Leaven Community
Building a future in Liberation and Love
Building a future in Liberation and Love

Announcing: Now We're Cooking!

Potlucks, meetings, and holiday gatherings all are better with…FOOD! 

For our February board meeting, Leaven Board Member Meshal Alajmi made a delicious meal in the Leaven kitchen to share. The rest of us were inspired!

There are three events this month which are prompting us to think more systematically about food hospitality and mutual aid in our community: The March Board Meeting, a Garden Work Party, and the Salt & Light Easter Pancake Breakfast.

We’re going to cook together!

  • Thursday, March 14, 3-6 PM Make soup and prep salad ingredients food for the Leaven Board meeting (3/14) and Leaven Garden Work Party (3/16)

  • Thursday, March 28, 3-6 PM Preparations for Salt & Light Easter Pancake Breakfast 

Sign up for now we’re cooking!

Fill out the form below if you are interested in:

  • Contributing recipes/meal planning or signing up to bring ingredients

  • Cooking or doing meal prep on a regular basis with the community

  • Serving as one of a few Now We’re Cooking! Coordinators through August 2024

What comes next?

In the near future we hope to provide community members with meals who put a lot of time into the development of our community and could benefit from less time and energy spent on the dinner details every night.

We want to have frozen meals on hand for families in our community who are experiencing transitions such as births, hospitalizations, financial hardships, etc.

We’re exploring restarting a bulk food purchasing club, which Leaven members have organized in the past.

These efforts will strengthen the relationships we are developing as a Community Resilience Hub and unveil future opportunities for food justice in our community.


When Our Bodies Show the Way

by Alison Killeen

I was sick this week — the kind of sick that shows up mysteriously and knocks you off your feet. I tried to push through, but my body had strong opinions against that. In the end, there was nothing left to do but lay my body down.

Our bodies know the way. As I experienced this week, a body can hit the brakes when we've pushed our productivity too far. 

If we listen, our bodies can reveal emotions swelling up from our chest that we hadn't even recognized were there - but which desperately need expression.

And sometimes, the thing we are looking for is not in found in a word or idea - but in the hearty flavor of a home-cooked soup, the soothing sound of crickets outside the window, or the embrace of a loved one coming home - experienced only through our bodies.

Healing doesn't come through our head and heart alone. If we listen, our bodies will show us the way.

There's lots happening at Leaven right now to get your heart, head and body engaged:

Check out our Upcoming Events to learn what else is happening at Leaven — to explore with and through your one and only, precious body.

Curious to learn more about the body, trauma and healing? Check out My Grandmother's Hands by Resmaa Menakem and The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel van der Kolk.

Building a future in Liberation and Love

Over the holidays, in the midst of a cozy week off with family, I was interrupted by a push notification: Colorado Supreme Court Disqualifies Trump from 2024 ballot.

In less than a minute flat, my mind had spun off into a dizzying spiral of potential scenarios, from what would happen if Trump is elected to what would happen if he is not elected. None of my imagined scenarios were particularly reassuring, and as I began to layer other potential concerns over our country's coming electoral quagmire, my anxiety increased:

From the weakening of democracy to the rise of fascism - from our rapidly accelerating climate crisis to the ongoing realities of racism, capitalism and neocolonialism - from the increase of state conflict worldwide to the same of state collapse - 2024 was looking kind of bleak.

The Great Unraveling

Molly Young Brown in a recent podcast interview called this phenomenon "polycrisis" - which she says originates in a our separation from each other and from the earth. And Buddhist thinker and theologian Joanna Macy calls this moment we are experiencing The Great Unraveling.

But as both Brown and Macy (and many others) point out: if our systems are grounded in a sense of separation - from each other, from the land, from our sense of the sacred - then what is there to fear, really, in their demise?

Rather than worrying about what might happen in the future, we might instead begin to dream and imagine how we can be a part of shaping our collective future - a future grounded in love and liberation for all beings on this sacred planet.

Building a Future in Love

As my own fear and anxiety itself began to unravel, I remembered that I am not alone. Among other beloveds, I have the privilege to walk alongside all of you.

And even more, I remembered that Leaven's Strategic Goals for 2024 and 2025 beckon us toward that same future rooted in love and liberation:

(1) Grounding ourselves in a radical culture of belonging, we will (2) organize for justice, considering (3) becoming a Community Resilience Hub.

