Join us to explore how to transform yourself and the world.
Warm Springtime Greetings Bioneer,
We write to let you know that there is still time to apply for our upcoming Cultivating Women's Leadership intensive, as we’ve extended the deadline to Friday, April 4! This spring's training will be held May 18-23, nestled among redwoods in beautiful Ben Lomond, California.
Nine years ago, in partnership with Toby Herzlich and Akaya Windwood, moved by the desire to create a unique space to help women find greater clarity, strength and skillfulness through inner inquiry, practices and authentic connection, Bioneers co-founder and President Nina Simons launched a new kind of women’s retreat, Cultivating Women’s Leadership (CWL). In the years since, Nina and Toby have convened a diverse and skillful team of facilitators dedicated to hosting an intimate gathering of peers who are diverse in every way, and focused on co-creating a space where insights, creativity, genuine sisterhood and clarity of purpose can emerge.
Group photo from the 2013 Cultivating Women's Leadership Intensives
"I have to say, for the very first time, I know deep down in my core what my own personal calling is...I no longer feel scattered - I have an umbrella with different threads that contribute to the one central, core vision. What an amazing gift!" -CWL Alumna
Nina Simons describes how the collaborative environment at CWL continues to be a rich font for continued, positive, personal transformation this way: “The processes in CWL helped me to move from seeing myself as a character in my own story, to becoming the protagonist, to eventually becoming the author of my own narrative. Through experiential and embodied learning, we offer a smorgasbord of ideas and practices that can alter and improve the foundations of how women see ourselves as leaders, and relate to others.”
Pay it Forward
Bioneers’ Cultivating Women’s Leadership trainings offer a limited number of scholarships to low-income women. We invite you to help a woman with financial need experience this powerful retreat. Click on the link below to donate and select “Cultivating Women’s Leadership Scholarship Fund” as your designation. Or contact hrobertson@bioneers.org to learn how you can help sponsor, strengthen and equip great grassroots women leaders.
Who is Cultivating Women’s Leadership for, and what are its goals?
Cultivating Women’s Leadership is intended for women of all ages, ethnicities, orientations and backgrounds who are passionate about bringing progressive and life-affirming change to their communities, and who have a significant capacity to reach people, through their relationships, positions or influence.
Now in its 9th year, Cultivating Women’s Leadership is a deep and transformative 6-day intensive focused on:
Developing greater clarity about purpose, assignment or calling in the world;
Exploring what women uniquely bring to leadership in this pivotal time of change;
Experiencing how profoundly women can inform, grow and strengthen each other;
Discovering the power and joy of women connecting across differences that tend to otherwise divide us;
Learning tools and practices to continue to refine and cultivate your own leadership; and
Investigating challenges with power, competition, self-limiting stories and internalized oppression.
This compassionate, deep and intimate intensive is lead by Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons, in collaboration with Toby Herzlich and Rachel Bagby.
Left to Right, CWL Facilitators Rachel Bagby, Toby Herzlich, Nina Simons and Sarah Crowell
CWL is part of Bioneers' Every Woman's Leadership program, of which Co-Founder Nina Simons is the director. Every Woman's Leadership is focused on developing the abilities of women of all ages, backgrounds and ethnicities to come into greater leadership roles to effect positive social and environmental change. One major way in which the Every Woman's Leadership program does this is through CWL.
Cultivating Women's Leadership builds Partnerships and Powerful Networks!
After the August 2013 CWL training, a partnership emerged between a young Latina activist from Espanola, NM and a donor/activist who had both attended. They created a blog called Sister Perspectives, about finding their way as allies across the many differences that divide them.
Cultivating Women's Leadership intensives happen twice a year
Mark your calendar: The second retreat will be held in Northern New Mexico on July 21-26, and applications are due by June 1st.
"I gained an appreciation for how muddied with racism the waters I swim in are. In my own studies I have focused on the suppression of women and the Feminine as a whole in our culture. After our training I am now mindful that I have so much to understand and humbled that such a chasm exists. It was great to address it and it is worth an entire week of its own." -- Nurse CWL alumna, and Attorney with a multinational software corporation
Nina is an award winning social entrepreneur and co-editor of Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart. She co-founded Bioneers, and has helped to lead the organization through 25 years of identifying, gathering and disseminating breakthrough innovations to re-imagine how we live on Earth and with each other. Currently, Nina’s focus is on inspiring leadership that connects women, nature, healing, diversity and justice. She co-founded Cultivating Women’s Leadership trainings with Toby Herzlich in 2006, is developing www.everywomansleadership.org, and co-facilitates trainings while speaking and teaching widely.
Toby is a leadership trainer, facilitator of transformational change, and network weaver, focused on assisting groups and individuals dedicated to building community assets and catalyzing progressive social and environmental change. As Founder of Biomimicry for Social Innovation, Toby guides leaders in learning from nature’s wisdom. Toby is co-founder of Cultivating Women’s Leadership and a Senior Trainer with the Rockwood Leadership Institute. Working nationally and globally, Toby has supported women to be effective and heartfelt leaders in the Middle East, Bosnia, the US and Canada.
Rachel is an artist with a Stanford Law Degree in Social Change, is a leadership consultant whose clients include leaders from organizations like Google, the Sierra Club and Rockwood Institute. A former member of Bobby McFerrin’s Voicestra Ensemble and author of Divine Daughters: Liberating the Power and Passion of Women’s Voices, Rachel originated Dekaaz, a poetic form that hones vast amounts of information in to just 10 syllables of shareable wisdom.
"What I experienced over the six (infinite) days of the retreat filled a well that was all but dry, returned a sense of long-lost hope, and ensconced me in a community so rich and generous and wise that I was truly overwhelmed... The unfolding process of understanding our collective and individual histories, the damage that we hold in our bodies and hearts, allowed for an extraordinary healing. We became whole." -Nurse, professor and director of an environmental health education center
