Watershed at 10 Years

1. An area of land that shares a common watercourse and links all life into a community of interdependence. 

2. an event or idea that marks an historic change of course, turning point or transformation.

1. An area of land that shares a common watercourse and links all life into a community of interdependence.

June 22, 2024

This year, Watershed celebrates 10 years of hosting retreats and offering a spectacular array of social justice movement organizations a place to call home. A land-based project requires resources and labor of all kinds, so we begin this celebration by expressing our gratitude for the many people and organizations who have given shape and form to Watershed. If you’re reading this, you are likely one of these folks. Thank you.

We have spent these first 10 years as Watershed leaning deeply into the first aspect of our definition – supporting the creation of a vibrant community of interdependence both with our movement partners and with our local community. As we enter our second decade, we embrace the second aspect of our Watershed definition – supporting the ushering in of what we regard to be a much-needed change of course, turning point, or transformation.

Building Community of Interdependence

Watershed officially opened its doors 10 years ago to a group of 30 young activists and organizers from across the country. The training team arrived on a warm June afternoon as we were fitting a temporary ramp to the yurt, having just completed construction of our circular gathering space the previous day. The timing was tight, but auspicious. Watershed’s inaugural retreat was the first ever Momentum Training, a movement organizing model built upon a century of nonviolent power and movement building, crafted by and for a generation of millennial activists and organizers. Our center grew out of our own experiences inside of these movements over the course of 2 decades and we were moved that our call to this land in the heart of the Hudson Valley – as a place to gather, connect and grow – was heard. In the ensuing months and years, Watershed has held space for hundreds of retreats, nourished thousands of beautiful people and helped to incubate a community of land projects and partners all in the service of a more just and equitable future here in the Hudson Valley and beyond. 

Over the last 10 years Watershed has supported the establishment of five local partners, all connected to a shared vision to center land as a source of connection, nourishment and wisdom.

One of the most meaningful aspects of our first decade has been the trust and love we have cultivated with the Schaghticoke First Nations (SFN), who continue to be economically displaced from their land. Watershed hosted their Unity Gathering for 3 years before helping SFN to acquire 75 acres of their ancestral land, where they now host their Unity Gathering and through which they support the re-indigenization of their people and their land. 

Rock Steady Farm (RSF) provides vegetable shares to dozens of low income families in the Hudson Valley and NYC, as well as intensive farm training opportunities to BIPOC and queer burgeoning farmers. Watershed provided a range of support to Rock Steady in their start-up period from 2016-2018 – providing access to capital, technical assistance and fiscal sponsorship. As Rock Steady has grown in recent years, Watershed’s retreat center now hosts RSF’s biannual Queer and BIPOC Tractor Training, provides regular meals to their team and collaborates with them on perennial cultivation.

WILDSEED, which is currently stewarded by Catalyst Collaborative Farm,  is incubating BIPOC farms and providing gathering space and workshops for communities of color. Wildseed was originally purchased by a Watershed Board member as a reparation gift to a Black collective. Watershed continues to provide organizational support and retreat space to WILDSEED. 

The Brooklyn Zen Center (BZC) was a client of Watershed’s for years, holding their annual silent meditation retreat here since 2017. When land adjacent to Watershed came on the market, they saw an opportunity to establish Ancestral Heart Monastery (AHM) as their monastic training site. Watershed helped BZC to find their footing locally and continues to collaborate with AHM for operational support, facilitation and retreat hosting. They offer long term residential monastic training in Millerton as well as year-round instruction, courses, and support to practitioners in Brooklyn and in their new center in downtown Millerton. BZC runs a 10-month Undoing Whiteness for white and multiracial practitioners program, whose opening retreat Watershed had the pleasure of hosting this past Fall.

The Ayni Institute has just purchased the property along our southern border. Anyi Institute was instrumental in creating the movement building methodologies of the Momentum Training Institute, which was our very first retreat 10 years ago and which trained many of our subsequent clients, including the Sunrise Movement, Coseha and If Not Now. Integrating original movement theory with indigenous wisdom traditions, the Ayni Institute is one of the most impactful movement building organizations of our time. As we step into our 10th year we are thrilled to be welcoming ANYI as our 4th stewardship partner, supporting them in maintaining and operating their rural center. 

With partners now in the three of the four directions (state parkland borders Watershed to the East), we feel like we are being embraced in a hug of collective solidarity and hope. Together we steward 275 contiguous acres of unceded Schaghticoke territory offering a uniquely integrated potential for social change. While we each retain our autonomy as organizations with specific missions and offerings, together we are able to offer a broad diversity of frontline communities respite, nourishment, spiritual grounding, facilitation, and concrete skills ranging from mass movement building to farming. We are building a village of care, vision, and collective action. 

Emboldened in body and in spirit by sharing land with 4 other visionary projects, we know it is our duty to put the strength that we have cultivated to use, as together we face the growing polycrisis. We know that stewarding our rapidly changing landscape, growing food, and providing respite for our communities is all work that we will be called upon to do more of in the coming years. Yet we know that the needs of our communities will far surpass what we are currently positioned to offer, both spiritually and functionally.  Now is a time for both strengthening and deepening. 

