Building Community at Landwell
Greetings and Happy New Year from Landwell!
From our community to our greater Landwell Community - we wanted to express gratitude, share some updates, reflections on our first year as the new Landwell Housing Cooperative. And offer some invitations!
A Year of Grounding & Commitment
Just over a year ago, the Landwell Housing Cooperative secured the resources to purchase the title to the Landwell property—an enormous milestone that placed this land on a path of long-term stewardship beyond speculative markets. In the spring of 2025, Landwell’s co-stewarding partner, the Innovative Learning and Living Institute (ILALI), received a multi-year grant from the NoVo Foundation, helping stabilize and deepen the work unfolding at Landwell.
Together, these commitments wove both land and people, creating a stronger foundation for what is emerging here—rooted in care, continuity, and long-term responsibility to place.
Deepening Community Partnerships
Over the course of the year, Landwell and ILALI also deepened relationships with key and emerging partners, including Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation & Open Space, North Bay Organizing Project, and the Ah’neh Indigenous Revitalization Council. These relationships are supporting ongoing conversations about land protection, community resilience, and shared governance. We are currently exploring two land easement pathways with Sonoma Ag + Open Space, while ILALI continues convening organizational partners around bioregional capacity-building across ecological, economic, and cultural resilience.
Cultivating Shared Governance
As Landwell continues to mature, so does how we care for and govern the land together. Over the past year, the newly formed Landwell Housing Cooperative deepened its internal governance while also helping form the Kinship Council—a co-stewardship body including the Housing Cooperative, ILALI, and Living Lands Trust, held in relationship with the Land itself.
This work reflects a commitment to governance that is relational, place-rooted, and oriented toward long-term care. It also reflects a shared understanding that the land itself is an active teacher and steward—shaping how we listen, decide, and respond.
Landwell is both a place and a community-of-communities, grounded in a larger vision of supporting regenerative and equitable ways of living during these tumultuous—and often initiatory—times. As residents, we are on our own Wayfinding journeys, learning how to live well with land, difference, and uncertainty, so that we may better support others walking similar paths.
Created by artist Mari Shibuya
Building Bioregional Resilience and Community - NAVELLA
Navella Initiative is a growing collaboration of trusted nonprofit partners working across Sonoma County to strengthen local resilience—from land and water stewardship to livelihoods and shared civic life. Over the past year, ILALI has convened partners through conversations and working sessions that built trust, alignment, and shared purpose.
That momentum deepened during a two-day Navella convening at Landwell, moving the collaboration from exploration to commitment. Navella brings together people who don’t often share decision-making—farmworkers, Indigenous leaders, small business owners, organizers, faith leaders, and longtime residents—to work on practical, place-based priorities like watershed health, local economies, food access, and community preparedness. By focusing on shared needs rather than ideology, Navella turns cross-class trust into visible improvements that make our region more resilient—economically, ecologically, and culturally.
Loving the Land, Together
Throughout the year, Landwell continued to host Land Loves—residential and community land-tending days that support the health, beauty, and vitality of the land and HeartSeed Farm. These days weave together hands-in-the-soil work with art, music, education, and shared meals, cultivating a culture of care that is both practical and relational.
In support of this work, Landwell received a second grant from Ma Earth, strengthening our capacity for land restoration and regenerative agriculture at HeartSeed Farm. This funding supports soil health, ecological resilience, and food systems rooted in reciprocity with place—deepening Landwell’s role as a living demonstration of regenerative stewardship.
Through collaborations with SoundWell, MaMuse, BeeHive Learning Center, ILALI, and others, Landwell has remained a place for place-based learning, creative expression, and community gathering—where care for land and care for one another meet.
Upcoming Community Offerings
Landwell offers community events for the public to connect with others and the land itself!
Land Love
One such offering is Land Love - a community work day offered in partnership with Landwell Housing Co-op, ILALI and Happi.org. You can join us for our monthly Landwell community Land Love hours, or one of our quarterly Land Love programs, which includes storytelling, land listening, land tending and a sponsored lunch!
Our next Land Love for the wider community is on Sunday, March 1. We will be serving lunch - so if you’d like to come, we need you to RSVP here!
HeartSprung Tongues
ILALI hosts Heart Sprung Tongues - a recurring storytelling and performance gathering that blends poetry, music, ritual, and open mic, creating space for shared voice, beauty, and truth-telling in relationship with land and community.
More events are cooking! Stay tuned.
The importance of building trust in our communities cannot be understated in the times we are in. We invite you to join us at Landwell as we focus our energies into coming into right relationship with the land and each other, fostering deeper connection, compassion and holding a vision for humanity beyond our time.
Thanks for your support!
The Landwell Community
