Program Arc
The 9-month Positive Deviants journey is broken down into three required in-person immersions, four online group sessions, and four waypoint calls from February, 2024 through to November, 2024.
Ignition
Gathering One: April 9th – April 19th, 2024
The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity
Treaty Seven Territory, Banff, Alberta
The Ignition Immersion builds a foundation for the Fellowship where we get to know one another and learn about each other’s stories, work, practices, dreams, challenges and systems. We will build a shared language and reference points around systems and complexity and explore patterns of intervention and transformation. We will begin to establish our ways of practicing together, with regular intervals of reflection, journaling, dialogue and group discussion. You will get clear about the type of change — personal, relational and systemic — that you are working towards over the coming months and what it will really take to foster.
Listening to the Land
Gathering Two: July 6th - July 14th 2024
Ktunaxa and Blackfoot Territory, British Columbia
Natural eco-systems offer a beautiful living model to understand the dynamics and principles of complex socio- cultural systems. In Listening to the Land, participants develop a greater understanding of complex living systems and undergo an extended period of reflective solitude at a remote lodge in the Canadian Rockies. We’ll explore the ecology of worldview, purpose, mindset and connection and cultivate profound new capabilities for pattern tracking, and deep listening. We’ll learn to articulate, align with and act from with a deep sense of purpose, calling, commitment and motivation; and will be encouraged to embody the unique systems ‘niche’ that we’re each called to inhabit in this time - and from which we can make our distinctive contribution.
Note: this is a wilderness camping experience in a single occupancy tent. See Accommodations in Important Details below.
Integration
Gathering Three: November 4th – November 10th, 2024
Treaty Seven Territory, Cochrane, Alberta
The Integration Immersion closes our time together and involves harvesting insights, renewing commitments and taking creative action. Our collective learning journey will largely inform how this module takes shape, allowing for beneficial emergence.
Online Group and Waypoint Sessions
Group Sessions (4 total):
We will meet together at four separate times throughout the fellowship learning journey to share some of the questions we are holding to explore the edges of our learning and experimentation.
Group sessions will take place on Zoom for 90 minutes, always starting at 12:00 MT mountain time.
Wednesday, February 21: 12pm MT
Wednesday March 13: 12pm MT
Wednesday, June 19: 12pm MT
Wednesday, September 25th: 12pm MT
Convert to your time zone here.
Waypoint Sessions (4 total):
Prior to the first in-person gathering you will have the opportunity to meet with members of the hosting team to have a conversation around your growth edges and how these might impact your work as systems leaders and entrepreneurs. These waypoint calls will be scheduled along the way according to your availability.
Program Elements
In a single day there could be meditation and dance sessions, a challenging group process around race and inter-sectionality, a complexity leadership powerpoint, an Elder-led ceremony, a wander on the land, a dojo session and an artistic practice. Plus meal-time conversations with fascinating people and solo reflective/integration time.
Meet Your Hosts
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He/Him
Greetings everyone! I’m an artist, activist, scholar, parent and identical twin. I like making things and working creatively to solve problems and answer questions.
In my daily work, I hope to inspire irresistible revolutions through art, activism and pedagogy. As an artist, I tell stories and make art about systems change and Black activist culture. As an educator, I teach in community and in the university setting as an Assistant Professor at McMaster University.
I’m interested in helping people to thrive, to find what they’re passionate about and to go and do it and in helping people to make change in their communities. I’m interested in residencies as generative spaces for galvanizing support for and incubating change making and direct action strategies.
I love living on this planet. I am most at home in the forest, in the water, and in nature. I’m interested in mycelial networks, botany and psychedelics. I’m a speculative fiction writer and artist and am interested in practicing the future together through this work.
In 2005 I spent time working with Octavia Butler- Black speculative fiction writer extraordinare-and her ideas about change have shaped my understanding of what’s possible through systems change lenses.
So! Welcome to this year! All that you touch you change//all that you change changes you.
You can find my formal bio here.
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She/Her
I grew up in Colorado to a family of artists, entrepreneurs, and musicians who have always pushed me to think differently. At a young age I left the mountain west for San Francisco and then to Los Angeles where I joined the world of the performing and entertainment arts. I found my people in the warehouses, artist enclaves, and co-housing collectives all over the world that offered refuge for wildly different worldviews, misfit thinking, and creative experimentation. It was there that I gained some of my most valuable life skills: both the scrappy, entrepreneurial and artistic visionary action that is required to thrive at the edges, and also an applied appreciation for the intelligence of the body, the heart, and the imagination.
Though I left the performing arts over a decade ago, I continue to be drawn to understanding the invisible currents that give rise to the visible in individuals and in systems. This curiosity has gifted me the great privilege of accompanying people at their developmental edges, and crafting generative growing/learning spaces. I am a practitioner-scholar in the fields of adult development, land-based and transformative education, and soulcentric psychology. In addition to our work at Wolf Willow, I regularly guide intrepid wanderers into multi-day ceremonies in wilderness settings.
