Lifeboat Academy Driver Statement

Building a model of resilience and regeneration at the person, place, and community level.

Purpose

There are lots of different ways to think about The Lifeboat Academy and they’re all a part of the truth. 

The Lifeboat Academy is an on-going experiment to create a model of resilience and regeneration at the personal, place, and community level by testing ways to cooperate effectively to maximize our quality of life within a sustainable footprint. 

It’s seeking practical ways to address climate change - specifically, how do we raise a whole diet within our “fair share footprint” in a way that is resilient in the face of changing conditions while simultaneously drawing carbon out of the atmosphere?

It’s also a seed that grows strong, resilient communities. We recognize that true resilience includes community / social resilience. In this way, growing food is really only an excuse for us to relearn effective ways of working together. 

It’s also a shared mindfulness practice because true resilience also includes personal / emotional resilience. In this way, the farm work is merely a focus that allows us to find flow individually and collectively. 

It’s also a place for people to heal from wetiko and provide mutual support for others in recovery. It recognizes that we are waking up to a crisis that’s been brewing for centuries and we’ve all come in halfway through the movie. We’ve been conditioned to see and operate in unhealthy, destructive ways and it will take time and effort to identify and unlearn bad habits.

Ultimately, the Lifeboat is taking us somewhere - to “recreate the village” where people with diverse skills and backgrounds work together to provide for the majority of their needs in ways that are healthy, healing, and regenerative to both the farmers and the farm. 

And we hope that the Lifeboat Academy is working to reclaim the commons - establishing a different kind of relationship between ourselves, the land and each other where we recognize that no one “owns” the farm or the land. We all share a responsibility to maintain and care for this precious, sacred space and for all our relations. 

Guiding Principles and Strategies

All of the work of the Lifeboat Academy aligns with the 7 Guiding Principles of Sociocracy 3.0 

Further, we have learned from experience that things go better when:

• We treat all projects as experiments - we take the time to learn from experience, unearth what seems to work consistently and actively incorporate these lessons in future iterations. Aim - Act - Reflect. Repeat.

• We recognize the inherent intelligence of nature and living systems, so we prioritize biomimicry and wu-wei solutions.

• We treat the farm as an organism composed of organs, which is in turn an organ in a larger organism - our community. We remember that all living systems are holographic - wholes, made up of wholes, that are also parts.   

• Ultimately, trust is the key, so we spend the energy required to make sure communication is transparent, interests are aligned, and capacity is demonstrated through a commitment to continual (and gentle) refinement and growth. 

The Lifeboat Academy Agreements 

All work and interactions at the Lifeboat Academy are done based on our core agreements, and we expect everyone to abide by them to the best they can at least while they are on the farm. The tao that can be named is not the true Tao. Our agreements point to some hard-to-define concepts. They help us orient in the right direction, but we recognize our agreements will also morph and evolve over time, so we commit time and effort regularly to exploring and reviewing our agreements in Circle as part of the oral tradition. 

We believe that as long as we all agree to these basic ideas and commit to finding the most effective ways to cooperate, all the rest will work itself out.