TRP with In-Person Intensive in Lisbon, Portugal, Fall-Winter 2024: Participant Questionnaire - The Regenesis Institute for Regenerative Practice

Your Name	Kelly Sommerfeld
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Cohort Assignment	Americas with In-Person Intensive in Santa Fe, Fall-Winter 2023
1. What do you see as your primary work at this stage of your life?	I long to participate in the restoration of social and biotic living systems through my work as an architectural designer. With a background in community and residential projects, I’d like to continue to explore how design, especially of housing and neighborhoods at a village scale, can support new and ancient ways of living together that fosters human connectivity, belonging, interdependence, generosity, collectivity, abundance, love, faith, and harmony with living systems.
2. What role do you see as yours to play?	To help steward a design and community engagement process that helps connect people and community to each other, to place, to potential, and leads to built projects that enable ways of living in right relationship in their everyday lives. To continue to evolve alongside community and projects.
3. What goals or aims do you have in regard to the above?	To learn more about regenerative development and evolve a design and community engagement (field-building) process within my practice that aligns with Regenesis’ approach. To live the values I believe in and design around.
4. Where do you feel your next arenas for personal growth are?	To more deeply understand my potential and my commitments, and to walk right-sized through the world towards them.
5. And for professional growth?	To not make myself small. To center the potential of the work to help stay right-sized and committed
6. What have you invested in to get you where you are?	Deep relationships with community members, collaborators, and projects. Years of ongoing inner transformation work. Time, care, and effort towards my craft.
7. What fields of learning and which thinkers have been important in your life?	Decolonizing/ Indigenous design framework; Architect Wanda Dalla Costa Black Futurism; Architect Francis Kere Emergent strategy; Adriene Marie Brown Organizational leadership and healing; Huayruro (cultural change agents) Grief/ trauma/ healing: Grief to Action (founder Aaron Johnson; facilitator, touch activist), Laurence Cole, Ahlay Blakely, Francis Weller Politicized somatics; Generative Somatics lineage White-bodied ancestral recovery; White Awake
8. Can you frame your philosophy or cosmology of life? What role(s) do humans play in it?	We are all stardust. Knowing we, everything, shares this common heritage brings me a deep sense of belonging and awe. I feel part of something bigger and it is comforting to know that my story is part of something greater than anything I can understand. I think our role as humans is to be present and open to the infinite mysteries of this universal story, and if we can do that we open ourselves to love, connection, joy, and aliveness.
Date Created	January 25, 2024