My work has been forged in the field of life as a devotee of the Living Earth. I also hold a PhD in Psychology and have researched and written extensively on the relationship between uncertainty, beauty, and complexity leadership.
I now live and dream on the ancestral lands of the Ute Mountain Ute, Dine, and Ancestral Puebloan people in the desert southwest — a place that has my heart. I live rurally, and engage locally. When I am not with you, I can be found tending the land, painting, dancing, or building things, volunteering in my community, or getting into mischief with my beloved, Dr. Julian Norris. I look forward to learning alongside you!
You can check out my formal bio here.
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She/Her/Elle
Vanessa works at the intersection between systems and soul. She works locally and around the world to co-create cultures and communities of practice dedicated to systems transformation amidst complexity, collapse and chaos. The deeper pulse of her work is to welcome the many intangible, often marginalized intelligences to participate with us in this time of massive transition.
Vanessa co-founded the Living Wholeness Institute which works with citizens, teams, organizations and social movements around the globe on initiatives that are transforming broken systems and creating new, deeply sustainable social realities. She has a Masters in Architecture (McGill) and a Masters in Process-Oriented Psychology and Conflict Studies (PWI). Vanessa has 25 years experience in systems transformation, leadership development and building practice grounds for participatory change processes locally and internationally. This includes co-initiating The Art of Hosting — Athens when she lived in Jerusalem and Athens during Greece’s economic and political crisis. She combines a living systems worldview with deep democracy to discover collective ways forward while tending to trauma, diversity and relationship issues and unprocessed history. Vanessa creates cultures — personal, organizational, societal — that are alive and deeply aligned with all of life; this includes working generatively with transitions- from the mess and excitement of creating new systems and initiatives to Conscious Closure and the Wild life of Dying.
Vanessa is a former executive director of Montreal’s Santropol Roulant, a vibrant non-profit founded by young people where innovations with food, urban sustainability and intergenerational relationships act as catalysts for social change. She worked on Parliament Hill, in wilderness education, in India with Aga Khan Foundation and Guatemala in Fair Trade Coffee. She is faculty with Anima Leadership’s The Art of Public Dialogue: Hosting Conversations on Race and Identity as well as faculty with Trailblazery’s Hedge School that has been lauded for its ‘exploration of the possible.’
She comes from lineages of poets and policy-makers, settlers from Wales, Scotland, England and Ireland who were harmed and the harmers, colonized then colonizer. Vanessa lives in Tiohtiá:ke also known as Montreal on the unceded territories of Kanien’kehá:ka of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
As an architect, she brings the essence of participatory design to create collective spaces of inner and outer transformation. As a poet, writer and former publisher of the Utne award-winning yoga magazine ascent magazine, she brings a depth of reflective, body and awareness practices to develop the inner diversity of leaders and change agents. And as a global soul, she knows it is a great time to be alive and there is a great journey ahead of us.
She is currently working on her book, The Wild Life of Dying.
See Vanessa’s TEDx talk Conscious Closure and the Wild Life of Dying.
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She/Her
Aaniin, Mizhiikay-kwe ndi-zhnikaas. Nebane’gwune ndoodem. Makomanising ndoo-njibaa. Anishnabai-kwe ndaaw. I am a community member of the Temagami First Nation on Bear Island. We are the Teme-Augama Anishnabai, the Deep Water Peoples.
Though living with Mother Earth and in my purpose, I feel called to walk with those on deep journeys of healing, learning and transformation. I am on that journey myself and am deeply supported in community.
This is the most rich and fertile part of my life currently, healing from trauma and intergenerational trauma. Reclaiming.
As for what I am up to work-wise in addition to Positive Deviants...
* I work as a physician, specializing in Family Medicine and Indigenous Health. My path integrates clinical medicine with Indigenous ways of knowing and healing.
* I work in health education systems as a Clinical Instructor and Indigenous Portfolio Co-Director at the Faculty of Medicine at UBC. I work alongside a powerful and kind Elder in changing and decolonizing this system.
* I am trained as a psychedelic therapist and am in connection
with the Roots To Thrive Program. I am especially connected to the spiritual healing inherent in psychedelic medicine and know that we all have inside of us, the way to heal ourselves.
* I have 25 years experience as a culturally-centered wilderness guide and have a deep commitment to the power of land-based traditions. I am a musician, backcountry devotee, fancy-shawl dancer and a parent to two capable, creative and courageous children.
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He/Him
Hi Folks!
