To better facilitate the process of learning about bioregionalism, networking in the landscape, and connecting to the knowledge commons in the Design School for Regenerating Earth, we have created a part-time Cohort Coordinator position. Andra will be supporting students during the Design School’s 2025 Learning Journey: How to Organize Your Bioregion.
In this role, Andra will facilitate onboarding to the Design School platform, hold Cascadia Cohort calls every other week, and act as a liaison between the Design School and Regenerate Cascadia to provide regular updates about organization happening in the landscape. In this way, we anticipate people in the course will find greater involvement in their landscape and Cascadia as a whole.
Andra’s History with Bioregionalism
Having been a life-long climate activist, Andra eagerly jumped into last year’s learning journey, Birthing Bioregional Learning Centers, offered through the Design School. During that six-month course, Andra avidly looked for ways to get involved with their landscape, finding existing projects and starting their own.
After visiting for a Community Experience Week last August, Andra is now Board Treasurer of Lost Valley Education Center, a nonprofit and ecovillage supporting bioregional education, sociocracy, non-violent communication, permaculture, and community resilience while living on the land. Andra also reinvigorated the landscape team for Northern Willamette Valley, which is now creating a directory of regenerative projects, calendar of events, and volunteer-match program for the area.
As they practice hyperlocality, Andra has also begun working with the Oregon Department of Transportation to adopt a large section of Stephen’s Creek where they live, which flows directly into the Willamette River. They will be organizing community land-tending projects and native plantings to help restore the creek.
They have been heavily affected and influenced by books such as Hospicing Modernityby Vanessa Machado De Oliveira, Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, All We Can Saveby Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson, and Breaking Together by Jem Bendell.
Andra in the Wild
When they are not knee-deep in a creek or doing mutual aid outreach downtown, Andra serves as co-director for Ethical Yarn Community, a co-op focusing on accessibility to start-to-finish fiber arts education and equipment. They also facilitate ceremonial self-knowledge through Space Mermaids and are the author of several books of poetry (published under a former name), with a forthcoming collection entitled for every body a thousand ghosts.
They live in the Northern Willamette Valley at a multigenerational co-housing community with a small bunny grove, which they hope to open to the public in Spring 2025.