Our Mission

The Earthville Network makes a better world by educating and empowering responsible global citizens, engaging them as compassionate and creative change agents, and connecting them in innovative collaborations for learning, service, and sustainable thriving.

Our Vision

Earthville envisions a worldwide network of people and initiatives engaging the power of human creativity and caring to forge a more compassionate global village in which sustainable thriving becomes the norm, for people and the planet.

Our Objectives

1. Educate ourselves as informed world citizens exploring the most important issues of our times, especially in the spheres of responsible global citizenship, sustainable thriving, holistic personal development, and the arts and media.
2. Empower people of all backgrounds (especially learners, leaders, entrepreneurs, creatives, volunteers, and activists) with the skills and sensitivities to achieve effective, positive transformations in ourselves, our communities, and our world.
3. Engage these caring global citizens in lifelong learning, volunteer service, and professions that benefit both oneself and others.
4. Connect these compassionately engaged citizens and their initiatives, locally and globally, building communities of purpose and cultivating mutually supportive relationships.
5. Innovate in the fields of education, charitable work, and responsible business by leveraging the limitless resource of human ingenuity and caring to engineer holistic solutions to our personal, societal, and global challenges and contribute to a more harmonious and sustainable global village.

Our Long-Term Trajectory

The five objectives above come together in Earthville’s main long-term focus: developing an integrated organizational model for learning, service, and sustainable social entrepreneurship.

Take three of society’s fundamental institutions — school, charity, and enterprise — and put them together in one place where they’re all working together toward the same ends: a more compassionate and sustainable community, locally and globally. Here, nonprofit initiatives are seen as natural partners for socially and environmentally responsible business endeavors, and vice versa. And this dynamic and stimulating collaborative environment becomes the real-world campus in which learners of all ages educate and empower themselves as the leaders and laborers of positive transformation — on the personal, community, and global levels. That’s the idea behind the Earthville Institute.

Now, take this one step further and imagine integrated institutes like this spread across the world, connected in meaningful exchanges, sharing people and ideas, learning from one another, and enjoying mutually beneficial collaborations. That’s the essence of our long-term vision of a global campus for learning, service, and sustainable thriving, which is already partially implemented in the partnership between our Earthville Institute in Colorado and Dharmalaya Institute for Compassionate Living, our eco-campus in the Himalayas.

Our Programs

Earthville pursues its mission through a global network of local initiatives addressing social and environmental issues in an integrated way. We “think globally and act locally” all across the globe. We catalyze mutually-beneficial relationships between these people and programs, cultivating a borderless community of purpose: Earthville.

That sounds great, but what do you actually do?

Here are a few examples to give you the flavor of Earthville’s diverse charitable activities:

For more information on Earthville’s charitable projects and programs, see our What We Do page and our Events page.

Our Tools

We see the whole world as our toolbox, but here are some key tools for transformation that we use every day in Earthville:

• Service-learning:  Much of Earthville’s activity involves the union of experiential education and voluntary service — learning useful things in a real-world context by doing things that make a difference. Of the myriad possibilities for experiential education, service-learning is one of the most effective means to make a lasting impact on a learner while she’s making a positive impact on the world. The heart-opening activity of service deeply engages the learner and profoundly enhances her understanding of the matters at hand, while doing some good for others in the process. Earthville provides a variety of opportunities for service-learning around the world.
• The arts and creativity: Creativity is about more than just making stuff — it’s a powerful resource for making solutions, and for making ourselves. But even simply making the world more beautiful and involving through the arts is also a service in itself. Creativity is the DNA of problem solving, so when the world is facing unprecedented problems, there’s an urgent need for unprecedented creativity. In Earthville’s activities, we love to put the arts and altruism together to multiply the impact  — on ourselves and on our world.
• Media and technology: It’s the age of content, and the media and technology (when in good hands) become high-impact, low-cost tools for education and transformation. Earthville uses digital media and the Internet to educate, inspire, and engage the global public, through stories, photos, videos, music, and more.
• Compassionate commerce: To change the world, and even to live sustainably and comfortably in modern society, one needs money. The model of the impoverished charity is bankrupt, and charitable giving is currently insufficient to meet the needs of our nonprofits, so new revenue sources are needed urgently. We seek to mine the great human gift of entrepreneurial creativity to incubate responsible business enterprises that generate revenue for good causes and comfortable livelihoods for the good-hearted people who dedicate their time to those causes, while making the world a better place in the process.
• Contemplative explorations: Change, sustainability, and harmony — they all begin with the individual. Who and how we are in the world makes at least as much difference as what we do in it. The better we understand ourselves, the better we can understand the world. The more profoundly we’re able to transform and empower ourselves, the more we’ll be able to help transform our local and global communities in more effective and sensitive ways. Clearer thinking and feeling supports inspired planning and elegant execution. This inner tool of contemplative exploration enhances the impact of the four outer tools above because all of these things come down to people dealing with people, and that tends to go better with greater self-awareness, deeper sensitivity to others, better communication, and more skillful interactions.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Earthville’s approach is the integration of all five of these tools into most of our activities. We don’t treat them as separate disciplines. We consciously use them together, addressing the whole person and the whole problem to generate whole solutions.

A Current & Concrete Example…

If you were to show up for one of Earthville’s “Sustainable Living Work Retreats” in the Himalayas, what could you expect? Not just another volunteer/service-learning program, but a richly multi-faceted (and often life-changing) experience in which you can study Indian village culture and get your hands in the mud to learn the arts of building traditional adobe houses by working alongside our charming local craftspeople and other interesting kindred spirits from across the globe. But there’s also yoga and meditation to start and end the day well, and to provide opportunities to reflect on what you’re learning about the work, about the world, and about yourself. Some friendly and bright young architecture students are building a clay oven or working in the organic garden, and they’re happy to have you join them. You take part in all of this with the knowledge that your participation in the program is supporting the host organization to provide green jobs for low-income villagers, helping to keep their daughters in school, and helping the institute develop its pioneering model for immersive, educational ecotourism. And all of this is being photographed and filmed for the purpose of creating documentaries, online curricular materials, and more — and you can play a part in that, too, if you’re inspired. All the five tools above in one experience, and everyone wins.

→ If this particular example has whet your appetite, check out the Dharmalaya Institute page and see our Events calendar. There are also opportunities to help create similarly holistic environments and experiences in the US and elsewhere.

Our Integrated Strategy

In short, Earthville brings together people, places, and programs advancing our progress toward sustainability and harmony with solutions and models that are locally appropriate and globally replicable.

Again, none of the elements above is unique in itself, but the way Earthville brings them together creates a fertile world of possibilities for personal and global transformation.

Where to from Here?

Your tour of Earthville has reached a fork in the road:

Looking back: For a quick overview of what Earthville has accomplished since its founding, see our Milestones and Results page.

In the present: For an introduction to Earthville’s current projects and program activities, visit our Projects page and our Events calendar.

Looking forward: For a glimpse of the far horizon, see Earthville’s long-term vision for a global campus.

Earthville’s accomplishments to date →

← A concise introduction to Earthville

Get Involved

We welcome you to explore Earthville,  find your place within it , and add what only you can bring.