River Valley KinMakers CoLab
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River Valley KinMakers CoLab *
If Wealth Were a Watershed
The long river
The Connecticut River is the region's longest, running 410 miles through four states.
Her tributaries reach more than 11,260 square miles of the Northeast. She provides more than 70% of the fresh water to Long Island Sound and is one of 14 American Heritage Rivers, recognizing her historic, economic, and environmental importance.
Connecticut River Valley KinMakers ask the question: is life valuable? The five Massachusetts counties through which the great river and her tributaries flow — Franklin, Hampshire, Hampden, Worcester and Berkshire - are among the ten poorest in the commonwealth.
While "poor" according to mainstream market economics, this region is rich with the essential components essential to life.
We gather to listen, re-learn, and practice the foundations of a life-centered economy together. We explore the relationships and practices that keep life going, so that our collective wealth can overflow from the center like the watershed of our great river.
Together, with Regenerative and Systemic Investing designers, we lay the seedbed for a deeply rooted regenerative economy centered around giftmakers: caregivers and the watershed.
KinMakers Retreat
August 25-27, Woolman Hill, Deerfield MA
A meaningful blend of rooted cultural, caregivers and curious KinMakers, playing our way into a new vision of life-centered wealth.
Together we will explore:
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Over six shared meals, KinKitchen invites participants into a living relationship with the Northeast Woodlands through locally grown, harvested, and foraged foods.
Together we will explore the gift flow of nourishment—humans in reciprocity with the more-than-human world. By gathering, preparing, and sharing food, we reconnect with ancient patterns of gratitude, stewardship, and belonging that have long sustained both bodies and communities.
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What if wealth were a watershed?
Through guided experiences, creative inquiry, and encounters with the living landscape, participants will explore wealth beyond money. Together we will investigate the hidden forms of value that make life possible—healthy forests, flowing waters, strong communities, cultural memory, care, and reciprocity.
ReImagining Wealth invites us to recover ancestral and communal ways of gathering around the hearth and to see our watersheds as valuesheds: places where living systems continuously generate abundance.
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Long before markets arrived, people here lived within sophisticated economies of relationship, reciprocity, and responsibility.
In conversation with Native leaders, cultural practitioners, and ecological stewards, participants will learn from traditions that have maintained enduring relationships with land, water, and the more-than-human world. Together we will explore what it means to live in reverence, to listen to the language of place, and to understand economy not as the management of resources, but as the cultivation of right relationship.
How we gather
Across the Central Connecticut River Valley, people have cared for each other and the land for generations. These ways of caring still sustain life today.
Care is part of the productive economy, thought it is not rewarded in the mainstream economy. It lives in relationship and connection. In the gifts that we offer unconditionally with joy.
KinMakers explore opportunities to:
Bring light to the existing gifts of life and land.
Strengthen the relational conditions for gift and care.
Improve circulation between the currents of money and care
Over six months (May–November) we come together—unveiling and enjoying the economy that grows from care at its center.
KinMaker Roles
KinMakers
All of us who seek deeper, more sustained ways to live in the gifts of life and love around us.
Tech Magi
Rooted Wealth
Collectives already holding community through care, mutual aid, land, food, housing, or cultural practice.Working and playing at the edges of regenerative systems—technology, governance, data, coordination.
Falling in together…
Extraordinary farmland
Deep Indigenous life-ways
World-class institutions
Entrenched inequality
High potential, fragile food systems
Capital that rarely circulates locally