Maine Local Living School
nurturing the human-earth relationship
Maine Local Living School is a working homestead and education center founded in 2008. Our programs emphasize building regenerative relationships with the earth and each other, learning practical skills for wise living, and cultivating capacities for observation, stillness and gratitude. We do these through the Family Sustainability Stay, the Understory Semester, School Programs and Community Programs. Participants carve, weave, wild-gather, cultivate, compost, harvest, sew, plant, thresh, winnow and construct a life that honors the limits and abundances of our places. Local Living is a process of coming to know the earth as home. For us, coming home has meant coming alive. We welcome you to join!
We give thanks for this place we call home which is the unceded land of the Arosaguntacook tribe of the Eastern Abenaki Nation. May the future be as rich in place-based wisdom as was the past before the atrocities of colonization.
“First we must fall in love. Then we can make the world over.”
- N.F.S. Grundtvig
Programs
School Programs:
Kindergarten through University
Community Programs
Family Sustainability Stay
Understory Semester
"In the end the experience was so much more amazing and releasing than I could have imagined. Mulberry jam, drum making, carrying water, helping to harvest and cook, give and receive...Words fail to describe how much we enjoyed and learned!"
-2019 Family Stay Participant
On Justice: Maine Local Living recognizes that all environmental crises are rooted in the exploitation of people. We cannot disentangle the climate crisis from the social justice crises. For this reason, all education for living wisely and equitably is activism for the road ahead. This is about anchoring into our unique places and beginning the powerful work of Re-inhabitation. Re-inhabitation means rebuilding local knowledge and skills, acknowledging ways of knowing that have been marginalized through colonization, and rebuilding cultures that recognize the earth and each other as sacred gifts.
