Harvest Day re-imagined the traditional startup demo day by integrating embodiment, ritual, and ecosystemic representation. Presenters shared vision and process across a variety of angles on the wise innovation conversation. This recap highlights key insights and reflections from the gathering. Recording & resources from inaugural Harvest Day available here!
Fellow travelers,
It’s such a satisfying feeling to have a vision, walk with it in ways that feel aligned with our values, and enjoy the fruits of our labor.
That’s what happened last week. We had the seed of an idea to innovate on a core piece of startup culture (the accelerator demo day), and cultivated it well for what turned out to be an overwhelming success in the ways we define it 😌
We’re honestly a little surprised by how positive the reaction was! Reflecting on a couple of pieces that made the magic possible:
🎨 Variety of Experiences Integrated
As the myopic design of virtual spaces can reinforce mechanical, abstract, and disembodied ways of thinking, we put a lot of intention into making our online gatherings more embodied and ceremonial.
For Harvest Day, we brought in the usual movement, candles, and offerings. We then challenged our presenters to get creative in terms of content and style, which led to song, breath, scripture, shaking, an embodied exercise to experience the Earth’s cycles (check out these powerful slides from Rev Sara Jolena’s harvest experience), and even an invitation to physically walk outside and talk to trees!
Not to mention small group conversations, whiteboarding, AI video, incantation, fundraising deck, generative debate. Imagery of elders, ancestors, kids, land, panthers, presenter covered in dirt, and ecological metaphors across the board.
Harvest day was as multi-media as it gets!
🕸️ Variety of Worlds Represented
As we play a bridge role in the world of innovation x wisdom, we had the unique opportunity to curate the day with leading representatives from different angles on the inquiry around how to bring visions to life in more holistic ways. The people who have most shaped our thoughts, speech, and action. That we believe you should hear from too.
—> Our speakers represented philosophy & economics. Finance & field building. Narrative & movement building. Education & theology. Ethics & guildcraft. Land stewardship & re-humaning. Ritual & mythopoetics.
We called our presentation section of the day a “Vision Market” and indeed it felt like we had all gathered in the marketplace to check out the variety of ripe offerings that are feeding our emerging ecosystem.
🧺 It was a big harvest. And not too late to join!
One of our Harvest Day Judges, David Sauvage, had the following closing remarks:
“All of these projects are run by people who genuinely deeply care about what they’re doing. That’s really rare in a pitch session, where you can feel the other agendas underneath the vision, like ‘I want to be seen as a great visionary!’ ‘I want to make a lot of money!’ ‘I think this is a really cool thing I can talk about!’
And all of the things were absent here. There was total alignment in everybody between what they said they wanted to do and what they were actually doing and what was driving them. And that’s just really, really, really nourishing to hear from people doing that work.”
So much gold in one virtual event. You can be part of the unfolding story too by tuning into the recordings & resources shared throughout the day–which we’re making available to all at a discounted rate)–and letting us know your reactions!
Select the “Recording” level ticket and we’ll send you all the material asap - including decks and videos from select speakers, all links shared in chat, the future of School of Wise Innovation, and more.
✨ Sound Bytes
There are too many highlights to share. We want to pass along a couple of juicy ones for now:
Rev. Sara Jolena on harvesting:
“The stories you are telling around that which you are harvesting can perpetuate systems of domination, or perpetuate systems of inter-being, service, and mutuality…
They can further gratitude and connection with the earth and indigenous peoples, or cause greater separation and disconnection and dismembering. Both things can happen…
Do you like how that which you are tending is helping you become? The thing you are tending does shape you. The animacy of that thing is going to shape you. Is that shaping you in a way that is helping you go towards wisdom?”
Dajé Alōh on visionary praxis (paraphrasing):
“Vision is not just something that we experience in our imaginations. It’s a dialogue with the divine. It’s a dialogue with the earth. It’s a dialogue with soul…
None of the theory matters until it lands in the body. We have to practice learning how to bring these threads of vision into the lived, embodied, experience of being human. Because what is vision for if not to further allow us to integrate into our human wholeness at the individual and collective levels?
Suddenly it stops being about ‘what is my idea’ and it starts being this whole dance that we’re engaging with that’s about being wholly human. Being in visionary praxis is about embracing all of your humanity and offering your essence back to the land, back to culture, back to community. And then you become further integrated as a part of the wholeness…
The visionary process is less about what we’re creating, and more about what are we being into being. What are we breathing into being? What futures, what stories, what timelines, what modes, what ways of being are we animating with our life force and our presence and our willingness to practice?
When we plug the soul into the earth, into the animate field of nature, we remember ourselves as nature, and new solutions move through. When we remember ourselves as nature, we think as nature, we be as nature, we feel as nature, we create as nature…
When we come home and remember ourselves as nature, this practice of bringing vision into form becomes a life way. It becomes less of a philosophy and more of a remembered way of being in community together, where we can actually express from our ecological niche.”
🥁 And the winner is…
Somehow, in all of the detailed planning that we did, it didn’t really occur to us to have some sort of prize on the table for our presenters to “compete” for. It wasn’t what we prioritized in this first experiment.
But at the very end of Harvest Day, a couple of people wanted to know “who won?!”
One attendee remarked:
“The winner is everyone on this call. Everyone won by being here.”
and then Judge David declared:
“The project winner for today is School of Wise Innovation. And you win our gratitude.”
There was certainly an all-win quality in the room. New relationships sparked, inspiring ideas and stories and language shared, glimpses into possibilities, laughs.
And yes, we feel like we won too. We completed the year-long holistic entrepreneurship experiment. We gathered 100 remarkable humans together to share and witness the fruit of the projects that have come through the school or been in collaboration with it. We stayed on time the whole time. Grew in our capacity to facilitate online events–including energetically preparing for them in the days and hours beforehand. And simply feeel proud and accomplished.
We think we’re on to something. Perhaps a template that other emerging communities can borrow inspiration from. Perhaps next time we’ll do a full day to accommodate more presenters, or even IRL on an actual farm. Wise prizes. What do you want to see?
Great thanks to all who made Harvest Day possible. May all the seeds of inspiration and connection ripple outwards towards unimaginable beauty and flourishing for all life,
Fall blessings,
School of Wise Innovation
“The seed is in the fruit, quite literally. The seed of the new thing is in the thing you are harvesting. The apple grows from the seed, and you harvest the apple and there’s the seed in it. If you’ve harvested without the seed (if you’re talking about a fruit), you’re probably harvested it too early. The seed need to actually be fully a seed by the time you are harvesting it. And this question of are you harvesting too early or harvesting too late? When do you harvest? You don’t wanna get the timing wrong.” - Rev Sara Jolena Wolcott
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