At the Wild School you will live in a unique-to-place, regenerative, zero waste eco-campus. A living-learning community partnering with Indigenous and regenerative projects in the bioregion.

The school provides immersive training programs in nature connection mentoring and holistic village building through the 8 Shields Lineage and 5 Sacred Pathways. These pathways include Food, Nature Connection, Art, Ceremony and Village as the key pillars of regenerative culture.

When you complete our residential program you will be equipped for leadership, mentoring and project design and management. We offer a unique journey in cultural regeneration that you can draw from to design and initiate your own regenerative events, camps and projects. We call this the 5 Sacred Pathways of Cultural Regeneration supporting healthy Social Ecology - essential to successful regenerative projects.

FOOD - NATURE - ARTS - CEREMONY - VILLAGE

What is the wild school?

Wild Schools are ‘intentional student cooperatives’ and ‘communities of practice’ living experientially as a learning and regenerative village or camp for eight months. Students can elect to study a range of accredited regenerative degree or certificate programs concurrently with their Wild School Leadership Program - living and learning and developing their skills and gifts whilst participating on all levels of design and implementation of land and sea restoration projects in the local region. 

• Improving the health and vitality of human and natural communities - physical, psychological, economic and ecological;

• Producing and reinvesting surplus resources and energy to build the capacity of the underlying relationships and support systems of a place needed for resilience and continuing evolution of those communities;

• Creating a field of caring, commitment and deep connection to place that enables the changes required for the above to take place and to endure and evolve through time” Ref: Chapter 303, Encyclopaedia of Sustainability Science & Technology

Wild Schools build an active knowledge base for sharing and applying ancient wisdom with permaculture design to restore balance to our world, in local applications.

The Wild School offers a world first starting in 2022: an 8 month Residential Program for university age students - living, learning and cocreating ecological cultural villages and regenerative camps in various locations in Australia. We call this “the great journey” or, the Earthwalk. While walking the 5 Sacred Pathways of Biocultural Restoration in a real-life, village context, we regenerate our world by our own walking within it. In this way we join in “The Great Work”, as Dr John H Todds explains in the video below:

Why?

The world we live in requires regeneration on an urgent and massive scale.

For humanity to be able to meet this challenge within several generations, large numbers of willing, capable, skilled and empowered individuals are needed now to work collectively to undertake the strategic restoration of our planet.

The living wisdom held by the Indigenous Elders of this Earth needs to be urgently passed on to a new generation of capable custodians. The people in the world who are motivated to lead this work are disparate and few. ­To succeed they require the time and space to collaborate, synthesise and upgrade their professional and personal capacity to respond to the Earth’s current crisis whilst having direct access to the Elders who carry original custodial wisdom.

Our Facilitators

Billa and Britt

Billa Lauiti-kolkr is a true pioneer in the regenerative education movement. She is an accredited Sustainability Consultant by The Natural Step Institute (Sweden), Permaculture Mentor, Nature Connection Mentor, Regenerative Practitioner and Eco-Social Designer with more than 20 years of experience. Billa is also a powerful medicine woman, home-birthing mother of 5, and Founder of the Pacific Earth School that has now been reborn as The Wild School. Her hands-on knowledge of holistic permaculture, sustainable architecture and building, regenerative living and ecologically sustainable development is hard to match – with her expertise ranging from soil ecology and food sovereignty, to complex western corporate and legal structures and traditional bio-cultural lore. Billa also holds a unique mastery in project management and the implementation of complex adaptive systems that lie at the heart of every village. For Billa, The Wild School is her solution to modern humans having lost crucial cultural wisdom that connects us to people and place in a harmonious way.

Brittany Jane Laidlaw is a visionary wild woman on a mission to activate the unearthed potential within all humans through deep nature connection. She has dedicated her life to helping people around the world transform their lives and local ecologies by reconnecting to the natural world and the wild parts of themselves. Britt is a Somatic Ecologist, Rewilding Mentor, Environmental Educator, and Accredited Wayapa Practitioner with over 11 years of experience leading programs across 8 countries. She also has extensive experience in the tertiary education sector having led post-graduate courses in Social Entrepreneurship and Holistic Design for some of Australia’s leading universities, including the University of Melbourne and UTS. Brittany holds a Master of Environment (Distinction) in Somatic Ecology, a Bachelor degree in Sustainable Enterprise, and various certifications in rewilding, permaculture design, village building, and women’s mysteries. She is currently completing a pioneering PhD in eco-somatics that explores this practice and paradigm of dance and embodied nature connection experiences as an ecological necessity. Britt is also the Founder of Wildsong that offers immersive nature connection programs to serve as a catalyst for holistic wellbeing and cultural transformation, including a weekly kids program. Britt has received numerous awards for her revolutionary leadership in socio-ecological regeneration, including the inaugural Westpac Future Leaders Award, and DFAT’s Australia Award.