Program Arc
The initial year of the fellowship runs from May 2026 – July 2027 and consists of four, required in-person gatherings, five online group logistical and sharing sessions, personal coaching, personal practice, and optional electives.
The Dance of Self & System
Gathering One: Stowel Lake Farm | Salt Spring Island
Traditional Lands of the Hulqumi’num and Sencoten Speaking Peoples
June 26 – July 1st 2026
We begin by stepping out of the rhythm of our daily lives to slow down, gain perspective and explore the fractal relationship between self and system. Our first gathering 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 shared language and reference points around systems and complexity and explore patterns of intervention and transformation.
We will introduce and explore individual and collective practices - with regular intervals of reflection, journaling, dialogue and group discussion. You will get clear about the type of changes or edges—whether those be personal, relational or systemic—that you most need to focus on over the coming months and what it will really take to foster. What is your work to do right now? What is it asking of you? What might you need to release or say No to in order to say a bigger Yes to your own calling?
Deep Practice
Gathering Two: Stowel Lake Farm | Salt Spring Island
Traditional Lands of the Hulqumi’num and Sencoten Speaking Peoples
October 28 – November 2nd 2026
The Deep Practice Immersion is a time of renewal and reconnection. It is something like a contemplative retreat that offers a full spectrum of practices to cultivate complexity capabilities. We’ll use a range of creative, somatic, artistic and reflective practices to deepen a conversation with our inner lives, the complexity we face, and the emergent edges of our ‘becoming’. Practices will include a somatic approach drawn from the martial arts traditions to explore the dynamics of relational system thinking, movement and meditation practices, time in reflection out on the land and time in rich dialogue together. The intent here is become more comfortable with uncertainty, liminality, paradox, confusion and risk as inevitable fellow-travellers and potential allies in the work of systems shaping.
From Social Change to Systems Artistry
Gathering Three: Royal Roads University | Vancouver Island
Traditional Lands of the Lekwungen-speaking Peoples, the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations
April 22 – 27th, 2027
We're moving from a rural retreat centre to a university campus. Close to the city of Victoria, it’s set amongst hundreds of acres of mature coastal forest and here we’ll dive into the craft of systems influence and complexity leadership with a renewed focus. We've borrowed the term systems artistry from the futurist Jean Houston who describes it as the ability to navigate and creatively engage with complex, interconnected systems using both intuitive insight and practical strategies. It involves seeing the world as an interconnected web of relationships and patterns, and artfully intervening in ways that foster transformation, coherence, and emergence. It's another way of saying positive deviant—and an artist's work is never fully done!
There will be opportunities for revisiting and reimagining familiar challenges and opportunities to reveal new opportunities for creative action. To take your work to the next level—whatever that might mean for you and the communities you serve. We will explore practical tools, techniques, tactics, strategies, concepts, models, resources and system 'hacks' that you might be able to apply directly to your own work. We'll continue to have opportunities for personal reflection, collective deliberation and ongoing practice. And there will be opportunities to take stock of the past months, to pull out and integrate some of their threads and lessons, and to begin preparing for the next gathering.
Earth As Home & Teacher
Gathering Four: Kunzang Dechen Osel Ling (KDOL) | Salt Spring Island
Traditional Lands of the Hulqumi’num and Sencoten Speaking Peoples
June 27th 2027 - July 7th, 2027
It’s our final gathering. KDOL is a mountaintop Buddhist sanctuary perched high above the Salish Sea on Mount Tuam. Living simply and close to the earth, we’ll explore what it means to directly experience a deeper sense of kinship and connectedness - with ourselves, with others, and most importantly, with the more-than-human world. To experience the living earth as our truest home and greatest teacher. The gathering will offer a rare invitation - to step outside ordinary time, take stock of the journey of the past year, and listen for what wants to emerge next. You will have the opportunity to spend several days and nights alone on the land in reflective vigil and for many, it will be a true threshold crossing — a chance to integrate the lessons of the Fellowship, to renew or deepen the vows at the heart of your work, and to mark an important life passage as you step forward with greater clarity, courage and commitment into the next chapter of your journey.