We know that one of the most valuable aspects of what we offer is support for people’s hearts. In a time of massive division and heartbreak, spending time being nourished by our land and our community allows our guests to reconnect to hope and to love. It is for this reason that we at Watershed will be devoting ourselves to convening our constellation of land partners in both shared rituals and strategic conversations on how we can create a ground of support that can meet the concrete challenges of our times, while keeping our hearts receptive and expansive.

Invitation as Intervention

The fecundity and pure magic of this land has provided nourishment and connection to thousands of changemakers. Over the last decade Watershed has had the immense honor of supporting denizens of movement groups through pivotal movement moments. We have celebrated their many wins, and we have also accompanied many of our partner organizations through moments of intense breakdown. We’ve witnessed the vulnerability of leadership and the disorientation of watching best intentions cause harm. It is in these moments of stumble and crumble that the nourishment of Watershed has been felt most deeply, and it is also through these moments that we have received our greatest insights. We honor these insights – because we too have stumbled. 

Just 5 years ago we awoke to the sound of our iconic leaning butternut tree crashing to the ground. The demise of this ancient tree eerily coincided with the breakdown of our own Watershed staff collective. The synchronicity of these two great losses felt to us like a death knell. We felt heartbroken, ashamed and afraid. By leaning with vulnerability into the wisdom of our community and of our land, we re-found our ground. So too did our butternut, which sprouted leaves the next spring and took on a new life – one in a more intimate connection with our community and with the earth.

2. an event or idea that marks an historic change of course, turning point or transformation.

With gratitude in our hearts we invite you to join us as we step into this next chapter and second definition of Watershed, as we hone our focus on supporting movements to usher in a historic change of course for transformation. 

Our invitation to you is to join us as we begin with an open-eyed look at our current movement cultures. 

From our unique Watershed vantage point, we have witnessed movement organizations putting a decade of work into building greater levels of sensitivity and accountability. This work has offered a much needed course correction from the obtuse and entrenched organizational structures of the past. Many organizations have worked hard to adopt a trauma-informed lens and to democratize their organizational structures. Many in our movements have taken a brave look at our internalized white supremacist culture and begun the painful process of building accountability around how our under-inspected ways of leading were causing harm. This ongoing work has been profound.  

It has also become evident to us at Watershed that at times the speed and breadth of these much needed course corrections have been too much for our organizations to hold with too little support. In these under-resourced moments, our organizations lose their nimbleness and ability to hold complexity. They become brittle, and are susceptible to fundamentalisms with condemnation, exile, and the dissolution of whole organizations as common consequence. 

There are many brave and brilliant minds working on this movement quagmire. The recent writings and work of thinkers like adrienne marie brown, Celia Kutz, Carlos Saavedra, Gibrán Rivera, Kazu Haga, Loretta J Ross, Maurice Mitchell, Prentis Hempill, Shilpa Jain and Sonya Shah attempt to move us back towards compassion and the capacity to hold complexity as we continue to struggle to free ourselves from the grip of oppressive ways of being.  As we step into our 10th year, Watershed is committed to leaning into these murky painful conversations and to supporting the emergence of new wisdom.

Moving Out of Movement Murk

Holding space for this kind of work is both risky and absolutely essential. We have identified 6 areas of movement “murk” that we feel are contributing to some of our movement organizations' stumbles and crumbles. 

  1. Intolerance for leadership mistakes and attempts at restitution

  2. Shame-based approaches to shifting supremacy cultures internally

  3. Shame-based strategies for polarization and movement building externally

  4. Ideological pressures for organizations to flatten power structures

  5. Attempting to heal personal trauma

  6. Lack of connection to the spirit of land

In response to these 6 areas of movement murk, we have begun to initiate movement conversations. All of these conversations are held in partnership. As we step into this highly charged work of transformation, we again lean into the depth of connection we have cultivated over the last 10 years with our partners, the dynamism of our local community, and the sanctity of our land. 

  • In May 2023, we invited two dozen key movement facilitators and restorative justice practitioners to Watershed to begin to unpack the phenomenon that has come to be known as “cancel culture.” We named this gathering “Because We Need Each Other” and we renamed the phenomenon as a “rupture in belonging.” The gathering opened up space both to unpack complexity and also to grieve the impacts of movement ruptures. Out of this retreat came an embodied appreciation of both the systemic pain and injustices that this phenomenon is attempting to heal, and the ways in which it is unraveling our organizations and eroding our movements. We leaned into our collective wisdom to find new strategies and paths toward healing. This was the first of many conversations to come, as Because We Need Each Other has become a formal program of Watershed with the leadership of Sonya Shah, Celia Kutz and Kazu Haga.  There is both forthcoming curriculum and writing emerging out of the relationships built in this gathering. We have included a summary BWNEO here.