Together, we'll (4) nurture our relationship to the sacred in post-religious spaces.

And we'll do all of this while tending to Leaven's (and, I hope, our wider community's) (5) financial sustainability.

When all is said and done, what we have is our relationships with each other, with the sacred, and with our precious earth. This 2024, I want to stay close to Leaven’s intentions - trusting that they will bridge us toward a future of love and liberation for all beings.

Salt & Light Service on Zoom - Sunday, Jan 14 @ 10am

Click here to join the service on Zoom 

Because of the anticipated snow and extreme cold, the CMLT has made the decision to move Salt and Light's weekly service to Zoom. Pleasestay safe and warm during this extreme weather, and join the community as we gather on Zoom!

If you're able, donate toan organization providing warm shelterin the cold weather.This wishlistfromTransition Projectsallows you to directly purchase needed items for folks living outside.  

Children's Accompaniment Circle

If possible, please make sure your youth have a separate device to Zoom on and join with both devices at 10am. They will join using the same link and be placed into a breakout room with Jane.

What to Expect: 

  • It’s a Zoom Pajama Retreat! Jane will be in her PJ’s.  We’ll be meeting each other in everyone’s houses at once! 

  • We will play our own version of CAC “Video” games as a group.

  • And of course we’ll do our Rose and Thorns for a cold snowy day.

  • If you haven't already received your Epiphany Star we'll have some for you to choose from!

  • Please bring your colored pens and some paper.

Announcing Leaven's 2024 Leadership + Strategic Goals

On December 10, 2023 at Leaven’s annual meeting, the community made some big decisions, approving five strategic goals for 2024-2025 and electing 12 members to Leaven’s 2024 Board of Directors.

Leaven’s 2024-2025 Strategic Goals

  • Recommit to Community Organizing as a Core Sacred Practice of Leaven Community - Community Organizing and Action is one of our four core values. It’s time to scale back up, training our leaders and use the lens of community organizing to guide our strategy.

  • Build a Culture of Radical Belonging - In 2024, we will create a team at Leaven that attends to Leaven’s culture and communal sense of belonging, in order for Leaven to more fully live into its vision where all people can gather here - making meaning and organizing for change regardless of race, gender, religion, age, ability, sexuality, class, and other identities and experiences.

  • Explore Leaven becoming a Community Resilience Hub - We will initiate and deepen our existing neighborhood and organizing partnerships to understand what needs there might be for increasing resilience in a time of climate and other social, political and natural emergencies, as well as where and how Leaven might support, lead or partner in these efforts.

  • Develop Secular Sacred Spaces at Leaven - Cultivating deep, meaningful relationships is an essential part of who we are as Leaven Community. We long for more spaces to cultivate strong relationships, and for more secular spaces to explore our diverse spiritualities.

  • Develop a Sustainable and Abundant Resource Pool for Leaven's Financial Stability - Leaven has a strong foundation of generous and longtime individual donors who are committed to our vision. To strengthen our financial stability, Leaven’s Raising the Dough team will experiment with and evaluate the development of additional revenue streams such as grants, events, and earned income, and will build on what we learn.

Leaven’s 2024 Board Members

  • Meshal Alajmi

  • Vanessa Bird

  • Jennifer Creswell

  • Derek Fenwick, Co-Chair

  • Mike Hogan

  • Lois Jordahl, Salt and Light Appointee

  • Cheryl Lohrmann, Co–Chair

  • Joe Morgan, Treasurer

  • John Rodgers

  • Jazmín Vélez

  • Marshall Wattman-Turner

  • Brent Wilson, Secretary

Unveiling the Sacred Spiral of Leaven

“Love and Justice are not two. Without inner change, there is no outer change; without collective change, no change matters.” - Rev. angel Kyodo williams, sensei

On October 27-29, 35 adults and 14 children and youth within Leaven Community participated in the community-wide Leaven retreat, following the Listening Season in September 2023. The primary purpose of the retreat was to unveil the next steps for the community emerging out of the Listening Season.

Retreat participants gather in a circle around a blue spiral taped on a floor.

