About the WildSeed Wellness Cooperative
What the WildSeed Wellness Cooperative Is
The WildSeed Wellness Cooperative is a worker-owned collective offering personalized, integrated care for movement and nonprofit folks — grounded in community, justice, and liberation.
We know what it’s like to give everything to the work and still feel overwhelmed, exhausted, or alone.
Many of our movements and organizations are carrying deep grief, burnout, and trauma — without the structures needed to truly support their people.
As movement veterans and healers, we created the Wellness Coop to change that.
We offer practical, relational wellness infrastructure that helps people heal, reconnect to purpose, and build the resilience needed to keep going — not just for the cause, but for themselves.
This isn’t self-care in a vacuum.
It’s healing in context — surrounded by people who understand why you push so hard, and who know how to hold you while you pause, grieve, rest, and return.
You don’t have to choose between caring for the world and caring for yourself.
With us, you can do both — together.
Why We Created the
WildSeed Wellness Cooperative
The WildSeed Wellness Cooperative is one of the first experiments of the WildSeed Ecology Studio - which is a radical maker's lab and world building project, guided by the vision of the WildSeed Society and co-stewarded by movement organizations.
So before we talk about the Wellness Cooperative, let’s talk about the WildSeed Society - which is a political, spiritual and economic community that is inviting people to build a 21st century Underground Railroad together. We are building a series of refuges from the current exploitative world to new worlds where we all get to belong and be cared for - by focusing on Spiritual Liberation, Social Transformation and Economic Revolution. We seek to experiment and prototype our way into a new way of life - in community and in right relationship with the land.
The WildSeed Society is stewarded by a Black-led, BIPOC collective of movement veterans, spiritual teachers, and organizational development nerds. Many of the instigators of the collective were involved in the Black Lives Matter movement before starting WildSeed. It is inspired by the vision of futurist Octavia Butler of gifted misfits finding community together before transforming the world.
The WildSeed Society created WildSeed Ecology Studio to answer a core question:
What kind of infrastructures do our movements need to not only survive, but truly transform the world for our collective liberation?
We too often saw our fellow organizers and comrades lacking the capacity to vision and invest in the growth necessary to build a new world in the shell of the old. But this wasn't due to a lack of commitment or effort to overthrow systems of oppression and exploitation.
This lack of capacity to vision and grow was, in large part, the result of having our movements be primarily funded for the fight and not for the recovery - leading to inevitable burn-out, unprocessed trauma, and overwhelming grief.
The WildSeed Ecology Studio seeks to counter this with a network of interrelated infrastructural institutions designed by and for movement leaders. It would drastically change the condition under which movements struggle for a better world. It seeks to combine infrastructure for:
Trauma-informed recovery & crisis care that increases movement stewards capacity a & vision, with
Support for life long commitments to liberation in ways that are accountable to communities, with
Regenerative ways of resourcing movements that are not tied to the donations of wealthy families in the extractive economy, with
Movement defense and protection with intelligence gathering, decentralized regional crises support and wrap around support to frontline stewards.
Together, these interrelated infrastructure institutions make it possible for movements to become human centered and fully democratic. It is a strategy for building truly liberated autonomous zones of social, economic and cultural activity from which new types movements could emerge and thrive.
If you’re interested in supporting the WildSeed Ecology Studio, please contact us at info@wildseedsociety.com.
How The WildSeed Ecology Studio
Led To the WildSeed Wellness Coop
We found that many movement folks and funders were very excited about the vision of the WildSeed Ecology Studio and believed it to be really needed.
However it also became clear that the vision didn’t fit into the narrow grantmaking priorities of philanthropy. We found ourselves not getting grants but instead getting contracts to bring healing support to funders.
We also found that movement groups and nonprofits were stuck in a scarcity and high stress cycle. They often didn’t have the capacity to vision beyond the more immediate survival needs of their communities and organization.
In essence, the very problem the WildSeed Ecology Studio was created to address — that movements are funded to fight but not to heal — was also the reason we struggled to get it funded.
This situation taught us that to realize our radical vision, we needed to follow Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ guidance to keep “a foot on land and a foot on water,” where:
Foot on Land engages with the world as it is and responds to urgent needs and realities.
Foot on Water stays focused on moving toward the world toward the liberated future we are building together.
The WildSeed Wellness Cooperative is our Foot on Land — a way to respond to the immediate struggles of nonprofits and movement groups and operate ethically within the current system - while resourcing the radical work of WildSeed Society, our Foot on Water.
Together, we’re not just reacting to crises — we’re reshaping what comes next.
How the WildSeed Wellness Cooperative
and WildSeed Society Work Together
The WildSeed Society and the WildSeed Wellness Cooperative are sister organizations with shared leadership and deeply aligned values. While the WildSeed Society holds a special “golden share” to ensure its core values guide the Wellness Coop, the Wellness Coop is run day-to-day by its worker-owners.
One of the Wellness Coop’s primary purposes is to financially support the WildSeed Society’s radical nonprofit work with a significant portion of its profits. For example, a portion of every dollar spent in the Wellness Coop goes to fund our Revolutionary Aftercare — free financial, emotional, and spiritual support for organizers in crisis — as well as movement leadership development and community care.
By focusing on supporting nonprofits, and movement groups with their wellness, Wellness Coop, we’re able to help them build the system, practices, and culture needed to care for their people amidst high stress and risk. By helping them turn wellness from self-care into systemic care and understanding that you can’t be well where you don’t feel safe, we’re making sure that wellness and safety are integrated into their daily work, not treated as separate or optional.
This is especially important as movement work is becoming increasingly exhausting, traumatic, and risky. Frontline staff and organizers face growing amounts of political attacks, media smears, surveillance, and grief - leading to burnout and overwhelm.
We’re also seeing a growing shift from protected to unprotected organizing - where movements once shielded by legal safeguards and public support are now exposed to growing threats and repression from the government and far-right.
That’s why the Wellness Coop focuses on helping both individuals and nonprofits build the internal structures that support wellness, emotional resilience, and safety — so they can feel rooted, not just reactive, during this political moment.
This relationship brings us back to our broader vision for the WildSeed Ecology Studio that seeks to create a regenerative and autonomous movement ecosystem — one that can care for itself, adapt and respond strategically, and sustain its work through institutions rooted in shared values and deep community accountability.