten the continuity of life on Earth.

My life has become a living apprenticeship to The Great Turning: the long, necessary work of helping shift our world toward a life-sustaining future. I have the deep privilege of walking alongside people who want nothing more than to offer something honest and reparative to their communities and to the Earth. I am committed to supporting this movement by catching us when we are tired or disoriented, and by cultivating spaces that help liberate courage, steadiness, and imagination. Whether through music, facilitation, or community-building, my deepest calling is to help people remember what becomes possible when we move together in service of life, and to recognize that this movement is already unfolding, quietly and boldly, across the world.

School for The Great Turning was born from an urgent need for places where inner transformation, cultural remembering, and collective action are held together. Emerging from my years of facilitating the Work That Reconnects, the school exists to support people in building the emotional resilience, clarity of purpose, and relational capacity needed to face the crises of our time, and to actively participate in the creation of a more just, regenerative, and life-affirming future.

This is a school for those longing to practice community care; to clarify their role, deepen their roots, and learn how to stay in the work for the long haul. It is for activists, artists, educators, organizers, and everyday people who feel the pull to meet this moment with both tenderness and resolve. Here, grief and beauty are welcomed as teachers, and belonging is understood as a practice we shape together.

You’re welcome here if you’re seeking steady ground in uncertain times. If you long for spaces where learning is alive, where grief and hope can sit side by side, and where the work of mending our relationship with the Earth and with one another is shared in good company. This is a place for those drawn to the slow, courageous work of tending to culture, to community, and to the future we are bringing into being.

Music is a living thread in everything I offer. I fell in love with the fiddle when I was three years old, after my father brought me to a small instrument shop in Pasadena, California, and invited me to choose anything I wished. I pointed to the violin without hesitation, beginning a lifelong relationship with its voice, one that has shaped how I listen, how I teach, and how I belong.

Today, one of my greatest joys is touring with Singing the Bones, a diasporic musical project that lives at the intersection of cultural healing and collective song. Alongside my beloved bandmates, Kele Nitoto and M’Gilvry, we share music that invites people back into connection—with themselves, with ancestral memory, and with one another.

She is a student of global cycles of violence that eventually gave rise to The Native American Holocaust and the destruction of many cyclic relationships between human beings and nature. This exploration birthed her passion for revitalizing spiritual relationships with Mother Earth and cultivating spaces for forgiveness and reconciliation to occur between cultural groups. She is a co-founder of The Taos Peace and Reconciliation Council which works to heal intergenerational trauma and ethnic division in the northern New Mexico.

She is a walker within the Nihigaal Bee Iiná Movement, a 1,000-mile prayer walk through Diné Tah (the Navajo homeland) that is exposing the exploitation of Diné land and people by uranium, coal, oil and gas industries. She is the lead organizer of the Black Hill Unity Concert which gathers native and nonnative musicians to pray for the return of guardianship of the Black Hills to the Lakota, Nakota and Dakota nations. She is the also the founder of Regeneration Festival, an annual celebration of children that occurs in 13 countries around the world every September.

In 2012, she graduated with honors from Stanford University with a degree in Environmental Anthropology. During her time there she wrote the award winning papers: Nature and the Supernatural: The Role of Culture and Spirituality in Sustaining Primate Populations in Manu National Park, Peru and Chonos Pom: Ethnic Endemism Among the Winnemem Wintu and the Cultural Impacts of Enlarging Shasta Reservoir.

She currently lives in Diné Tah, the Navajo ancestral homeland which spans what is now called New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona. She spends her free time learning her endangered mother tongue, planting corn, beans and squash and spending time with elders who retain traditional spiritual and ecological knowledge.

the prayer of their life is to support safe and hilarious passage through climate collapse. they embody this commitment of attending to black health/imagination, commemorative justice (Free Egunfemi) and hospicing the shit that hurts black folks and the earth through serving as creative director for Lead to Life design collective and ecological educator for ancestral arts skills and nature-connection school Weaving Earth.

they are currently co-conjuring a film with esperanza spalding in collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony and practicing pastoral care (in an ecological and ministerial sense) as a co-steward of a land refuge in Kashia Pomo territory in northern California. mostly, brontë is up to the sweet tender rhythm of quotidian black queer-lifemaking, ever-committed to humor & liberation, ever-marked by grief at the distance made between us and all of life.

In the late 1970s, he co-founded the Rainforest Information Centre, helping to catalyze international efforts to defend tropical rainforests and Indigenous land rights. For decades, John has worked at the intersection of grassroots activism, systems thinking, and spiritual ecology, offering a fierce and loving response to ecological destruction grounded in reverence for the more-than-human world.