Online Content
Group Sessions:
The Complexity Code (at your pace)
A 6-module, online (asynchronous) course for complexity leaders delivered by Dr. Julian Norris and special guests.
Logistics (1 Session)
We will host an online information session prior to the July in-person land-based gathering to review equipment, preparation and logistics.
Listening Circles (4 Sessions)
Following our first two in-person gatherings, we will reconvene online for an integration and follow-up session.
Personal & Systems Coaching
The Fellowship includes a package of eight sessions with a skilled coach who brings experience navigating inner work, systems work and the dynamics of complex social contexts. Dates and times—along with the specific intentions and content for the sessions—will be negotiated between you and your coach. These coaching sessions are intended to offer you a space for deeper reflection, compassionate accountability, insight and exploration.
Participant Hosted Sessions
Peer Resourcing Sessions
Self-Directed Funds
Over the course of the year, we will ask each person to both commit to hosting one session for - and attending the ones organized by - their fellow participants. Where possible these will be in-person. The possibilities here are limitless. A dinner. An art project. A short walk or day hike. A strategy session or design sprint. A curated conversation. Some harvesting or foraging. A community visit. Help building a greenhouse or drying fish. Self-organized activities that deepen connection, expand our sense of what's possible, and remind us that learning happens everywhere - in the kitchen, on the trail, in the workshop, and around the fire.
Past Fellows have expressed some regret that they didn’t fully draw upon the wisdom and insight of their cohort during the Fellowship itself. This year, we will offer some simple frameworks to support the emergence of participant-led inquiry circles. These are basically a way to leverage the real expertise and experience of the wider group. To get some compassionate and discerning outside eyes on the challenges and edges you’re encountering in your life or work. Any participant can host such a session around any topic throughout the year. In addition to holding immediate tactical value, such sessions are also an opportunity to practice critical systems skills – deep listening, asking good questions, giving clear and courageous feedback, collaborative sense-making and inquiry-driven, relational leadership.
Each Fellow will be allocated up $1,000 Cn that they use in whatever way will best support their own development. What that means in practice is left entirely to your own judgment. It could involve the practical costs associated with the Fellowship itself…pet-sitters, travel costs, a good rain-jacket or the food to host a participant dinner. It could cover the purchase of books, subscriptions, private sessions or membership fees. To enable your travel to a conference or retreat. To support your health and vitality. To do something wonderful for the people in your life whose invisible support makes it possible for you to fully participate in the Fellowship. No questions asked.
Personal Practice
We become whatever we regularly practice. And everything we regularly do in our lives – our morning routines, our stress reduction strategies, our patterns of consumption – is a practice. It is the wolf we feed, the muscle we exercise, the path we walk. But most of our practices are unconscious and are often misaligned with our aspirations. If you want to see what someone is becoming, look at what they are practicing.
Contemplative Practice.
Insight, clarity, wisdom, compassion. All of these flow from the deeper layers of the mind. Meditation is simply whatever we regularly do to help us access and inhabit those deeper layers. The value of a regular practice is well established; reduced stress improved immune system function, increased focus, less unhealthy self-criticism and a greater ability to respond creatively to complex challenges. Whether you are an experienced practitioner or tasting such practice for the first time, the Fellowship asks you to commit to a minimum of 20 minutes of meditation per week. For many, this is likely become a sustained daily practice. We will teach a simple, non-denominational form during the first gathering and may host periodic online practice spaces.
Wild Nature Practice
Our capacity to understand and influence larger fields for change is enhanced through what systems sage Peter Senge has called "direct contact with the generative capacities of nature." Wild nature is present everywhere – in the body, the city, the social system – not just in natural or wilderness landscapes. To encounter the wildness of the world is to encounter its infinite creative energy, its animacy, its vibrant complexity and its self-organizing capacity. Awakening or deepening our connection to the wild gestures towards new cultural patterns and possibilities. When we lose connection to wildness, the severance shapes our consciousness and we end up with monocultures of the mind and spirit no matter how diligent our awareness practices. We ask prospective Deviants to commit to a practice of contact and connection with wild nature every week. We will give specific guidance around this practice at the first gathering and throughout the fellowship. At minimum, participants should be prepared to commit at least 20 minutes per week, along with three more extended (2hrs +) periods over the course of the year.
