Cultivating
Kinship
A relational practice series exploring presence, curiosity and gratitude—in community.
Begins October 8
Through December 17, 2026
Hosted by Shilpa Jain
Shilpa has spent decades exploring and cultivating cultures of relationship, community, and regenerative futures.
Pat McCabe
Throughout the series, we'll be joined by wisdom tenders, storytellers, and facilitators who will guide us in developing a culture of kinship…
Michael Meade
Orland Bishop
Cultivating Kinship is a translocal Lab designed to help us deepen our kinship ties. Each 3-week cycle explores a theme—presence, curiosity, or gratitude—through simple relational practices.
Together, we’ll explore simple but meaningful relational practices that can strengthen our relationships with friends, collaborators, neighbors, and other community members. Rather than simply learning these tools conceptually, we’ll experiment with them in our existing relationships and seed new practice grounds.
The experience combines online learning with local practice. We’ll gather online to explore kinship themes and learn and learn and practice a variety of relational approaches together. Participants will also form Kinship Pods of 3–8 people (ideally in your geographical region) to practice and integrate what we're learning with our small group.
Kaira Jewel Lingo
Oren Jay Sofer
We live in a time when many of us long for deeper relationships, stronger communities, and ways of being together that remind of us our shared humanity. Yet few of us were ever taught how to intentionally cultivate communal ties. Cultivating Kinship offers simple relational tools and a community of practice to help us grow our capacities and deepen our relationships.
Throughout the series, our guest speakers will explore broader questions of kinship with us, including…
✧ Why have kinship ties fractured in our communities and cultures?
✧ What helps communities heal and cultivate kinship?
✧ Why is cultivating kinship essential in times of ecological, social, and cultural transition?
These conversations provide the larger context for why we’re gathering. Each cycle invites us to live into the answers to these questions through ways of relating that cultivate our capacity for kinship.
Each 3-week cycle focuses on a key theme and one or two relational practices
-
❊
Week One
Introduces our theme for the cycle with a guest speaker
-
✵
Week Two
Teaches guided relational practices and offers breakout time
-
❂
Week Three
Kinship Pods meet on their own to practice together
Cultivating Kinship may be especially meaningful for…
- collaborators and teams who want stronger foundations of trust and relationality
- friends and family members seeking greater depth and connection
- neighbors and community members interested in cultivating local resilience
- facilitators and leaders seeking relational tools to offer in their communities
- anyone longing for relationships that move beyond surface-level conversation and toward more meaningful connection
Cultivating Kinship is a community of practice that unfolds across three interconnected layers.
Reflect
In weeks 1 and 2, we’ll offer prompts for solo self-reflective work and practice(s), offering opportunities to bring these themes into other aspects of your life and community. Your personal reflections and personal practice will weave into your pod meetings.
Practice Together
We encourage you to join with others in your local community, but you are welcome to join whether or not you already know others who are participating. We’ll do our best to connect participants with others in their region and, when that isn't possible, place them into virtual pods.
Cross Pollinate
Cultivating Kinship also offers a chance to cross-pollinate with kin outside of your pods. Online sessions will include randomized breakout groups to give time to explore our themes and experiment with others in the greater, global ecosystem.
The Journey
The general schedule is as follows:
Week One: Gather online together and with our guest Wisdom Tender to explore the cycle's theme
Week Two: Choose from one of two identical live practice sessions, offered at different times to accommodate participants across time zones.
Week Three: Meet with your Kinship Pod to continue practicing together
Introduction
We’ll open our container by sharing introductions, building agreements, and grounding in the history and context of this work. Together, we’ll review the Foreword, Prelude, and Chapters 1–3 to orient to the journey ahead. We’ll also be joined by special musical guests, MaMuse - and, will review elements of the Gift Economy
Vulnerability Rally
We’ll review Chapters 4–6 and engage in the Vulnerability Rally: an interactive practice where we experience fierce vulnerability with each other in real time.
Embodied Presence
In this session, we’ll review chapters 7-10 and hear from guest speaker, Kaira Jewel Lingo, author of Healing Our Way Home, who will speak to the importance of spiritual grounding and guide us in some practice.
