At otherWise, we believe that connecting in community—cosmolocally, across difference, across longings, losses, labors, and lifeforms—is how we find our way back from the edge.

Find out below if otherWise is for you.

The Exhausted Activist

You’ve fought hard for change within systems that resist—and sometimes consume—the very people trying to heal them. You’re tired, not just from the fights, but from watching movements fracture under pressure. You’re seeking a space where grief can breathe, solidarity can sober and strengthen, and imagination can re-ignite. A space to ease into real reckoning, to regroup without pretense. As the losses pile up, you’ve started to suspect that what you’ve been fighting for lies somewhere beneath the wreckage. But finding it may mean recalibrating old organizing instincts—and redirecting your fighting spirit toward uncovering interconnected freedom.

The Meta-Professional

You’ve made your mark—leading, facilitating, building. But you see now that harm reduction isn’t enough. You recognize the cracks in the foundations and want to bridge your work toward deeper shifts. Or maybe you’ve simply outgrown your field, your title, even your career. You’re seeking a way of contributing that feels more real, more relational, more regenerative—one that grapples honestly with the end of the world as we know it, and still tends possible futures.

The Soft-Landing Educator

You bring truth and care into your classrooms—even as it gets harder by the day. You carry more than lesson plans: you carry students’ heartaches, societal fractures, the impossible weight of expectations, and the stubborn flame of hope. You see the cracks widening—the subjects, the systems, the assumptions losing relevance faster than they can be replaced. You feel how little contemporary culture esteems the work you know is essential. And still you show up. You’re longing for a co-learning community where complexity isn’t punished, slow transformation is honored, and the sacred work of growing whole human beings is valued. You know deep down: real education was never just about information transfer. It’s about tending the roots of a living, struggling world. You’re ready to find others who remember that too.

The Village Yearner

You dream of living rooted in place, surrounded by others who know, need, and nourish each other—not just acquaintances or networks, but true companions in the work of life. You’re searching for signs that re-villaging is still possible in a world wired for separation. You want to live simply, to secure shelter without lifelong debt, to reduce your precarity and dependence on extractive economies. You long for a life where work and rest weave together naturally, where sharing isn’t a loss but a gain. You believe it’s possible to balance shared living with the sacredness of solitude—to build a life both more connected and more spacious. You’re not looking for utopia. You’re looking for something sturdier: a home within the human web, woven into the more-than-human world.

The Weary Worker

You’ve given your labor, your care, your best ideas—and the system still asks for more. Maybe you’ve poured yourself into work that is non-negotiably necessary, only to find that such work is overlooked, underpaid, or crushed under bureaucratic weight. Or maybe you’ve spent years holding jobs that don’t make much sense anymore, jobs that keep the gears turning but leave you hollow at the end of the day. You carry the ache of wondering: is this what my life’s energy was meant for? You’re tired—but you’re not without hope. You long for ways of living and working that restore dignity by making more life possible: growing food, protecting water, healing bodies, holding grief, repairing the commons, stewarding beauty, and nourishing bioregional thriving. At otherWise, we honor the quiet work, the exhausted hands, the stubborn heart that still beats for something better. We believe the future needs your skills—and your longing.

The Disillusioned Diagonalist

You’ve stood on the left, skipped over to the right—or vice-versa. You’ve taken a hard tour through two-party politics and found it all impoverished. Plenty of leaders and influencers told stories that sounded right, but they turned out to be oversimplified, self-serving, or hollow. You’re not down on democracy in theory, but in practice, you’ve been disappointed, betrayed, or just deeply skeptical of the policies, practices, and personalities being offered. You’re looking for something sturdier than slogans, something more discerning than brute power. Something that feels like it might actually hold up under real pressure.

The Deep Ecology Alchemist

You move with the seasons, listen to the land, and see breakdown not just as loss, but as an invitation to reweave life. You find belonging through soil, seeds, rivers, and roots. Maybe you came through permaculture, food sovereignty, or watershed restoration. You trust the slow wisdom of ecosystems more than the brittle logic of industrial society. You’re seeking companions who tend the land and honor the deep complexity of human community—those willing to listen across cultures, generations, and geographies. You sense, though, that there still might be some senses of supremacy within you that keep you from right relationship. You’re curious about wisdoms beyond your current reach, and ready to braid local rootedness with wider kinship. You’re open to expanding your circle of active care. Here, we move with land and lineage, known and unknown, weaving what has been remembered, recovered, and reimagined.

The Tinkering Transitionist

You’re building what comes next, out of scrap wood, scavenged parts, salvage-yard wisdom, and the sheer stubborn belief that better is possible. Maybe you’ve left the glass towers and cleanrooms behind. Maybe you still have one foot out the door. Either way, you know the future won’t be 3D printed in a lab or beamed down from space.

It’ll be patched together with real hands, real dirt, and real limits. You’re designing low-energy tools, fixing what’s broken, wiring up resilience with whatever’s on hand. You might also be fashioning open-source networks, resilient or nomadic infrastructures, and communications networks. Duct tape and radio frequencies are among your love languages. We need you: your kinetic wisdom, your fix-it spirit, your stubborn practicality, your refusal to wait for perfect conditions. We’re not looking for miracle tech. We’re looking for the kinds of tools, shelters, and systems that can survive a hard rain, a long winter, and a lot of human error. Bring your skills. Bring your soldering iron. Bring your scrounged brilliance. We’re trying to build something worth handing down.

