Durango Land Project

Over the past four years we have been living in a 15-person community in the majestic Turtle Valley near Durango, Colorado. Here we’ve had the perfect practice ground to explore and experiment with many of our SEEDS frameworks, concepts, and vision for a more beautiful future based upon community-based ecological stewardship. During the course of our time here, we’ve had the opportunity to design and implement a regenerative community farm system, guide community-based wilderness rites-of-passage ceremonies, and host seasonal celebrations and a weekly neighborhood farm stand for deepened relationships with people and place. In the process, our relationship with the place kept evolving to reveal new layers of healing, connection, and emergent possibility. Now we have the opportunity to further develop our work here through purchasing property in the same valley we have called home for the past four years.

During the winter of 2022-23, after three successful growing seasons, a generative community design process, and invaluable applied praxis we came the realization that it was time for us to leave the small 140 sq ft home we had built at the Turtle Lake Community Farm in order to step toward a new chapter in life. We felt like we had outgrown our current situation but were not yet clear what was next. We both grieved the possibility that we may have to leave the valley we had spent so much time tending and rooting into. Although there were innumerable lessons from our time living there, it also  felt like there was a lot more vision wanting to be rooted into the ground.

There is currently a 4-acre property for sale adjacent to the Turtle Lake Community Farm where we have been living. After much consideration and reflection, it has become increasingly clear that purchasing this property could radically support the further development of our work in this bioregion and the world. We see ways that this property could become an innovative model for localized efforts of eco-cultural resilience. We are blessed to have the support of several loving family members and dear friends who have pledged enough capital to make an initial offer for the raw land, but we still really need your help to develop the land.

We have hopes to build an entirely off-grid home that demonstrates bio-regionally appropriate sustainable design, innovative technological integration, and radical affordability. We hope to build an indoor/outdoor community center for promoting the cultural arts such as story-telling, music, theater, circle practice, and traditional folk arts. We hope to build a barn that serves multiple functions such as a food center for the neighborhood CSA, community barn dance hall, tool and bike share, indoor makers’ workspace, pottery barn, woodshop and more. We hope to use the land not only to have a home we can call our own but through deepening our roots to this place, ultimately serve the cultural development of the valley we have so deeply come to love.

If you feel called to support our vision, please consider donating to this project. Being that we are in early stages of development, every dollar matters. It should be noted that if we meet obstacles in the land purchasing process or otherwise decide not to pursue this particular opportunity, capital donated to this love fund will be directed toward future land development opportunities that are based in similar values. We deeply thank you for your consideration and any scale of generosity as we move toward this shared vision.