otherWise is a cosmolocal learning community of Wisdom-seekers and reVillagers.
Small, place-rooted gatherings. Deep, slow virtual inquiry. Shared rituals. Commons-Sense.
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Mission
otherWise teaches people to be where they are together.
We’re weaving a network of interdependent, intergenerational communities that nourish local autonomy while cross-pollinating wisdom across distance.
Not to teach the right answers—
but to live the necessary questions.
Not to fix the world—
but to stay with it, tend it, compost what must be composted.
otherWise uses community-based, lifelong learning, and cosmolocal connections to reconnect people and their homeplaces through care and collaboration.
We envision (more than) human communities, cultures, and economies that have re-learned to “belong” and “be long” within vibrant and dynamic ecosystems through care, dignified labor, and the power of paradigm shifts.
Purpose
Approach
We ground ourselves in our places while journeying through liminal spaces and times of tremendous transition.
otherWise moves education outside of legacy institutions. We make education accessible to people who might otherwise be unable to access spaces for deep consideration and conversation, change-shaping and community building, or practical, providential skill-building.
Listening to land, legacy, and deep time enlivens our learning, enables deeper acknowledgement, and recovers reciprocity.
otherWise is based on unceded Abenaki territory within the wider homelands of Ndakinna, in the watershed of the Passumpsic River, near Sozap Nebees (Joe’s Pond, Danville) in the Northeastern North American bioregion (NA10). Land is not site but source. In an era of reckoning, we pursue entangled liberation, placefully and cosmolocally.
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Placedness
Educational Philosophy
“Mutual learning happens in the entropy; we need the confusion to release the new.”
― Nora Bateson
The vast majority of people alive today didn’t learn how to show up for the predicament we face.
Few legacy educational institutions – even those that position themselves as “alternative” – have the courage, stamina, or integrity to reckon with reality, make rapid shifts or take the kind of action that reaches the roots. Even when offered insights, material support, and a protective chrysalis, many are seduced by the purportedly inherent virtues of education, too wedded to the idea of their own expertise, and too invested in the futurity of modernity to imagine otherWise.
It will not be enough for educators to climb down from the ivory tower and go for a walk in the woods. Instead, they must allow the tower within to come apart and invite others, including those who never ascended, to help assemble temporary structures that can offer shelter – space for warmth, hydration, and nourishment; for caring exchanges; for honest attempts; for potent failures. To be clear, we are not anti-expertise; we are about humbling it before and integrating it with otherWisdoms.
As we live into the end of the familiar, we tune in. The shifting terrain can be sensed beneath our soles and scoped from a lookout.
It can be felt if we ease our fingers into the loam or if we meet the gaze of a stranger for longer than is polite. It can be sketched, perhaps, but these maps are sure to expire before the journeyers arrive at anything like a destination. What we need now are willing guides. Those who’ve offered their attention and empathy to the unraveling. People who are willing to walk just a step ahead of others and fall back when someone else can better navigate.
otherWise offers and encourages learning from a place of generative uncertainty.
Paiting by Minoru Nomata, all rights reserved.
It can be felt if we ease our fingers into the loam or if we meet the gaze of a stranger for longer than is polite. It can be sketched, perhaps, but these maps are sure to expire before the journeyers arrive at anything like a destination. What we need now are willing guides. Those who’ve offered their attention and empathy to the unraveling. People who are willing to walk just a step ahead of others and fall back when someone else can better navigate.
otherWise offers and encourages learning from a place of generative uncertainty.
Our Spaceholders
Rather than replicate top-down structures, we operate as a Worker Self-Directed Nonprofit. This means that the people doing the daily work help shape the direction of the organization itself. We aim to model now the kinds of relational, collaborative ways of working that we believe are vital for more just, resilient futures.
Our approach is inspired by movements for economic democracy, collective leadership, and prefigurative practice — the idea that we build the worlds we long for by living into them today, in imperfect and evolving ways.
Nicole C.
Vessel Maker. Word-winder. Midwife to Paradigm Shifts
Nicole Civita is trying to make a home at the crossroads of devotion and discernment. She’s a little bit obsessed with peering into the cracks and sharing what she sees – in all its brutality and beauty. An integrative lawyer turned educator, writer, and weaver of wor(l)ds, Nicole is the founder of otherWise – tending to its relational integrity, collaborative discernment, and rhythms amid the rumbling.
