Transformative Adventures Organizational Vision (About)

With our recent growth, new programs and a reduced ability to provide accountability through Facebook, I (Mike Hoag) thought it would be a good idea to provide this refresher and overview here to provide for public oversight and community accountability.

What is Transformative Adventures?

The “Transformative Adventures“ are a program of experiential learning tasks designed to to help people transform their lives, landscapes, livelihoods and communities through connection to nature and community.

The Transformative Adventures Cooperative Non-profit exists to support that emerging community of adventurous change makers.

Outwardly, the organization exists to facilitate personal and societal transformation. Read more about this outward mission.

The Transformative Adventures Coop exists to support that outward mission, by providing content, advocacy materials, programs, business models and support to local scale community transformation leaders. So our inward mission is to support the emergence of a DIY Green New deal to fund and facilitate socially and ecologically Transformative action. Read more about this inward mission.

Mission Statement:

Therefore: the mission of the Transformative Adventures Cooperative Non-profit is to help people transform their lives, landscapes, livelihoods and communities through building connection to nature and community, and to support the emergence of a DIY Green New deal to fund and facilitate this socially and ecologically Transformative action.

Goals:

To expand the market and reach for more just and sustainable life ways based on community reliance and sun-powered economics, so that “regular people” everywhere feel empowered to take personal action in their lives.
To empower individuals to take meaningful direct action in their own lives toward creating a better, more just and sustainable world, through transformative programs with a proven positive impact, meaningful objectives and measurable outcomes.
To support an emerging DIY Green New Deal, which will launch an army of professional Community Transformation Leaders, to lead and facilitate local action.
To create and govern a cooperative to provide that transformative content through solidarity economics, so that contributors maintain ownership of their content and are the beneficiaries of their labor.
To Relocalize the movement for relocalization, decentralize the movement for decentralization and bring solidarity economics back to the movement for solidarity economics.
To de-mystify transformative living through COMMUNITY authority and research based approaches, instead of guru authority based on fame.

For more information, you may see and comment on the current working proposed bylaws, here.

History

Transformative Adventures was developed as a concept by Permaculture Designer, urban homesteader, organizer and educator, Michal Hoag, in collaboration with dozens of colleagues in the Permaculture and Transition community, formally beginning in 2015. It intended to focus on transformation, positive personal action and change that looked like the gradual cocreated morphogenisis of nature, rather than design as a top down process that tends to favor “leaders” and designers, over everyday people taking direct action. This path of working on actions that have a profound personal benefit while also being leverage points for major societal change led to the adoption of the first Transformative Adventures programs.

Realizing this was a replicable mode of right livelihood with a huge potential impact, it became evident this work was too big and important to hold into as a personal fiefdom, and the work began to transform the organization into a dispersed cooperative structure. Too often, communities in the Permaculture movement have become centralized and based on guru authority, so the need for a truly accountable, community organized and cooperative leadership model to provide greater access seemed of primary importance for a project with this scope.

After 3 years of development by an online steering committee, December 2020, Transformative Adventures held its first general annual meeting, with over 60 members in attendance. To get an in depth presentation on the vision, you can see slideshow for the presentation.

At present, the organization is being developed by a small team headed by Michael Hoag, with oversight from a steering committee tasked with establishing the organization and its board.

To go with the slideshow, here is an audio brief presentation summary, 20 minutes.

Here is the full audio presentation of the first general meeting.

And for those who want an in-depth look at the Coop board and organizational structure, here is the First Coop Board Steering Committee Meeting. Entry password: Y57@?QBj