  • Last October we had the honor of hosting our neighbor, Ancestral Heart Monastery’s opening retreat for a 10 month Undoing Whiteness as the Path to Liberation course. Through meditation, somatics, readings and small group dialogue, participants support each other to find a “centered” form of accountability and to move away from familiar patterns of self-flagellation and shame. One of the most profound moments of this retreat came through sitting around a campfire with Buddhist monks and Schaghticoke Chief Sachem Hawkstorm. Together we mourned the many knots, injustices and dislocations embedded in all of our ancestries, as we explored healing our connections to land, culture and spirit. The power of this retreat fomented for both Watershed and Ancestral Heart a desire to collectively evolve our social justice practices through contemplation, compassion, connection to land and community. We have also been grateful to be hosting 4 somatic based retreats for a year long program for white racial justice organizers called Opening to Freedom.

  • Shame is a powerful motivator. The use of shame as a means to force people to choose a side has historically been key to polarization strategies used by the Left. The fear of being shamed or ridiculed presents a threat to our core human need to belong. In our movements the use of shame as a strategy often precludes growth. The phenomenon of Trumpism is deeply tied to people’s emotional intolerance for shame. For many people struggling to grow out of the destructive hegemonies, entry to the Left often requires a perfectionism that is difficult to live up to. Given the choice of living in fear of being shamed or turning a blind eye to the egregious shortcomings of the Right (embracing Trump’s superpower of shamelessness), many have chosen the latter. As we inch closer to fascism in America, we feel it essential for our movements to develop new strategies for direct action and for movement building that move away from the weaponization of shame and towards an invitation towards hope, care and community. In recent years the Watershed Center has facilitated community conversations on “Talking to your Trumped-Up Neighbor” which invite bridging rather than shunning. We look forward to reviving this work in the lead up to the election.

  • Watershed has taught classes over the last 15 years in collaboration with the Institute for Social Ecology on building healthy democratic movement organizations. While the idea of entirely horizontal or democratic organizations is inspiring as a vision, we realized that achieving horizontality has become an anarchistic holy grail and the failure to do so, evidence of a predilection for power. Many organizations have contorted themselves in aspiration, while their mission-based work languishes under a misaligned “one size fits all” structure. In an attempt to satisfy this mandate we see organizations with either “inverted hierarchies” – in which a small group holds the lion share of responsibilities, while being hamstrung in their ability to make decisions; or “implicit hierarchies” – in which a brilliant charismatic leader massages group consensus. In both cases a central dishonesty attempts to buttress a facade of ideological righteousness. This murkiness is often accompanied by an ambivalence around occupying a space of leadership, which makes everyone uncomfortable and leads to major internal breakdowns. We also see this ambivalence as leading to often unproductive challenges to any thing that smells like power, even when the power is a reflection of decades of work, principled relationship building, and competency. We are excited to bring together some of the most creative and neardiest minds in the field of organizational development to share strategies for building more dynamic and functional organizational structures. 

  • Developing a trauma-informed organizational culture is essential to the prospect of creating liberatory work places, and yet many organizations we find are struggling with knowing how to hold all trauma that is surfacing. Watershed has hosted many groups that offer powerful support in this arena. In recent years we have witnessed many organizations feeling compelled to open up space internally for healing staff member’s personal trauma histories and then wobbling under the weight of doing so without enough on-going or professional support. For many organizers, our workplace may be the most organic “community” to which we belong. How can we support the healing of trauma without destabilizing our organizations? How can we build more effective and well-equipped avenues for healing trauma as a means for building collective wisdom? We have a number of partners that are doing exciting work on this front that we look forward to bringing together, including our new neighbors, The Ayni Institute, which is launching a Community Counseling Program this Fall.

  • Before the violence of colonization, our land was home to the thousands of Schaghticoke. Remains of their wigwam platforms and burial mounds offer testament both to their greatness – and to the tremendous loss of life, knowledge and culture that our land has borne witness to. In preparation for our 10 year anniversary, we interviewed key partners about their most transformative experiences at Watershed, and unsurprisingly nearly everyone spoke of the power of spirit that they felt in the land. This is a question that has been very alive for us over the last 10 years. From our work building trails that offer access to the sublime power of the waterfalls, to our work around re-indigenizing the plants on our land, we are continually humbled by the spirit of the land we collectively steward. We are working with the Schaghticoke and other land and spirit guides to invite our community into a deeper communion with land and spirit. Inviting pause and listening to the waters and other energies around us is where we have found the greatest teachings. 

Gratitude

We thank you in advance for being on this journey with us. What we have honored most about our work over the last 10 years is our ability to deeply nourish our partners. In our next ten, we hope to support our partners in being able to identify and to compost what divides us and uplift and strengthen what brings us together. In doing this work we are emboldened by the love and strength of the community we have helped to cultivate this last decade and by the spirit and power of the land that supports us. Thank you for your contribution to 10 years of Watershed Moments and Movements. 

Supporting Watershed

As we enter into our next decade of existence we are looking for philanthropic partnership. We are looking for multi-year foundational and major donor support. While the majority of our income is fee for service, from our movement clients, we are committed to keeping our costs affordable, which requires additional financial support.