You will need to commit, upfront, to the following:
Attendance at all in-person gatherings (four in 12 months)
Five Online All-Cohort Sessions (60-90 min.)
Monthly Peer Resourcing Sessions (12 total)
One hosted event for the cohort
20 minutes of seated meditation per week.
20 minutes of intentional contact with wild nature per week plus three longer sessions (2hrs+) over the course of the year.
Please don’t apply if you are not able to sincerely commit to these specific practices at this point in your life.
Whole-Person Learning as a Throughline
Across every element of the Fellowship we’ll be drawing on multiple interconnected streams of learning: conceptual grounding in complexity and systems thinking; Indigenous pedagogies and perspectives offered by Elders and knowledge keepers; direct experience of the land as classroom and teacher; contemplative and reflective practices that cultivate awareness and presence; somatic and movement practices that bring the body into the learning; arts-based approaches that engage the full range of our creative intelligences; some practical competencies for responding to disaster and systems collapse that we call Be the Ground: Sexy Life Skills for the Apocalypse; and a rich variety of social technologies that support deep dialogue and collective inquiry.
Together these streams are designed to develop the whole person in service of more skillful and soulful systems leadership.
Beyond the Fellowship
Alumni Community, Partnership Network & Ongoing Support
For seven years, Positive Deviants has combined inner depth work with outer world work through a complexity lens, selecting cohorts of cultural outliers positioned for broad systemic influence.
We’ve come see Positive Deviants everywhere. 67 of them (so far!) have found their way into this fellowship. Over the years, Deviants have joined together in support of individual work, have formed new organizations and initiatives, have dreamt new educational offerings into being, and have otherwise egg’ed each other on to do the work that is theirs to do.
In fact, the majority of the program alumni continue to be engaged with each other, active in the Wolf Willow Learning Ecosystem, and in touch with faculty, coaches, or partners long after the initial yearlong completes.
The vision, which continues to become manifest as time and resources allow, is to continue to support a vibrant community of coherence in the Cascadia bioregion with the right scaffolding that will allow for emergence and generative connection overtime, in place.
Electives, Dinner Salons, and More.
In 2026 and 2027, we will host a handful of electives, made available first to Positive Deviants alumni and their immediate communities. These electives will be dreamt up and facilitated by the core Wolf Willow faculty team, as well as by our partners in the region who are holding critical pieces of the story.
We’ll also provide encouragement and support for local interactions that build community, such as salon-style potluck dinners, meet-ups, and leadership opportunities for alumni, partners and faculty.
Here Are a Few Electives Cooking for 2026-27:
Be the Ground
(Sexy Life Skills for the Apocalypse)
A highly practical, place-based, and ecologically-informed certificate program designed to cultivate capable, connected, adaptive humans for a reality defined by compounding crises. It integrates crisis awareness, preparation and response skills with direct community building, wilderness and urban survival training, psychological resilience practices and place-based connection. Groundwork offers both the hard skills and the relational infrastructure (badass skills) required to respond intelligently, compassionately, and effectively to disruptions in our communities.
Pattern Mind
Embodying Ecological Consciousness with Joel Glanzberg from the Regenesis Institute
To change the world, we need to change our minds — to shift from seeing a mechanistic physical world to a living biological one. This means remembering our native pattern perspective that is our birthright, not just ecological awareness, but a pattern mind that sees the dynamics. Through embodying ecological consciousness, we can replace dogma and arguments with inspiring experience. Getting beyond typical carrot or stick motivation we can practice finding the role we are called to play is our communities.
By moving beyond ideas and words to direct experience new possibilities arise, for ourselves and our work. So long as understandings of how living systems work and our roles in them remain in our heads, we will feel separate from the rest of the living world. Gathering groups of practitioners we will grow our combined abilities to embody ecological consciousness and how to integrate this rooted sense into our daily work.