I grew up on a hop farm in southern England. It was an old landscape – the only dwelling place I could see from my bedroom window was a 6,000 year old long barrow...the tomb-shrine of distant ancestors. Old bones and ghosts. I’m still digging them up as I learn how the unresolved pain and suffering of our ancestors helps to shape the present. After time spent living and working on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota, I came to Canada for a brief visit in the late 80’s to learn about the work of an Indigenous-led organization that was bringing together spiritual leaders, healers, systems thinkers, adult educators and community activists to support the healing and development aspirations of Indigenous communities. I ended up working for them for five years and have been a grateful guest in Treaty 7 territory ever since.
I’ve had a wildly diverse career and set of life experiences. I’ve worked night shifts for a street crisis team and been a faculty member for Canada’s Advanced Leadership Program training the leaders running every branch of the federal government. I’ve been a nightclub doorman, the music teacher and storyteller at a K-6 school and a counsellor with recently released inmates at a probation hostel. I’ve started a charitable foundation and directed the mountain and ocean schools for Outward Bound Canada. I’ve worked with young people entrenched in street life or who found themselves in family violence shelters, alternative justice programs, the sex trade, and solvent abuse treatment centres. I’ve worked with militarized youth and combat veterans, with entrepreneurs and innovators, and with all kinds of organizations around the world. For several years, I co-directed the Getting To Maybe social innovation residency at the Banff Centre. These days, in addition to my work with Wolf Willow, I have a faculty position at the University of Calgary’s Haskayne School of Business where I teach courses related to complexity and leadership.
My work has been seasoned by a love for the bardic traditions - the music, visionary poetics and mythic patterns of my homelands. It’s been weathered from a career spent in wild landscapes and honed through contemplative and somatic practice. I have an interdisciplinary PhD that focused on transformative learning, psychology and systems change. I’m a member of the Association of Canadian Mountain Guides and hold a teaching license in Budo Taijutsu, the martial art and spiritual tradition associated with the Japanese ninja. Above all, I consider myself to be a student of – and occasional teaching assistant to - Mystery and the emergent wonders of the living world. I aspire to be good practical company for anyone wandering in the depths or wondering at the threshold…particularly those called to birth and build the life-enhancing patterns of consciousness and culture required for a flourishing future.
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She/Her
Here’s a bit about me; I volunteered and worked in communities for a long time, as a literacy educator, parenting advisor and justice advocate. This served to anchor me and my career — I deeply value life experience, I honour multiple ways of knowing, I acknowledge the power of intergenerational love and I believe in the potential that lies in each of us to be what our world needs.
Just over 20 years ago, I was invited into the world of universities, where I designed leadership programs and courses, taught, researched, and partnered in the spaces between communities and campuses — this led to the founding of the Canadian Alliance for Community Service- Learning which I directed in its early years. My final university role was as Associate Director for the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience at the University of Waterloo — part of the ten year Canada-wide initiative called, Social Innovation Generation (SiG). I also worked with a brilliant team to co-design and deliver an international offering — the Rockefeller Foundation’s Global Fellowship program. Trusting relationships served to open doors where I could act as an advisor to foundations (Senior Fellow at the McConnell Foundation), corporations (Lead Designer for the Suncor Energy Corporation’s annual Gathering) and academic institutions (Founding Director of Canadian Alliance for Community Service-Learning). Most of all, I feel so honoured to have acted as mentor, coach and friend to hundreds of brilliant system entrepreneurs.
Recently, I’ve become interested in kind endings; the concept of hospice and final transitions for people, organizations, systems. It’s been amazing to study the sacred practices of death doulas at the Conscious Dying Institute in Colorado. I’m inspired by stories of transformation and I’m grateful to be able to share some of these through my writing, in video, in conversations, and across a series of podcasts, called “Maybe”.
Last words for now — I am one of the wild ones that co-founded the Wolf Willow Institute for Systems Learning, and we are privileged to be able to offer programs such as this fellowship — welcome!
Important Details
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Gathering One: Ignite
April 9th – April 19th, 2023
Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity
Treaty Seven Territory, Banff, Alberta
Gathering Two: Listening to the Land
Gathering Two: July 6th - July 14th
Cross River Education Centre
Ktunaxa and Blackfoot Territory, British Columbia
Gathering Three: Integration
November 4th – November 10th, 2024
The Crossing at Ghost River
Treaty Seven Territory, Cochrane, Alberta
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Wednesday, February 21: 12pm MT
Wednesday March 13: 12pm MT
Wednesday, June 19: 12pm MT
Wednesday, September 25th: 12pm MT
We will meet together at four separate times throughout the fellowship learning journey to share some of the questions we are holding to explore the edges of our learning and experimentation.
Group sessions will take place on Zoom for 90 minutes, always starting at 12:00 MT mountain time.
Convert to your time zone here.
Waypoint Calls (four 1:1 sessions)
Prior to the first in-person gathering you will have the opportunity to meet with members of the hosting team to have a conversation around your growth edges and how these might impact your work as systems leaders and entrepreneurs. These waypoint calls will be schedule along the way according to your availability.
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There is no fee for this programme.
It is generously supported by our partners at the Suncor Energy Foundation.
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We will adhere to all relevant provincial & federal public health guidelines and do our best to stay current in our awareness of any changes. As things currently stand, we plan to have test kits available but testing will not be mandatory. If individuals are more comfortable wearing a mask during indoor sessions, they are encouraged to do so. It will not be a requirement for all participants.
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All accommodations at The Crossing at Ghost River (gatherings One and Three) are in single occupancy rooms.
Accommodations for Listening to the Land at Cross River (Gathering Two) will be in a single occupancy tent. We will help to provide all necessary equipment for this land-based experience such as warm sleeping bags, tents, sleeping pads, etc.
Please note that there is no cell signal at Cross River and no internet except in the case of emergencies.
At each gathering, we will share three beautiful meals together each day (except for arrival and departure days). All dietary needs and/or food allergies will be accommodated for.
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We will be building our knowledge and our learning container together at each session - both online and in-person. The quality of the experience hinges on everyone’s full participation. Before you apply, we ask that you take a look at your calendar and commitments to be sure that you can participate fully at each in-person gathering and online session.
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We will give serious consideration to every application and recognize that applying for something like this is time-consuming, potentially risky and asks you to reveal a certain vulnerability. We greatly respect that and have worked to make sure that the application has some inherent value – that you might get something of value for yourself just by working through the questions.
A diverse team reviews the applications and looks for signs of the five characteristics listed in the program description (transformative potential, visionary action, tenacious but flexible commitment openness & influence). Between your application and interviews, the team will work to get a sense of ‘fit’ and ‘timing’.
Application Window: You may submit applications between October 1st - November 13, 2023. There is no priority given to those who submit earlier in this window. All applications will be considered equally!
Application Review: November 1st - 15th. Applicants will receive an initial response by November 15th.
Interviews: The hosting team will interview select candidates over Zoom November 15th - November 30th.
Final Cohort Selection: December 15th
Before You Apply…
By sending an application to join Positive Deviants 2024, we are making the assumption that you have read the program outline and understood the following:
You can fully commit to the dates for the three in-person gatherings and four online sessions. If you “may have to leave a couple of days early for the second session”, consider applying when you have both time and bandwidth. Your participation matters.
The program – and your participation in it - is funded by the Suncor Energy Foundation. Suncor is an energy company with roots in the oil sands that also owns the Petro Canada gas stations. We fully understand that not taking funding from the energy industry (or other sources) is a matter of principle for some folks. By sending an application, you are making a choice. To learn more about the Foundation click here.
Listening to the Land (the 2nd gathering) takes place at a backcountry off-grid lodge with no cell service or regular internet connection. Most participants will be staying in tents (we provide the equipment). During the gathering, the hosting team will invite you to spend up to three days and two nights alone on the land in a wild place – which they will carefully prepare you for and supervise. Members of the hosting team have decades of wilderness guiding experience, search and rescue, and medical training and are professionally qualified to host this experience well.
We’re serious about the program elements! In a single day there could be meditation and dance sessions, a challenging group process around race and intersectionality, a complexity leadership powerpoint, an Elder-led ceremony, a wander on the land, a dojo session and an artistic practice. Plus meal-time conversations with fascinating people and solo reflective/integration time. All in the same day! We hold the perspective that each of these ways of learning has some value and validity – and assume that you do too. If you are turned off by one of more of these modalities, this probably won’t be a good fit.
Wolf Willow in general, and Positive Deviants in particular, offers an inter-sectional and diverse learning container. Our work is grounded in Indigenous ways of knowing, post-colonial futures, deep reconciliation and the wisdom of the Elders. We understand this to be a time of racial reckoning in many domains and hold critical and systemic perspectives on the way that racism and racial dynamics underpin entrenched social institutions at all levels. The openness, trust and accountability that characterizes a truly effective learning container must be co-created by all participants and hosts together if we are to journey deep, far and well together – and that requires a high degree of self-awareness around our positionality and impact on others. We are not just looking for a cohort of progressive-sounding conformists who know how to signal all the right things as paid-up members of the cultural elite. We are assuming that those applying to the Fellowship will already have a high degree of self-awareness and some familiarity participating in very diverse groups.
The Fellowship is primarily intended to support positive deviants. By which we mean, someone who is consciously building and around whom some version of the next story is actively emerging – the adjacent possible, the speculative future, Game B, living patterns of a different future. They are a living example of positive deviance in practice and the Fellowship is designed to be in service of their journey.
The application portal is closed for the 2024 Cohort.
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