Dear friends, composters, and fellow tenders of the web,

If you’ve ever planted a seed, you know the joy of watching it sprout. If you’ve ever walked in the woods and noticed a rotting log teeming with fungi, you know the quiet power of the mycelial network. That’s how I see this newsletter — not just as information, but as living connection: an underground weave of stories, events, and people nourishing each other through the layered, fertile soil of permaculture values.

For many years, I’ve been running the NW Permaculture Newsletter on a volunteer basis. I started it with help and now I continue alone out of love — love for community, this land, this bioregion, and the deeply creative, wildly generous people who inhabit it. It’s fulfilling to help us feel we belong and less alone. I did it to help our community see itself. And I’ve done it mostly solo.

But now it’s time for this network, this culture to grow — and for that, I need you.

🌱 Why Join the Communications Team?

Do you have permaculture news, events, or insights you’d love to share with a highly engaged audience?

Would you like to help our Cascadian community grow, connect and create belonging?

Here’s what contributors receive:

• Visibility: Your voice, project, or event gets in front of 2,100+ dedicated readers across the Cascadia bioregion — folks who open the newsletter within hours (800+ in the first few hours after sending!).

• Connection: Contributors regularly report that they’ve made new friends, received offers to collaborate, or found the encouragement they needed to keep going.

• Meaningful impact: Whether you write a short event listing or a deep-dive article, you’re adding nutrients to the shared soil of our community.

• Support: You’re not expected to go it alone. This isn’t hustle culture — Its reciprocity, it’s mutual aid. You can write your own piece, or just tell your story and let someone else transcribe it. You can bring an idea to a brainstorming session and see it bloom with others’ help.

🌾 My Story (and Why I’m Asking for Help Now)

I’ve written this newsletter through snowstorms and heatwaves, through burnout and bloom. There have been times I wasn’t sure it would go out — and then a reader would email me and say, “Thank you. I really needed this today.” That’s the fuel that’s kept me going.

But the truth is, this newsletter was never meant to be a monoculture effort. It’s always been about interconnection. And right now, I’m inviting you to help deepen the roots and expand the canopy.

This isn’t a job posting. It’s a call to join a living field of relational intelligence — a field where:

Stories compost despair
Events become mycelial links
And collapse-aware communities make meaning together

🍄 Ways You Can Contribute

You don’t need to be a writer, a professional, or a permaculture guru. You just need a heart tuned toward care, community, and creativity. Some ways you can help:

• Easy Fast and Powerfully Effective Community Connecting as simple as Copy and Paste someone’s prewritten news, events or article and see it magically go out in the Newsletter once a week!

• ✍️ Write a post: Share your own news, insight, reflection, or upcoming event.

• 🗣️ Tell your story out loud: We’ll transcribe it for you — no writing needed.

• 🎧 Record or transcribe someone else’s story: Support others in getting their voice out.

• 🧠 Join a brainstorming session: Come help shape future issues and storylines.

• 📆 Help maintain the regional calendar: Add local events to our shared Northwest Permaculture Calendar.

• 🍲 Organize a potluck or local convergence: Bring the newsletter and community connection to life in your neighborhood.

• 🌍 Help map community resources: Who’s doing what where? Let’s visualize our web on our Map Directory.

Contribute once, seasonally, or monthly — it’s all up to you. Every contribution nourishes the whole.

And if you prefer a simpler way to help, you can submit a one-time post for a small sliding-scale donation. That helps support those weaving behind the scenes.

🌱 Why This Matters — Especially Now

We’re living through deep unraveling. Climate, economy, culture — it’s all in flux. In such times, clarity isn’t always found in “messaging” or “content.” What we need are real stories, real connection. Messy, rooted, paradoxical stories. Voices that resist oversimplification and instead metabolize grief, joy, complexity, and transformation. We need each other and all our relatives.

This newsletter is where:

• Urgency is composted into presence

• Collapse is met not with control, but creativity

• Connection grows deeper than crisis

If you’ve read Hospicing Modernity, Outgrowing Modernity, or Burnout From Humans, you know the kind of embodied communication we’re trying to model here.

This isn’t about raising awareness. It’s about lowering the floor of denial, so we can build something honest from the ground up.

🌿 A Call to the Composters, the Weavers, the Tenders

If this speaks to you — if your hands are already in the soil of community, or if you’re yearning to root more deeply — come join us.

We don’t need heroes. We need kin.

We’ll set boundaries, agree on roles, and allow for exits — because sustainability includes sustainability of self. Whether you give 2 hours or 20, what you offer matters.

If you’re ready to weave together, here’s how to reach out:

• ✉️ Reply to the email that linked to here.

• 👤 Use this contact page

• 📝 Fill out this quick interest form.

Thank you for helping to tend this compost pile of community. Let’s celebrate each other’s creations, and grow something beautiful together.

In community,

Julie Wolf
Communications & Community Building
NW Permaculture Newsletter

P.S. If you’re curious about trauma healing, Restorative Circles, or building safe containers for conflict resolution and reflective listening practice — I’m your elder. Let’s co-create those spaces, too. Reach out, and let’s weave.