We will draw upon centuries of human traditions worldwide to play with gentle martial arts movement, breath, traditional skills like friction firemaking and tracking, and living systems thinking frameworks.
Our Regional Partners that Will Join Us in this Work Include:
The Cascade Institute: Canada’s leading complexity-focused research centre addressing urgent and entangled global challenges
The Regenesis Institute: a global community of educators and practitioners dedicated to regenerative systems change
Roots To Thrive: Canada’s first multi-disciplinary, community-based, non-profit psychedelic medicine collective
Xe"Xe Xpay Lelum: the Sacred Cedar Centre based on the Quw’utsun First Nation dedicated to Indigenous ways of knowing, being and doing.
Prepare Your Community: compassion-based emergency readiness.
Critical Detail:
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The Positive Deviants hosting team draws on Wolf Willow’s kinship network and extended community. We will continue to be confirming core faculty for Positive Deviants as we understand the cohort composition and its unique needs and attributes.
Currently confirmed include Tuesday and Gibrán Rivera, Julian Norris, Laura Blakeman, Pravin Pillay, and Zhiish McKenzie. Check then out on the Wolf Willow “people” page here.
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The application window closes midnight PST on Sunday, March 15th.
The final cohort will be announced by midnight PST on Tuesday, March 31st.
You will hear from our team for the results of the Initial Review (Yes to interview, or Not This Time), on Sunday, March 22nd.
Interviews will be held the week of March 23 – 29th.
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You will be responsible for your own transportation (both air/ground) to and from each of the program gatherings. We will be encouraging you to draw from your own communities and support networks to help you gather the resources you need to join us!
All lodging, food, and expenses during the gatherings (and all the online components/coaching etc.) are fully covered.
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In Person Gatherings 2026:
June 26 – July 1st
October 28 – Nov 2nd
In Person Gatherings 2027:
April 22 – 27th
June 27 – July 7th
Online Sessions (all take place on Wednesdays beginning at 12pm PST):
Welcome and Introductions:
May 27th: 12-2pm (2 hours)
Listening Circles: (60 mins)
July 8th, 2026
November 18th, 2026
May 5th, 2027
July 14th, 2027
Logistics Call for Land Gathering (60 mins)
June 16th, 2027
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You are primarily based or work in and around the Salish Sea and the watersheds that flow into it and the adjacent territories. If you’re not sure, here’s a map! There are four in-person retreats during the fellowship and we hope to encourage meaningful collaboration without dependence on air travel. Here’s one way to think about it: could you get to Victoria BC relatively easily for a weekend without flying? We will prioritize applications from within this bioregion for the 2026-27 cohort.
Attendance at all in-person gatherings and online sessions.
Practice Commitments:
20 min. of meditation a week
20 min. wild nature practice a week
1 hosted event for the cohort (walk, dinner salon, a game!)
12 (monthly) peer resourcing calls
Self Assessment & Expression of Interest
Not For You? Not Right Now?
Nominate Someone Else!
Positive Deviants are like truffles. Rare underground treasures. And really hard to find!
We’ve learned that they rarely recognize themselves as being deviant.
It’s not false modesty. It is more like a structural feature of the phenomenon itself. Positive Deviants are often too busy doing what seems obvious, necessary, or simply right to notice that almost no one else is doing it. Their deviance is invisible to them because they are living from a future logic that feels, from the inside, like common sense.
As a result, people that would be a great fit for the Fellowship don't even consider themselves for application…they encourage other people in their team or community to apply. So if you know someone who would be an excellent fit and might not otherwise apply, feel free to send a note to welcome@wolfwillow.org telling us why, sharing their contact details and showing us how we can learn more about them. We'll take it from there. We will not tell them you nominated them unless you explicitly give us your permission to do so.
And if you've been quietly doing what seems obvious to you, while noticing that others find it unusual, impractical, or ahead of its time... we'd like to hear from you. Not to celebrate your deviance, but to learn from it — and to connect you with others who are, in their own quiet ways, already living from the future.