The Power of Grief
In relation to chapters 11-13 and the Coda we’ll hear from guest speaker Francis Weller, author of the Wild Edge of Sorrow, about the importance of grief in the work of healing and social change.
We’ll also use this session to transition from discussing the book to putting its principles into practice through our group experiments.
From Deep Listening to Reciprocity
Vickie Chang will guide us in listening to and learning from the natural world as we begin shaping our collaborative experiments in fierce vulnerability. This session offers grounding and inspiration for the next phase of our work together as we remember to accept the unknown and listen to the voice of emergence.
The Infinity Spiral of Life and Death
LiZhen Wang will lead a somatic practice to help us lean into death as a sacred part of life’s cycle. This embodied work will deepen our projects and expand how we honor life and community.
Grounding & Resilience
Oren Jay Sofer will share mindfulness and emotional regulation practices that cultivate grounding and resilience. We’ll also pause to hear from kinship pods, reflecting on what’s emerging and what support is needed for the experiments ahead.
Closing
We’ll celebrate our shared journey, harvest insights from the pod experiments, and engage in a closing ritual to mark this chapter together and honor what’s to come. We will also be joined by poet and song-leader Lu Aya from the Peace Poets to help close us out.
***All Sessions will be recorded and recordings will be available to registered participants within 48-hours.
The Kinvene Experience
Cultivating Kinship is co-hosted and produced by and with Kinvene. Here’s what that means for you:
→ An integrated program experience designed for connection and meaning
→ Access to the Kinvene portal where you can login for all program information and instructions
→ The Kinvene team will post session recordings to the portal within 48-hours
→ You will have access to a Community Forum where you connect with other participants, your hosts and our team
→ Kinvene will organize you into your regional pods and support your pod process
→ We will be your friendly go-to support team should you need any help along the way
Join us in Cultivating Kinship
Tuition $100
Additional donations will be invited at the end of the program, in the spirit of the Gift Economy
Once you register we’ll collect info to place you into your kinship pod.
Reciprocity & the Gift Economy
We wanted this experience to be financially accessible to a wide range of community members, while still honoring the time, care, and work that goes into creating it.
Your $100 tuition is intended to cover much of:
Kinvene’s platform, production, pod organizing and participant support
Shilpa’s time and care facilitating the series
Our care in designing of the experience
Honorariums for our guest speakers and facilitators
As the program is underway, we will share transparently about resources needed to sustain this work and hopes for reciprocity. Depending on how many people join and the energy required to host this experience, we’ll invite those who feel called and able to offer an additional gift in support of the experience.
Our hope is that reciprocity becomes another way we practice kinship together.
Meet Your Guides
-
Kazu Haga is a trainer and practitioner of nonviolence and restorative justice, a core member of the Fierce Vulnerability Network, a founding core member of the Ahimsa Collective, a Jam facilitator and author of Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm and Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse. He has over 25 years of experience in nonviolence and social change work. He is a resident of the Canticle Farm community on Lisjan Ohlone land, Oakland, CA, where he lives with his family.
-
Kaira Jewel Lingo is a Dharma teacher with a lifelong commitment to spirituality and social justice. Her work continues the Engaged Buddhism developed by Thich Nhat Hanh, and she draws inspiration from her parents’ lives of service and her dad’s work with Martin Luther King, Jr. After living as an ordained nun for 15 years in Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastic community, Kaira Jewel now teaches internationally in the Zen lineage and the Vipassana tradition, as well as in secular mindfulness, at the intersection of racial, climate and social justice with a focus on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, and activists, as well as artists, educators, families, and youth. Based in New York, she offers spiritual mentoring to groups and is author of We Were Made for These Times: Ten Lessons in Moving through Change, Loss and Disruption and co-author of Healing Our Way Home: Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy and Liberation. Her upcoming events and teachings can be found at www.kairajewel.com.
-
Francis Weller is a writer and soul activist who has worked as a psychotherapist for more than 40 years. He's the author of many books and projects including the beloved grief text, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief.