A close collaborator of Joanna Macy, John Seed is widely known for his role in developing and facilitating Deep Ecology practices, including the Council of All Beings, which invites participants to experience their interconnectedness with the Earth through ritual, imagination, and embodied knowing. His teaching emphasizes the shift from an ego-centered worldview to an eco-centered one, reminding us that environmental action flows most sustainably from a felt sense of belonging to the living planet. Through teaching, writing, and decades of frontline advocacy, John continues to inspire courage, humility, and devotion in service of life.

She is the Director of the SEAL Initiatives at American Baptist College in Nashville TN (Social Justice, Equity, Advocacy, and Leadership). Vahisha is also a core team member of TRACC4Movements (Trauma Response and Crisis Care), providing supportive tools for wellness for those who labor in freedom and liberation. She also serves as an associate minister at Christ Missionary Baptist Church, under Rev. Dr. Gina Stewart, Senior Pastor, where she was licensed and ordained June 23, 2019.

Vahisha holds a dual Master’s of Divinity and Master’s of Mental Health Counseling with an Education Specialist Certification from Gardner-Webb University and a bachelor’s degree in Communications with a concentration in Interpersonal Organization from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In addition to penning book reviews, journal articles, online publications, and writing a bachelor’s curriculum in Applied Psychology, she has curated and co-edited three editions of *Resipiscence: A Lenten Devotional for Dismantling White Supremacy*, 2018-2020.

She is a recent graduate from Brown University, built on occupied Wampanoag and Narragansett lands, and received a BA in Critical Development Studies with a focus on Indigenous resistance and liberation. Ruth is the Climate Justice Director for Native Movement, a matriarchal grassroots Indigenous organization that fights for the rights of Indigenous peoples, our lands and waters, and justice for our ancestors and descendants.

She has worked many years towards climate justice and a regenerative economy for all on her lands and beyond, her work also includes international advocacy, including attending the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, the UN Youth Climate Summit, COP25 in Madrid, Spain, and the Continental Gathering of Indigenous Women of the Americas (ECMIA). She is a daughter, a granddaughter, and aunty, a language learner, a traditional beadworker, and a subsistence fisherwomxn.

He is passionate about regenerative agriculture, climate action, and entrepreneurship. He is the founder and director of Plethora Social Initiative, a refugee-led organization that works to develop the inner potential and capacities of refugees in Nakivale Refugees settlement, and their host community. They provide learning opportunities and a community of practitioners, encouraging each person’s unique abilities while developing a regenerative culture and building a resilient local community.

Women must comply with the Islamic Republic’s mandatory hijab laws from the onset of puberty, and they are unequal in matters of marriage, divorce, custody, inheritance, and more. In the Fall of 2022, hundreds of protesters, including dozens of children, were killed by Iranian authorities, and an estimated 23,000 were arrested. These nationwide protests were triggered by the tragic murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Jina Amini who died in police custody after being arrested by Iran’s “morality police” for failing to cover her hair adequately. We will hear from Iranian women who have been on the ground in Iran since the beginning of this uprising, sharing their experiences as well as how they experience this movement as part of The Great Turning. For their safety, these women will remain anonymous.

2008 was a year of great alchemy. Fires erupted in Northern California, a great wind of inspiration blew through, catalyzing a series of songs written from the soil and rivers, ash and heat of Chico where these two musicians met.

In the early days these troubadours toted instruments around town by bicycle and shared their songs at farmers markets, community gatherings, small cafes and festivals. Not too long after, these two voices became iconic to the Chico community, representing idyllic values of friendship, community, love for nature and care for Self and World. The love spread, sisterhood held strong through 14 years of LIFE: children, relationships arriving and dissolving, making home in many new places.

Mamuse songs such as “We Shall Be Known” and “Hallelujah” have sprouted wings and are now sung at the bed sides of birthing mothers, round campfires, at weddings and funerals... All places where people are gathered to celebrate and to mourn. These are songs born of the Folk lineage; songs for all of us.

She helps with the design and administration of our programs, and facilitates some of our Work that Reconnects gatherings and our Somatic Practice and Support Circles.

Leilani is also a mom of two and a Licensed Acupuncturist and dreamworker. In her clinical practice, she supports people dealing with pain, disease, infertility, and stress, using acupuncture, traditional Chinese herbal medicine, modern functional medicine, and dreamwork. With groups, she facilitates the Work that Reconnects and teaches courses on practical wisdom from Chinese Medicine.

Leilani attended Evergreen State College, where she earned a B.A. with a focus on Political Economy and Holistic Health, and the National University of Natural Medicine, where she graduated with a Masters of Science in Oriental Medicine. You can hear more from Leilani on Turning Season Podcast, a series of conversations she hosts with people around the world about how and why they’re rising to their own unique roles in the Great Turning.