How to Tend a Culture of Belonging
May 19 @ 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM CDT
How to Tend a Culture of Belonging
Tuesday May 19, 2026
- Pacific time: 10am-12pm
- Mountain time: 11am-1pm
- Central time: 12pm-2pm
- Eastern time: 1pm-3pm
View your local time here.
Learn practical skills to help you nourish belonging anywhere people gather, in this 2-hour workshop co-led by communitarians, grief-tenders, and song-carriers Grisha Stewart and Sabrina Simon.
About the event
In a fragmented world, so many of us are searching for belonging. We enter communities, gatherings, and workplaces hoping for genuine connection. We yearn to truly belong but all too often we find ourselves settling for “fitting in”.
True belonging is different. It means being welcomed as you are, having your gifts recognized, feeling known, and being missed when you’re gone. Your presence actually shapes the group.
Belonging doesn’t just happen– it’s something we create together through relational skills that are often overlooked in a culture that prizes individualism over community.
The good news? These practical skills are easy to learn!
In this 2-hour interactive workshop, you’ll learn practical tools to “tend to kinship” — to intentionally care for the quality of connection between everyone in a group and in the greater picture of us all. You’ll develop sharper awareness of what’s really happening beneath the surface of a community, and leave with concrete skills you can apply anywhere.
You’ll walk away knowing how to:
- Read the deeper dynamics of a group and notice what’s helping people feel connected, or creating distance
- Take personal and collective responsibility for tending to belonging, rather than leaving it to chance
- Increase accessibility and inclusion in ways that are easy to miss
- Set realistic expectations, recognize your limits, and treat mistakes as part of the process
These tools come from the Kinship Tending Skills for Belonging framework, created by Grisha Stewart, communitarian and founder of the virtual folk school, Stellar Village. Kinship Tending Skills can be used by every and anyone seeking to tend belonging and greater connection in community settings.
The framework is also used to train facilitators and Kinship Tending crews for gatherings and events. If you’d like to see their work in action, bring your voice and curiosity to the Cascadia Song Rise community singing campout in Oregon, where Kinship Tending crews provide support for inclusivity, care, and belonging.
About your presenters
Grisha Stewart, MA, KPACTP, CPDT-KA
Grisha is a neurosparkly community weaver, dog trainer, author, inventor, international keynote speaker, song leader, part of the Singing Insistance, and a prolific song catcher. She is interested in behavior, learning, body awareness, connection between species, spirituality, and psychology. Her work focuses on collective thrival.
Grisha’s superpower is operationalizing skillsets (i.e., being really specific about how to do useful things). She’s developed two frameworks for relational skills: Behavior Adjustment Training (BAT) for dog reactivity and the Kinship Tending Skills for belonging. She is also the founder of the Grisha Stewart Academy for dog behavior education and the Stellar Village Folk School, an online space to explore the technologies of belonging.
As an outgoing introvert, she recharges by singing, sharing feelings with others, resting, and enjoying life with her husband, three dogs, a cat, and a forest full of beings in the Siuslaw watershed of Western Oregon.
Sabrina Simon
Sabrina is the Programs Director for the Foundation for Intentional Community and a natural community web-weaver with a background in nonprofit leadership, community organizing, and facilitation. She strongly believes that community-building is no longer an option during these times of extreme polarization, oppression and disconnection.
Sabrina weaves her diverse background in yoga, grief-tending, community singing, bodywork, and ritual to help build greater collective capacity to identify, presence, and release isolating emotions like anger, shame, and grief. She believes that the work of healing our collective trauma is integral to building cooperative systems and most effectively done in community. She is loyal to upholding a posture of curiosity for humanity, frequently inquiring with her personal mantras: “What are we not seeing?” and “How do we work with this?”
She is currently on a global tour of intentional communities, filming and documenting their stories of challenge, experimentation, and success in order to increase the spread of ideas for systems change and the sense of solidarity in this work.
Location
You’ll get the Zoom link after you register in your confirmation email. Please check the spam folder of the inbox you use to register for an email from orders@ic.org.
The Online Event Experience
Live Zoom Sessions
Nothing pre-recorded here! When you sign-up for an event with FIC, you’ll have the opportunity to view a live session on Zoom.
Affordable and Accessible
All our events are run on a sliding scale basis. Generous donations cover the costs for low-income attendees. FIC is committed to making our programs accessible to people of all walks of life.
Watch the Recording
You’ll receive the recording of your event to view for 60 days. So don’t worry if you can’t attend a live session. Watch or listen whenever it is convenient for you. Transcripts available upon request.
Registration
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