PEOPLE

Kotaro grew up in a coastal town in Chiba, Japan; his search for kotowari — the intrinsic order of nature and truth — began in childhood with fish and insects. He studied philosophy at Wesleyan University, then worked his way down from global investment management up to multiple years of austerity in the Himalayan parts of India, studying Indian philosophy, meditation, and rituals. He returned to Japan in 2020, initiated KOTOWARI, where he offered contemplative and nature based retreats and programs to youth. He co-founded KUNI, which since 2023 has brought companions from across the world — and from 2024, young people — to walk Japan’s sacred lands and ancient paths together.

Current research

• What is large enough, in this era, to need more than one person, more than human — and what becomes possible when we admit it and gather together?

Fania is a leading international voice at the intersection of justice and healing. A lifelong activist, civil rights trial attorney, author, and educator, Davis holds a PhD in Indigenous Knowledge and brings decades of experience and wisdom to her work.

Born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama during the height of the civil rights movement, Davis was profoundly shaped by her early experiences of racial injustice—including the tragic loss of two close childhood friends in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. These painful yet galvanizing moments sparked her unwavering and lifelong commitment to justice and collective healing.

Over the years, she has been deeply engaged in the Civil Rights, Black liberation, women’s peace, prisoners’ anti-apartheid, and economic justice movements. Her journey took a transformative turn through her apprenticeship with African Indigenous healers, which ignited her pursuit of “healing justice”—a framework that integrates restorative justice with racial equity.

Davis went on to found Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY) and co-found the National Association of Community and Restorative Justice.

Davis’ groundbreaking work has earned numerous accolades, including the Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Restorative Justice, the Ella Jo Baker Human Rights Award, the Ebony POWER 100, the Black Feminist Shapeshifter and Waymaker Award, and the Open Society Foundations’ Justice Rising Award. The Los Angeles Times honored her as one of the “New Civil Rights Leaders of the 21st Century.”

Current research

• Indigenous justice, African spirituality, racial justice, restorative justice
• New world building

Dr. Lyla June Johnston is an Indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages. She is the founder of ReHuman School and a leading voice in Indigenous regenerative land stewardship. Through her research, music, and teaching—featured at TEDx, Bioneers, and Stanford Graduate School of Business—she provides ample proof that humanity can be a keystone species, catalyzing biodiversity and ecosystem health when guided by Indigenous values and practices.

Current research

• Humanity’s natural role as a “keystone species” to catalyze ecosystem health
• Doctoral research focused on how pre-colonial Indigenous Nations shaped large regions of Turtle Island (aka the Americas) to produce abundant food systems for humans and non-humans

Saad is an entrepreneur, investor and advisor to people creating social change. He is an artist and producer on several Grammy Award-winning projects and a champion of other artists, scientists, and filmmakers. He is devoted to his family, and to practicing his faith and connecting into what connects us all. From his earliest days studying Symbolic Systems at Stanford, to being on the board of the SETI Institute (exploring the origins of life and the mysteries of the cosmos), Saad has been looking for patterns, connecting dots, and bringing all that he can toward remembering who we really are and becoming who we are capable of becoming.

Current research

• Re-imagining education - starting with a curriculum centered around my son and spiritual lessons through his love of soccer - by following the inner light of young people

Andy is a father of three and from a family of artists and scholars. After studies focused on engineering and literature at Stanford, he’s had three career tracks: physician, entrepreneur, and investor. Andy is in service to people working on missions they consider worthy of their life’s work. He’s honored to be part of a team helping to co-steward sacred land in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and practicing regeneration.

Current research

• Collective remembering of a way of being that is more embodied and interconnected, and attuned to nature, art, the implicit and the sacred
• In our era of great change, bridging between current paradigms and further flourishing of all life

Stephen leads and instigates change and healing in faith communities, higher education, and social entrepreneurship. He is an innovative, organizational change strategist and a leadership development specialist serving as president of the Forum for Theological Exploration (FTE) and creator of DO GOOD X. As a deeply curious individual, mystic, minister, spiritual herbalist, and initiated priest, for more than 20 years Stephen has inspired and encouraged a new generation of leaders– artists, healers, freedom fighters, faith-inspired leaders, and entrepreneurs–to live and work on purpose.

Current research

• Practices of discernment, particularly Indigenous, African and African American practices, for discerning meaning and purpose in the lives of emerging leaders and their communities
• The intersection between spiritual herbalism, ancestral memory, and discerning the sound of the genuine with the next generation of healers - those who yearn for ancestral wisdom that can withstand their big questions, worthy dreams, and longing for a more hopeful future

Ekvn Cate Hokte cvhocefkvt os. Konepvlke vm vliketvt os. Este spvkoke towiyat. Kialagee vm etvlwvt os. My name is Tawna, I am from the skunk clan and kialagee tribal town of the Muskogee Nation.

Tawna is a co-founder of Ekvn-Yefolecv Indigenous Maskoke Ecovillage, located in Weogufka, Alabama.

Tawna is a mother of two children who has returned to her traditional homelands to uphold a sacred relationship with the earth and the ancestors.

Michelle has long brought together people who are re-imagining based on love. She co-created and weaves together a learning community of Jubilee College, Jubilee Railroad, and Jubilee Gift- a vibrant ecosystem of some of the world’s most creative people practicing to protect the sacred and to re-imagine money. For seventeen years prior, she led the movement toward local economies / bioregionalism across North America, strengthening networks of local farmers, builders, and creative entrepreneurs of all kinds, to work together for the love of their places.

