Written by Geoffrey Gill a reflection of our Sustainability Retreat in June 2025.

“Rivers carved stones, not by force, but by showing up day after day until Earth remembers.”

We went to Dunrovin Retreat Center in St. Croix with four intentions: slow down together, encourage through reflection, dream about the future, and claim our next right work.

What happened was we actually did those things. Not the polite version. The real version.

The Ground We Broke

Picture this: teams scattered around tables, sharing their stories – not the clean sanitized versions they tell at board meetings, but the messy truth. The breakthroughs mixed with grief. The celebrations tangled up with the spaces where they’re stuck.

Someone said the word “ecosystem” and suddenly we weren’t talking about neighborhoods as problems to solve anymore. We were talking about soil – what feeds growth, what determines what can actually take root. Climate – the forces that decide who belongs. Water – the relationships that connect everything, and what happens when they dry up.

Then we walked outside.

When the Trail Became Teacher

There’s something that happens when you stop theorizing about interconnection and start looking at it. Actual roots. Actual water flow. Actual evidence of what thrives and what doesn’t, and why.

Standing there in the heat that made us grateful for shade, pointing at trees that couldn’t survive without the fungi they’re connected to, talking about how nutrients in soil literally determine what grows – the metaphor stopped being a metaphor.

We came back inside with dirt on our shoes and feet – some people had taken their shoes off to ground themselves in the earth – and something shifted in our bodies. Continue reading “When Community Gets Real: Flowing Into Sustainability Together” →