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She brings the connection-craving mind of a complexity thinker, the tender heart of a mother, kitchen witch, and care ethicist, and the (always cramping yet capable) hands of a convener.
Underneath it all, Nicole remains a protector of possibility – someone who insists on the value of interdependence, resists the pull of professional pretense, and refuses to turn away from what is hard or harmful. She now facilitates learning experiences from a place of generative uncertainty, dreams of intergenerational repatterning, and honors the wisdom secreted in plain sight. As otherWise’s Executive Director, Nicole’s leadership is neither technocratic nor performative – it is shaped by love for the living world and a longing to recover what modernity would have us forget.
Nissa C.
Re-Villaging Steward. Craft-Keeper. Curious about that which sustains.
At otherWise, Nissa stewards the Re-Villaging content pillar, guiding efforts to reclaim practical skills, place-based repair, and the material and energetic circulations that ground community life. She’s especially excited about bike mechanics, natural building, and appropriate technology – and about finding ways to live rooted, accountable, and alive.
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Nissa has long been drawn to the essential endeavors that make life possible. As a child, she trained her attention on the natural world and practiced survival skills in backyards and forests. Her fascination with collective life led her to study sociobiology and the inner workings of honey bee hives – until disillusionment with academia and industrial agriculture nudged her back toward embodied, relational learning. She now draws inspiration from the hive’s choreography of shared labor to explore how humans might reweave livelihood, home, and care in a cosmolocal, low-energy future.
Nakasi K.
Collaboration Catalyst. Edgework Educator. Good Troublemaker.
Nakasi is a multi-situated edgeworker who is living, learning and loving across communities, disciplines and countries. She coordinates the day-to-day movements of otherWise, grounding our operations in care and coherence. Nakasi co-leads our Edgework learning arc, bridges across programs and platforms, and holds space for hard conversations with warmth, clarity, and integrity.
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Nakasi is especially committed to dismantling dominant narratives within environmentalism and reimagining ecological education as an act of solidarity, creativity, care and embodied justice. Beyond this, Nakasi is committed to having a good time, with good people, making good trouble.
Emily S.
Grief tender. otherWays explorer. Storyteller.
At otherWise, Emily holds space for others to tenderly welcome grief into their lives, find wholeness within it, and let it move them to live with as much presence, authenticity, and reverence for life as possible. With death and grief as the ultimate teachers in the impermanence of it all, she has found a special freedom in the release of certainty, in accepting endings, and in exploring otherWays to show up wholly to a future with no guarantees.
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As a young witness to the death of her father, Emily began an apprenticeship with grief early on in life. Learning from loss, she developed a deep awareness of the fragility of life and the importance of metabolizing the inevitable sorrows it brings. After attempts to reject, deny, and ignore her own grief, she has learned to see it as an essential component to our wholeness, as well as a powerful tool of resistance. Recognizing the lack of death and grief literacy within the dominant culture, she is passionate about bringing both out of the darkness and into the discourse.
A first look at
First Principles
If you’ve just found your way here, welcome to a space between stories. These are some of the principles that help us keep our bearings as we move with uncertainty together.
1. We honor the unraveling.
We don’t look away from what’s falling apart, crumbling under its own weight.
Facing reality opens the door to possibility.
2. We are collapse-responsive and committed to entangled liberation.
We’re not here to save or control.
We’re here to revive adaptive, life-nurturing ways of being and be longing—together.
3. We make space for otherWisdoms.
We center insights from the edges and from overlooked sources—human and more-than-human.
We’re not very interested in hot-takes or innovation.
We create conditions for wisdom to be revealed.
4. We relate richly, generously, and with earned trust.
We choose connection over transaction and practice trust with care, integrity, and consent.
5. We live, die, and begin again within the breathing body of Earth.
We aim to live, work, and come to know ourselves as part of cycles and within rhythms that are utterly earthly – inescapable, ever changing, nourishing through both growth and decay.
6. We help each other re-village.
We’re learning how to be community again – with shared skills, care, and response-abilities. Practical provisioning, together.
7. We prefigure what we long for.
We try to live the future we imagine, even if it’s messy, imperfect, and incomplete. We do what we can now, with what we have.
8. We embrace generative uncertainty.
We don’t peddle easy answers. But we have a curiosity, courage, discomfort tolerance to spare and share. otherWisdoms develop our capacity to move with the unknown.