Current research

• Experiments in hosting at Jubilee: How can hospitality for the “stranger” become a laboratory for the heart?
• The “third drawer” and other practices that bring people into open-heartedness with one another - and which open the space for life to join in and co-create new possibilities, (gift, service, pilgrimage, presencing, round house, farm as sanctuary)

Laura has lived on farms and in gardens since 1998. She worked locally and nationally as a practitioner and educator within the biodynamic farming community for nearly two decades before turning towards a devotion of place. With her milk cows at the heart of her devotion, Laura tends a small herd caring physically for the cows, their pastures and their milk, as well as the spiritual dimensions of the herd and the land. She and her husband grow gardens for year-round food, medicine and beauty, and as an offering of prayer to the world.

Current research

• “What could happen if we choose each other’s life as a currency”? This, from Orland Bishop, has defined for her the great potential in giving and receiving: with the Earth, the animals, and each other.
• Farm as Sanctuary, her initiative to work with reimagining money & gifting to allow for humans to once again choose a life in sacred evolution with the Earth.

An ordained Zen Buddhist priest, Matthew is also a lifelong activist and political organizer. He received his training at Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, where he ultimately served as President and Senior Teacher. While there, he joined the faculty of Upaya’s renowned Buddhist Chaplaincy Training and co-founded its Socially Engaged Buddhism Training during the height of the global pandemic. As an activist, he has worked on issues ranging from climate change to prison reform and workers’ rights. He currently leads Zen retreats in the US and Canada, and teaches Zen philosophy at Naropa University.

Current research

• Rituals rooted in pilgrimage that deepen our relationship to the land and create space for both individual and collective transformation.
• How does digital immersion reshape narrative identity and our sense of belonging, and what new languages help to make these emerging dynamics legible?

Pom is Winnemem Wintu, from the McCloud River in Northern California, raised by his mother, Chief Caleen Sisk, going to the sacred places his people have gone to since time immemorial. He studied Society and Environment at Berkeley, where he was usually the only one in the room speaking from an Indigenous worldview. Years later, at an event, the filmmaker Natasha Deganello Giraudie asked him a question he’s still answering: what is one word from your language that you could offer the world? His answer became “One Word: Sawalmem,” the short film they co-directed, a Tribeca Film Institute finalist that has screened at festivals around the world. Sawalmem means sacred water. It’s also the name of the organization he founded, which tends ancestral land in Winnemem Wintu territory, brings old village sites back into use, and works to carry the Nur, the McCloud’s Chinook salmon, home from Aotearoa (New Zealand) and open a way for them around Shasta Dam.

Current research

• What does an economy look like when the river, the salmon, the oaks, and the fire are the economy itself, not its beneficiaries? Sawalmem is testing that in practice: a restoration economy where value moves like water, toward whatever is healing.
• How a language and a river get carried into the next century in an age of AI. Who holds Indigenous knowledge, who protects it, and what tools can serve it without taking it.

Don comes from Quaker ancestors in the Philadelphia area. He lives by “judge not” and “no enemy”. He has co-led shifts in consciousness at the leading-edge of what’s next: integrated capital, regenerative agriculture, B Corporations. Don loves to work with money, because it is so challenging to do! As CEO of RSF Social Finance for many years, and in similar roles before and since, Don has experimented practically with the question, “What if we brought a spirit of gift into each & every financial transaction?”

Current research

• What if we didn’t charge interest on loans? What would happen if there were a Jubilee?
• The power of forgiveness; the beauty of mountain springs/sacred water

Born in India and raised in Kansas, Srinija’s bicultural upbringing sparked a lifelong curiosity about consciousness, from the arts to artificial intelligence. After working in foundational AI at the Cyc Project, she joined Yahoo! as their fifth employee, where for over 15 years, initially as Ontological Yahoo then Editor in Chief, her work centered on the human experience. She also chaired the board of non-profit SFJAZZ, and her twin experiences in tech and the arts led her to co-found Loove, a Brooklyn-based music venture exploring how artistic values can guide our markets, rather than market values leading our culture. She is a board member of the On Being Project and a former vice chair of Stanford University’s Board of Trustees.

Current research

• Practices and capacities for mutual liberation – navigating and evolving the porous relationship between “me” and “we” – at the level of individuals (in relationship), groups (in shared purpose), and societies (across diverse values and priorities).
• Recent examples of explorations:
  • Superhuman Intelligence: Meet AI with our deepest humanity
  • Wisdom of Improvisation

Srinija hosts the Jubilee College podcast series.

Amir is a three-time Grammy-nominated poet, recording artist, Harvard Fellow, actor, screen writer and producer born in Rochester, New York. His poems cross subjects of love, tragedy as well as what it means to reconcile humanity with the unprecedented trials of modernity. For over twenty years, Amir Sulaiman has traveled the world as a poet, carrying his voice into Muslim communities and carrying the voice of the Muslims into other communities.

Current research

• Reconciling humanity with modernity
• Recent example of exploration: This Being Human podcast

Love is an educator, coach, and mediator who has spent more than three decades tending and cultivating places of learning. She has founded schools, built programs of service and civic engagement, and mentored educators toward their own courage and best selves, always rooted in justice, community, and the care of the whole person. At the heart of her work lives a single, quiet inquiry she carries to every student: what do you need from the world to become the best you for the world? She believes who we are is the truest thing we teach.

Current research

• If knowledge is something we build together rather than deliver and measure, what does assessment, “rigor,” and success look like when reimagined?