For most of my adult life, my work has centered around creative work and online business — websites, designs, systems, and strategies that help other people bring their visions to life. I’ve always loved the online space: designing, taking courses, building systems, and connecting with people all over the world. There’s something deeply satisfying about taking an idea that lives in someone’s head and turning it into something real, organized, and beautiful.

The online world has been my active focus, but since 2003 when I volunteered on a subsistence permaculture farm, I have had a vision of buying land and starting a residential community, where people could create an alternative economy and live in a way that is kinder to the earth and our fellow beings. It was always in the back of my mind that online business, as much as I enjoy it, was really a means to an end.

Over the years, I’ve worked at an off-grid supply store, studied architecture and natural building, and visited ecovillages like Auroville in India and Govardhan in Maharashtra. Each experience taught me something new about how humans can live in harmony with the earth — and with each other.

In a way, my path has been a long winding road that turned out to be the perfect preparation. My years in design and digital strategy have taught me about systems thinking, communication, collaboration, and entrepreneurship — all skills that will be invaluable in building a thriving community.

A Pull Toward the Tangible

Over the past few years, as the global situation seems more dire, the climate crisis more urgent, I’m pulled to unify my creative work and my bigger vision. There will never be the perfect time to start an ecovillage, but if I don’t take baby steps toward it, I will never get there, so I have made a roadmap for myself to bridge my current work to my village vision, which means continuing my creative work while aligning it with my larger purpose.

Phase 1: Connection

• Growing the Birch Business Collective, a membership for solopreneurs who want to run their businesses with integrity, intention, and creativity, and need help in the online space. This lets me bring all my online skills into one offering, and is a way to connect with more people who are doing meaningful work.
• First steps toward the village dream: Intentional Community Discussion Group to learn more about what it takes to create and sustain a successful community, and connect with people who may be potential collaborators.
• Continuing to work with clients who are doing meaningful, sustainable, and regenerative work in the world.

Phase 2: Resource-Building

Developing Wonder & Wilder, an online course library exploring human rewilding — helping people reconnect with nature, purpose, and each other. Many people with important communty-building and resillience-building skills want to reach a larger audience and package their knowledge, but don’t have the expertise to create online courses. Wonder & Wilder will be a profit-sharing course-creation service.

Phase 3: Ecovillage

By now I will have connected with many like-minded people and will hopefully have found some collaborators for the ecovillage project.

Each project is a step toward the bigger vision: to create a network of people who not only talk about a better world online but build it, piece by piece, in real life.

Let’s Co-Create

If you’ve ever felt the same pull to live more in alignment with nature, I hope you’ll follow along — or even reach out.

I’m drawn to people working in all the interconnected layers of rewilding — from ecology, traditional skills, and natural building to social permaculture, group process, alternative economics, and the healing arts rooted in nervous system awareness.

Here are a few ways we might collaborate or support each other:

• 🌿 You need help bringing your business online — through design, systems, or strategy. (That’s what the Birch Business Collective is all about.)
• 🏡 You’re interested in intentional community, particularly here in Nova Scotia, and want to explore what that could look like together.
• 🎥 You want to create an online course to share your skills or teachings, and you’re curious about collaborating under the Wonder & Wilder umbrella.

If any of this resonates, send me a message.