The Wolf Willow Institute for Systems Learning has announced the 2026 Positive Deviants Cascadia fellowship, a place-based program for systems practitioners, organizers, and changemakers rooted in the Salish Sea and surrounding watersheds. The fellowship runs from May 2026 through July 2027.
Positive Deviants is not a typical accelerator or leadership program. It is a sustained practice community focused on what Wolf Willow describes as “systems artistry and the deep work of cultural transformation.” The program is designed for people working at the intersection of complexity, place-based organizing, and adaptive systems change, those who are already building alternatives to the status quo and are willing to engage in significant personal transformation alongside their public-facing work.
Why Place-Based, and Why Here?
Previous Positive Deviants cohorts drew participants from across the continent. This year, the program is shifting intentionally toward a bioregional model grounded in the Salish Sea. The rationale is relational: Wolf Willow argues that the skills needed to meet the future well are not just conceptual but deeply connected to specific ecosystems and the communities that tend them. Rooting the fellowship in a defined bioregion opens opportunities for ongoing connection, practice sessions, and collaboration that outlast the program timeline.
Applicants should be primarily based in or around the Salish Sea and the watersheds that flow into it. Wolf Willow frames the geographic test simply: could you get to Victoria, BC for a weekend without flying? There will be four in-person retreats over the fellowship period.
What the Fellowship Involves
The program moves through five domains of practice: ways of doing (courageous and skillful action), ways of being (self-awareness and centered presence), ways of knowing (expanding multiple forms of intelligence), ways of relating (deepening connection with the human and more-than-human world), and ways of belonging (inhabiting ecological embeddedness within ancestral, biotic, and cultural webs of relationship).
Wolf Willow describes the experience as equal parts crucible and sanctuary, designed to challenge and stretch participants as much as to support them. The fellowship asks for a genuine openness to personal transformation, comfort with ambiguity, and a willingness to work across difference.
Who Should Apply
The program seeks people with five characteristics: transformative potential in their work, a strong orientation toward action, tenacious commitment to long-term systems change, genuine openness to being guided, and existing influence within the systems they seek to shift. Applicants should have a tangible initiative or project that allows for experimentation, and they should be ready for what Wolf Willow calls “whole-person learning” across cognitive, somatic, imaginative, and relational dimensions.
Relevant to Cascadia Organizers
For anyone working in the Cascadia bioregion on place-based organizing, regenerative practice, or bioregional coordination, this fellowship represents a complementary pathway. Wolf Willow’s emphasis on communities of coherence, deeply aligned networks committed to localized, ecologically grounded patterns of practice, parallels the emerging landscape work across the region.
Visit the Wolf Willow Institute for full program details and application information.