Votary
Collective Liberation As A Vocation
The Votary Project is a series of programs and organizational structures with a common purpose. They seek to build a pipeline for people deeply committed to collective liberation to be supported by community and free to pursue liberation in an emergent way. They are also designed to ensure participants are accountable to the communities they serve. Its long term goal is to re-imagine a form of socially engaged monasticism and create new lineages of spiritual and communal support. It has three components, the Cadre Development Fellowship, House System and Ecovillages.
Cadre Development
We use the word Cadre both in the traditional sense of “a nucleus of trained personnel around which a larger organization can be built and trained” and in a new sense as people who are pursuing what they feel is their life purpose full time and supported and accountable to the community.
We seek to recruit, vet, initiate, orient and co-learn with a group of fellow travelers over the course of 2 years so that they can step fully into their life purpose and (if they so choose) in alignment with the WildSeed Way.
House System
The House System seeks to provide systems of mutual accountability, purpose-based community, apprenticeship, and shared rituals akin to those found in religious orders. Houses initiate, train and mentor people who make a vow to be in service to the collective liberation of all sentient beings. Houses can organize themselves around any affinity including such as vocation, ethnicity, spiritual lineage, theory of change, etc.
Trusts, modeled after religious orders, would be organizations of cadre based on shared resources and praxis geared towards a common mission. They would offer health insurance, retirement benefits, housing allowance and small living and travel benefits to make it feasible for members to be communally supported by dana (gifts or donations that maintain a teacher’s life as opposed to fee for service.)
EcoVillages
They would start and maintain Ecovillages, which are culturally, environmentally, and economically resilient spaces that serve both as prototypes of the worlds we want and as houses of refuge from the world as it currently is. These ecovillages could be urban resilience hubs built to be shelters in times of environmental emergency as well as rural communities that are semi-autonomous and provide health food to urban resilience hubs.
You can learn more about our Votary by reading the white paper written by our own Aaron Goggans.