The Reluctant Realist

You see the cracks widening, even when you wish you didn’t. You feel the strain between the world as it was promised and the way it really works. Maybe you’ve been drawn to simplified explanations that offered certainty. Maybe part of you still hopes the old ways can be repaired. But something in you knows the problems run deeper—that the systems around us aren’t just broken, they’re coming apart. You’re starting to connect the dots between issues you once thought were separate. You’re looking for a place to explore these connections without being handed another single answer. otherWise offers space to ask bigger questions, make sense of what’s shifting, and a community that’s been where you are.

The Skeptical Softheart

You’re wary of easy answers and false promises. You’ve seen certainty weaponized, good intentions devolve into dogma, and people turning into what they say they oppose. But your tenderness hasn’t hardened—even as those around you seem sharper, more resentful, maybe even revengeful.
You still feel the world ache—and you ache with it. You want real connection, but you don’t want to be cornered by slogans or forced into someone else’s framework. You’re looking for a community where questions and plainspokenness are welcome, where belonging isn’t limited by language or the right affiliations. A place where integrity speaks louder than performance or perfection. Here, we try to be kind to people, ruthless with systems that cause harm, and tough on those who wield power without care or accountability.
We honor discernment over judgment, knowing that real solidarity comes from learning together and relying upon each other, not from demanding complete agreement or compliance. Your enduring softness is not a weakness—it’s a compass. We need the company of those who still listen before judging, and who are willing to help each other find the next right step without rushing to claim the final word.

The Rooting Mystic

You’ve walked the pathways of spirit—through yoga, energy work, healing traditions, or rituals of remembrance. You know that unseen forces shape the seen world. You know that grief, healing, and transformation move through the body as much as the mind. Now, you’re sensing that spirit and solidarity must be woven together. That healing cannot end at the edges of our own mats, circles, or altars. You’re looking for a community where sacredness and material care are not separate. You don’t want ascension you want to integration and accountability. Step into our spaces to help us honor the medicine of mystery; together, we can make sure the body of the Earth and its beings are not left behind.

Offerings that may interest you

otherWisdom Circles Good Grief

The Accountable Elder

 

You carry experience, grief, and gifts—and you’re seeking ways to offer them without clinging to control. You grew up believing in hard work, upward mobility, maybe even a golden future earned by perseverance. But now that the story is slipping. (Was it ever broadly true?) The old markers of success feel hollow when the foundations themselves are shifting. Part of you longs to rest—you’ve earned it. But part of you knows the work isn’t finished. Not really. You want to support younger generations in ways that are honest, humble, and helpful. Some of you never fully bought into the old myths. Some of you did, and now find yourselves questioning. Either way, we need you. Even if you lived under different premises—fueled by the carbon pulse, shaped by growth—you’ve learned things about life that are still precious. We are a culture aching for real elders, and ready or not, your willingness to show up matters.

The Watchful Ones

You can tell something is off with the world. Maybe you’ve known it for a long time. Maybe you see the cracks that other people ignore. You might not have the perfect words for it yet—and you don’t need to. You’re not here for speeches, or slogans, or groupthink. No supremacy, no playing the victim either. You’re here because you’re paying attention and because you suspect that there other ways to organize a society than the ones on offer. At otherWise, you don’t have to put on a performance to belong. You don’t have to pretend you’re sure about everything—or anything. We’re building a place where people can notice the broken things without picking them up and using them as a weapon. No drama. No nostalgia. No purity tests. Just real people trying to do some real reorganization. Sometimes stepping on toes, always stopping to say sorry and mean it.

The Post-Progress Parent

You are raising, caring for, or walking alongside the next generation at the end of the world as we knew it. You were taught to believe that a better life could be secured through effort, achievement, and perseverance. But the stories that once guided families are fraying, and the milestones that once pointed toward progress feel brittle or hollow. You carry the ache of preparing children for a future you cannot predict—a future that may ask more of them than the world asked of you. You want to equip them with more than survival skills; you want them to know how to belong, to repair, to imagine, to tend what remains and what may yet arise. You are not looking for more programs that train children to compete or conform. You are looking for companions in reimagining how we nurture resilience without hardening, how we protect wonder without lying, how we keep care and courage alive across generations. At otherWise, we believe parenting, mentoring, and community-building are not private endeavors—they are collective acts of love and resistance. We are finding ways to seed new forms of kinship, to raise and be raised again for a world that asks everything of us—and still deserves our tenderness.

The Future Dreamers (9-14yo)

You notice things. You feel things. Even when grownups stay busy or quiet, you can tell that something is strange. Sometimes it feels exciting. Sometimes it feels scary. You care about animals, forests, oceans, and people—even when you don’t always have the words for it. You want to be part of something real. Something that helps, not hurts. At otherWise, you don’t have to pretend. You don’t have to know all the answers. You just have to bring your listening heart—and your courage to keep caring. There’s a place for you here.

The Horizon Watchers (15-24yo)

You were born into an era of endings, even if no one told you that out loud. You can feel it—the shifting seasons, the promises that don’t quite fit, the weight of futures that feel less certain. You’re looking for people who won’t sugarcoat the truth but won’t abandon hope either. People who know that survival isn’t just about technology—it’s about culture, care, and courage. At otherWise, wonder isn’t naive, and wisdom doesn’t slam the door behind it. You are not too young, too late, or too small. We believe you belong here—now.