Retreat design centered around aligning Leaven’s existing values (Diversity, Justice, Story and Action) with its existing activities, as well as holding them alongside the hopes and dreams that had been discussed at House Meetings in the listening season.

All our activities at Leaven are connected at a fractal level through relationships and shared values - so we were able to physically map on the floor Leaven’s existing programs and the hoped-for ideas that had been expressed in the listening season.

Building momentum from the sacred spiral mapping, the group engaged in an ideas-creation activity led by Rev Julia Nielsen, director of the Leaven Community Land and Housing Coalition. Each individual wrote one bold idea on a notecard. Notecards were then passed anonymously from person to person, stopping five times for individuals to review and score each idea on a scale of 1 (no thank you) to 5 (love this idea!!) for a total of 25 points. Ideas with scores 20 and higher were then added to the spiral map.

These conversations wove a deepening story of our shared dreams for this community! Curious to learn more? Read the 2023 Leaven Retreat Report here.

Two silhouettes of people stand in the bright sunlight overlooking the green grass and mountains of the Western Coastal range of Oregon.



What we learned during Leaven's 2023 Listening Season

To watch the video, visit this link and enter the passcode: ds4KxE!D

Key Takeaways

  • Leaven is alive! Lots of folks participated and articulated the same values and dreams we remember from years ago.

  • We are longing for connection. We want to be seen, to belong, and to be together in milestone moments and in daily life.

  • We are experiencing the pressures of capitalism. Folks shared about being busy, overstimulated, and stressed, and named longings for sharing resources and labor.

  • We focused on inner and community change - but less so systemic change. Few of us pointed to systems change or community organizing as a means to addressing the pressures we’re facing in our lives.

  • Now is the time to act on our longings. We have lots of ideas and energy - but no one is going to create what we’re longing for except ourselves!

Recommendations for Next Steps

Start organizing at Leaven! If there’s something any Leaven member wants to do with others at Leaven, find 1-2 other people, organize it, and invite the community! Get it on the calendar and in the enews (via Ali and Alison) and go for it. Don’t worry if it’s not in the building - it can still be a “Little Leaven.” No one is going to do it for us - it’s time to get started!

Recommit to a culture of community organizing and systems change through practices such as: offering regular Sacred Organizing trainings at Leaven; sending Leaven members to community organizing trainings such as those offered by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF); integrating community organizing into new member orientation and materials; re-establishing a Leaven Community Core Team

Consider becoming a Community Resilience Hub - Leaven becoming a Community Resilience Hub would combine many of the longings people have named for climate action, mutual aid, and community building in one overarching project that the community could organize around and engage our neighbors in.

Follow the leadership of BIPOC communities organizing for climate justice and anti-capitalism. Show up at events and actions, build relationships, amplify their work and voices, support the movement with our bodies and our resources, and organize others to join us.

Experiment with cultivating secular sacred community spaces at Leaven, to mark big life milestones and make meaning of the world around us.

Read the Report

Curious for more? Read the written report the Listening Season Team drafted and approved together.

Leaven Listening Season Team

Sam Yerke
Fumi Tosu
Matt Smith
John Rodgers
Nancy Phelps
Cheryl Lohrmann
Derek Fenwick
Jules Nielsen
Jane Keating

Be, Love, Act: Seeing Leaven as a Sacred Spiral

In this video:

  • Alison offers the second of two frameworks for thinking about Leaven today: the Sacred Spiral.

  • Fractals, the natural world, and biomimicry help us to understand that how we are at the smallest scale is how we are at the larger scale.

  • Leaven engages in inner change (spiritual work), outer change (local community work), and collective change work (community organizing). 

  • Leaven Community is connected through our relationships and our shared values, vision, and worldview. 

What do you think of all this? Attend a House Meeting to share your thoughts.

Resources:

How the "Two Loops" theory helps us think about Leaven

In this video:

  • Leaven’s Director-Organizer Alison Killeen offers the first of two frameworks for thinking about Leaven: the Two Loops theory of how systems change (via the Berkana Institute)

  • Leaven emerges out of the dominant system of American Christianity - to create something new, different, and liberating

  • Leaven has the potential to build community that is secular, communical and spiritually grounded, and which moves us toward inner, outer and collective change

Resources:

Secular-Spiritual Communities of Practice: