From the Studio

Wolf Willow endeavors to make a difference by supporting leaders to see, feel, and engage serious social and ecological issues through a complexity lens. This work requires a willingness take part in an inquiry of self and system – a learning journey that deviates from traditional leadership development initiatives in significant ways.

In all our programming streams, Wolf Willow invites a diversity of perspectives grounded in place and identity. We craft our content in collaboration and trust, drawing from multi-cultural concepts and frameworks, and centering land, arts-based, and other multi-modal learning strategies. We are listening as we go, allowing for emergence and adaptation. Rich, ongoing reflection and evaluation has shown us that these kinds of whole-person, self-and-system experiences do, in fact, help to build the capacity of leaders and changemakers to work more effectively in complex domains.

As we begin to share some of the impacts of our work, we thought it best to invite you into a more affective, arts-based journey through the landscape we’ve been inhabiting.

As you peruse the following images, videos, and stories, notice where you are drawn. What comes alive for you? What questions might you be holding now? What complexity is here that might touch your own?

Rosina Kazi | Musician-in-Residence

Performance: A sonic harvest and response to the week’s collective wisdom journey.

Dainty Smith | Artist-in-Residence

Performance: Dainty's improv made visible a somatic expression of our field, in her art form of Burlesque.

Syrus Marcus Ware | Café Host

Performance: Fragments of our self and systems love letters co-crafted into a collective aspiration.

Kristofer Kelly-Frere | Artist-in-Residence

Performance: A sonic harvest and response to the week’s collective wisdom journey.

Art as Inquiry

“Every conversation generates new layers of imagery. They build up as a stack of thinking/drawings but are porous. One layer feeds into the next, or loops back to an earlier insight. I work in a kind of mytho-poetic-synthetic style that has developed over years as a facilitator. Some parts of the drawings are very literal - others leave room for the imagination. They can be considered as a whole, or in parts. They are not linear, and sometimes have a quantum kind of quality - where more than one thread occupies the same space. Poetic phrases sometimes emerge to describe the images.

We’ve experimented with different ways of using these bundles as a kind of mirror for participants: videos, animations, image banks, coffee table books and other artifacts. Over time some images have become trailheads or symbols while others fall away. ”

— Kristofer Kelly-Frere, Artist in Residence and Positive Deviant

Words from the Café caught by Kristofer Kelly-Frere

Words by Vanessa Reid. Watercolor by Julia Hoffman

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"I came into the café with a certain understanding of complexity, but it was an intellectual, rational understanding - the importance of honoring different ways of knowing, the "un-seperateness" of all things, the power of the arts, speaking from a place of complexity, etc.... it was already part of my belief system. I came out of the Café with the beginning of an experiential, embodied understanding."
"The adaptive cycle taught me to look beyond the struggle for windows of opportunity and creativity."
"We are coming to the end of current systems. We need a resilient new way of being and a new way of thinking about how we do our work, and places like Wolf Willow make it safe to explore what that could look like. We can't do new things and old ways - and ask them about the red lipstick."
"Magic. I'm in something that's deep and big and it's touching my world work and my soul work. Join us in touching into that depth and that breath, and that creativity and that possibility."

From the Studio

Art as Inquiry

"The adaptive cycle taught me to look beyond the struggle for windows of opportunity and creativity."

"We are coming to the end of current systems. We need a resilient new way of being and a new way of thinking about how we do our work, and places like Wolf Willow make it safe to explore what that could look like. We can't do new things and old ways - and ask them about the red lipstick."

"Magic. I'm in something that's deep and big and it's touching my world work and my soul work. Join us in touching into that depth and that breath, and that creativity and that possibility."