ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION

Our organization is committed to an inclusive, empowering, and egalitarian form of governance, applying peaceful practices and effective communication. We aim to steward this land and these historic buildings in a sustainable, nourishing and respectful manner.

Get to know Bridget Center the Organization and what is in our toolbox right now to achieve our Mission and Vision.

-Our Mission is to celebrate our interrelationships with Nature.

-Our Vision is to co-create a nourishing environment where people nurture connection with the Self, each other, and the Earth.

-Our Values inform and guide our choices and actions. 

We…

  • Embrace sacred relationships of reciprocity with our life-giving Earth

  • Work to apply the Ethics and Principles of Permaculture

  • Empower community to realize dreams through a collective effort

  • Assume that parts of a whole are intimately interconnected

  • Honor our ancestors and future generations

  • Encourage child-like curiosity in learning

  • Practice gratitude

  • Recognize patterns of birth and death

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What’s Happening at Bridget Center?

Here’s how we are partnering with individuals and other groups, bringing people together to nurture connection and community through the heart:

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  • Green Burials, and other Sacred Ceremonies

  • Concerts

  • Sound Healing

  • Yoga

  • Group meditation

  • Therapeutic practices

  • Support groups

  • and more!

Check out our Events Page to see what’s coming up!

Together with our friends at Riveredge Nature Center, people from the Kewaskum area gather for an educational kayak tour on the Milwaukee River, not far from our location.

Dedicated Land Stewards join the fun at one of the Volunteer Work Days to construct one of four Hugelkultur berms that surround our labyrinth.

The Sparta Project brings together our veterans, military, first responders, and law enforcement for a healing experience in our walking labyrinth

Permaculture

Permaculture covers a wide range of topics. To put it simply, it is a design science for a person or place to maximize efficiency and sustainability by recognizing and utilizing patterns in nature, working with Mother Earth rather than against Her. It uses a set of Principles and Ethics derived from “whole-systems thinking”. As one becomes immersed in the world of Permaculture, one finds ways to integrate its ideas into their everyday life and it can truly become a way of life, a social movement.

Many methods and practices throughout Permaculture are nothing new, but more often ancient and prehistoric ideas that have been passed down for generations. Many of these ideas are still widely used today, in fields like regenerative agriculture, city planning, re-wilding animals, and natural disaster resilience. Other ideas are being slowly forgotten or replaced by new strategies and technologies. From the dawn of the industrial era and into our modern society, we have found countless ways to maximize convenience and minimize cost, sometimes to the detriment of our environment and personal wellbeing.

In 1978, two Australians, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, coined the term “Permaculture”. Their intention was to explore, and return to some older ways of doing things in opposition to the more modern, industrialized methods. They wrote the book “Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements” and developed the Permaculture Design Course (PDC), a comprehensive study that leads to certification. Mollison and Holmgren condensed the broad studies into three Foundational Ethics, and twelve Design Principles.

3 Foundational Ethics:

  • Care of the Earth: Provision for all life systems to continue and multiply

  • Care of people: Provision for people to access those resources necessary for their existence"

  • Setting limits to population and consumption: By governing our own needs, we can set resources aside to further the above principles"

Many simplify this to “Earth Care, People Care, Fair Share”

12 Design Principles:

  • Observe and interact: Take time to engage with nature to design solutions that suit a particular situation

  • Catch and store energy: Develop systems that collect resources at peak abundance for use in times of need

  • Obtain a yield: Emphasize projects that generate meaningful rewards

  • Apply self-regulation and accept feedback: Discourage inappropriate activity to ensure that systems function well

  • Use and value renewable resources and services: Make the best use of nature's abundance: reduce consumption and dependence on non-renewable resources

  • Produce no waste: Value and employ all available resources: waste nothing

  • Design from patterns to details: Observe patterns in nature and society and use them to inform designs, later adding details

  • Integrate rather than segregate: Proper designs allow relationships to develop between design elements, allowing them to work together to support each other

  • Use small and slow solutions: Small and slow systems are easier to maintain, make better use of local resources, and produce more sustainable outcomes

  • Use and value diversity: Diversity reduces system-level vulnerability to threats and fully exploits its environment

  • Use edges and value the marginal: The border between things is where the most interesting events take place. These are often the system's most valuable, diverse, and productive elements

  • Creatively use and respond to change: A positive impact on inevitable change comes from careful observation, followed by well-timed intervention

Bridget Center is exploring ways to apply these Ethics and Principles both to the stewardship of the land and buildings, and to our everyday life choices.

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Sociocracy

Sociocracy is a governance system best suited for organizations that want to self-govern based on the values of equality. If the etymology of democracy generally leads us to “people power”, sociocracy could translate to “comrade power”. Some people refer to sociocracy as Dynamic Self-Governance or simply Dynamic Governance. It operates in a non-hierarchical structure, inwards and outwards between interdependent member circles. Each member has an equal voice, and actions are taken upon consent based decision–making. It’s all about powering with and within rather than powering over.

History of sociocracy

What we call sociocracy now was first developed as the Sociocratic Circle Method by Gerard Endenburg in the Netherlands in the 1980’s. Its origins are in:

  • Natural systems: complex organizations work as decentralized, nested systems that are semi-autonomous. That means they are both autonomous and dependent on each other, like, for example, the respiratory and the nervous system.
    Sociocracy builds on a set of simple rules. For example, a simple rule defines how to create a circle. The same rule then allows any circles to form a sub-circle, and the sub-circles to form sub-sub-circles and so on.

  • Decision-making is rooted in the Quaker’s “communal discernment”, a form of decision-making with compassionate listening and trust in collective group wisdom over casting votes. There is also a strong commitment to inclusion and egalitarian values.

  • Cybernetics: sociocracy uses feedback loops to learn about the impact of actions.

Bridget Center is grateful for the guidance and inspiration from Sociocracy For All!

Sociocracy for All is a nonprofit membership organization with more than 200 members worldwide with several language groups and circles on topics like cooperatives, communities, permaculture, etc. They offer a range of training, coaching, and consulting programs. Bridget Center aligns with both their non-competitive, value-oriented peer approach, and their Social Change Mission, stating that sociocracy is one of the tools that will make our world more beautiful. That’s why we’re committed to spreading it all over the world. Read Sociocracy For All’s social justice statement.

Sociocracy For All has shared many tools with us that have helped establish structure and standard procedures for the facilitation of our meetings, record-keeping, decision-making, delegation of roles and responsibilities, feedback analysis, and for designing the future we want to grow into.

We have come up with a circle structure for the organization to grow into. Nothing is set in stone. The design will change and adapt for whatever needs arise. What do you think is missing? What would you change? Do you want to join one of these circles or start a new one?

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Circle Structure being updated. Will post here soon.

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Nonviolent Communication

This section is under construction!