Francis is currently on staff at Commonweal Cancer Help Program. He also founded and directs WisdomBridge, an organization that offers educational programs that seek to integrate the wisdom from indigenous cultures with the insights and knowledge gathered from western poetic, psychological, and spiritual traditions.
His most recent collection is In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty.
-
The second daughter of Chinese immigrants, Vickie Chang was born and raised in the SF Bay Area. Her work as a psychologist, facilitator, and writer is guided by Chinese ancestral wisdom including Buddhism and Taoism; Indigenous teachings; and 大地母親 (the Great Earth Mother), including the mountains Tuuyshtak, 武當山 (Wǔdāng Shān), Arunachala, and the Sangre de Cristos. Some of her teachers include West African (Dagara) elder Dr. Malidoma Somé, Jicarilla Apache elder Dr. Eduardo Duran, and Anuttara Lakshmin Nath. See more on her background and work at www.vickiechangphd.com
-
LiZhen Wang drinks from a mighty confluence of ancestral traditions: Daoist-Buddhist practice, ancient astrology, and the most primal ritual of all, mothering. She is an astrologer as well as Co-Director at the School of Unusual Life Learning (SoULL), where they offer nature-based, life-cycle teachings that ease existential suffering in a time of systems collapse. Experiencing her mother’s death was one of the greatest spiritual revelations of LiZhen’s life. It has opened them to the incredible richness of a life that includes, not avoids, death.
-
Oren Jay Sofer teaches meditation and communication internationally, integrating classical Buddhist training with Nonviolent Communication and Somatics. He holds a degree in Comparative Religion from Columbia University and is a Certified Trainer of Nonviolent Communication and a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. Oren is the author of several books, including the best-seller Say What You Mean and Your Heart Was Made for This. A husband and father, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and teaches worldwide through courses and guided meditations. www.orenjaysofer.com
Special Musical & Poetry Guests
-
Wholeheartedly fed by the folk and gospel traditions, MaMuse (Sarah Nutting and Karisha Longaker) create uplifting music to inspire the world into thriving. Interweaving brilliant and haunting harmony with lyrics born of honed emotional intelligence, MaMuse invokes a musical presence that inspires the opening of the heart. Playing a family of varied acoustic instruments including upright bass, guitar, mandolins, and flutes, these two powerful women embody a love for all life. The synergy that is created through this musical connection is palpable and truly moving to witness.
-
Lu Aya is a co-founder of the Peace Poets and a father, son, brother, cousin, nephew, poet, student, educator, emcee, musician, facilitator, freedom singer, friend and cultural worker. He sees all of these roles as sacred spaces to listen, love and learn more and more, day by day, how to embody healing. He believes that the foundation of working for liberation is always here and now with all our relations.
Frequently asked questions
-
Tuesdays (+ 2 Fridays - April 3 and 17)
11am–1pm PT / 2–4pm ET
8 sessions across 3 months (weekly at first, then bi-monthly):
Start Date: March 24, 2026
End Date: June 9, 2026All sessions will be recorded and recordings will be available to registered participants within 48-hours of each live session.
-
We’ll help all participants join a kinship pod: small groups of 3-8 people. In localities with 3+ participants, local kin groups will be encouraged.
If no local pod exists, we will support participants in joining online kin groups based on geography/time zone or affinity.
if there is anyone in your local community that you want to go through this course with, having pre-existing relationships can really support your journey through this work. Feel free to join with someone you know or with your own group.
Each group will be supported in carrying out a collaborative project aligned with the book’s themes.
Kinship pods will meet during session breakouts and are invited to meet in-person as much as they’d like - we recommend meeting for project planning in the off-weeks when we are not hosting group sessions.
-
Yes, all sessions will be hosted on Zoom and will be recorded. All registered participants will have access to a portal that will house audio and video recordings, transcripts and other program information.
-
The Gift Economy is a method of managing resources that is modeled after natural ecosystems, and which aims to create sustainability for all people. The gift is an invitation into a reciprocal relationship with the giver. During the program, we will share more about what this means and offer invitations for you to help make this program sustainable. No amount will be too small or too large.
-
-
Email support@kinvene.co for program support. We’ll direct your questions to the best person.
For a list of more FAQs about pods, gift economy and more go here.