Discover a global circle of matriarchal sanctuaries restoring what makes us whole.
Welcome Home to Gentle, Self-Sufficient Living
WHOLEFAM is a worldwide collective of matriarchal sanctuaries, third spaces, and regenerative land projects. We share resources and experience to create working models and practical trail guides for all.
Grounded in living project experience, we synthesize the best of human knowledge to create happy, healthy, vibrant communities.
- We create places where people, animals, and the earth can rest, heal, and work in peace.
- We reclaim, restore, and beautify forgotten spaces for community enjoyment.
- We nurture under-stewarded land for local food and housing self-sufficiency.
- We share knowledge and skills training in the healing arts, cyclical living, and community self-restoration.
Our matriarchal circle is not an “-ism,” belief system, or program. We’re a global council of fellow travelers shepherding the return back to all of us. We help communities gently return to their natural realignment of rhythm, responsibility, and right relationship with the land and the beings we share it with.
Each WHOLEFAM sanctuary is independently governed, locally rooted, and supported by a replicable, time-tested model of shared goodwill, cheerful effort, and a basic desire to feed, restore, uplift, and beautify our neighborhoods.
Local matriarchal councils are rebuilding the gentle cycles of community living right where they live in villages around the world, in both private and visible ways. Whether you have land, time, skill, or funds to offer, you’re invited to join the circle of matriarchs quietly nurturing our future from the inside out, one small sanctuary at a time.
Seeking self-restoration?
Want to help steward a neighborhood restoration?
WHOLEFAM is here to help.
PARTICIPATE IN WHOLEFAM SPACES
Our circle of matriarchal healing sanctuaries, self-sustaining homes, and heart-based community centers are designed to offer structured, quiet places for women to rest, reconnect to themselves, and remember how good a simple life can be—together with other fellow travelers.
Spaces allow women to drop into a restful, healing container for a weekend, week, or month at a time, or choose to live full-time in anchor role on the property for a longer season.
Each WHOLEFAM space combines a variety of focus areas, depending on the interests and talents of the local founding matriarchal circle.
1. A Safe House for the Self
We have developed best-practice living environments that help the nervous system rest—through animal care, garden rhythms, nourishing food, friendly companionship, and gentle, hands-on training in the self-healing arts. Each space supports the healing of body, heart, and mind with sunlight, clean air, music, beauty, quiet, and rhythm.
This is a drop-in residential resting place for burned-out women: structured, gentle, and free of pressure.
2. Land Stewardship as Self-Stabilization
Each sanctuary teaches practical, seasonal ways to stabilize daily living by learning from the land—the simplicity of working with food cycles and water management, the self-sufficient grace of the domestic arts, the joyful dance of daily work, and ease of local interdependence, and calm of singing around the fireside each week. This is not a survivalist model—it’s remembering our own inner home.
We study and develop simple frameworks for gentle, doable steps anyone can take, in any kind of space.
3. Animal Care as Mutual Healing
Non-human beings are a central part of the regenerative system for many WHOLEFAM sanctuaries—not just rescued, but respected as fellow beings and co-healers as we return to more peaceful ways of living. Working with animals offers deep healing from personal and systemic hurt, and we rediscover our own hearts in service, empathy, and true joy in ways we often cannot with fellow humans. In this spirit of goodwill toward all beings, all WHOLEFAM sanctuaries and community kitchens are fully vegetarian.
Animal caretaking is part of the self-healing cycle where living beings enjoy shared lives, not as pets or projects.
4. Community Refuge Restoration
All across our world, beautiful spaces with strong bones sit empty. Churches, schools, civic buildings, monasteries, campuses have been abandoned in communities who need them, just waiting to be loved back into life for the common good. WHOLEFAM acts as a non-profit knowledge repository and administrative resource to help guide local groups in community regeneration models to help revive these places as third-space sanctuaries: places of food, quiet, music, art, connection, and rest.
Every community can enjoy one. Every person can help.
5. Train Without Burning Out
Our “Heal the Healer” model rotates through WHOLEFAM sanctuaries to train community stewards, chaplains, landworkers, and caregivers in local communities to offer heartfelt care in sustainable, body-honoring ways. Learn how to serve without depletion while learning to let yourself be cared for as a fellow traveler of equal importance —we value and serve the life in all of us with the same care.
If you’ve spent your life serving others, this is a space to refill your cup.
6. Teaching by Living
We all are teachers, even if not by profession. And even the greatest of teachers know it is what we do and not what we say that teaches. We develop training models to support educators and reformers from all backgrounds who want to more effectively model a more whole and wholesome way to live a more beautiful life—structured, sacred, and seasonal.
Teaching others to live with dignity and rhythm in all spaces is the root lesson we offer others.
7. Peace as a Practice
Community doesn’t always mean perfect harmony—it means a commitment to shared resonance and willingness to repair. We train in simple, time-tested approaches to mediation, self-inquiry, council building, and compassionate decision-making rooted in common good and mutual respect.
Time-honored peace-building skills help steady individuals and groups both within and without.
8. Practical Stewardship in Ministry
For clergy, chaplains, spiritual caregivers, and lay leaders: WHOLEFAM sanctuaries offer a supportive model of practical ministry. Together we learn to hold space for others without burnout and how to bring our communities into communion with themselves and the land again. WHOLEFAM partners with globally recognized interfaith seminaries and world-recognized musicians to provide community chaplaincy training that helps strengthen communities. Training in peaceful living, song medicine, and universally helpful end-of-life pastoral skills apply to all communities.
Feeding the body, heart, and creative mind practically heals humans and requires no ideology beyond a desire for basic goodness.
9. Everyone Can Become a Sanctuary
You don’t need to live on a WHOLEFAM working sanctuary to live in harmony with this view. You may be saying, “I’m already doing this.” These principles—wholeness, cooperation, sufficiency, and joy—can live in any house, on any block, in any town.
We simply gather what works, connect resources and stewards, support one another, and share the tools.
The shift is already happening. Millions of people—across every country, tradition, and generation—are remembering, returning, and restoring without fanfare or branding.
WHOLEFAM builds bridges between those already living it and those wanting to learn it.
One Great Whole
If your life reflects (or aspires to) any or all of these principles, we share a vision:
- We nourish the land and living beings as part of our own well being—”not separate.”
- We live in harmony with the cycles of time and nature, not urgency or extraction.
- We respect land as sacred trust to steward generationally, not as an asset to exploit.
- We share knowledge, tools, seeds, space, and care without expectation or competition.
- We cooperate directly with the Earth, sidestepping middlemen or extractive exchange.
- We focus energy, attention, and resources on uplifting here and now, where we stand.
- We trust in the wisdom of life itself, affirming that protection and provision are not bought, bargained for, nor enforced.
- We live simply, sustainably, and in solidarity with all beings, and in harmony with Life Itself.
If this is already your way, then you are already helping to remind our whole family that we are all already whole. When we remember, we live more wholly.
The Movement You’re Already Feeling
We channel resources, expertise, and shared collective wisdom into real-world, working models that practically nurture and uplift our world.
Guided by the harmonized teachings of the world’s great sages and modern matriarchs across a wide range of disciplines, WHOLEFAM empowers individuals, animals, and communities to heal, grow, and thrive through land and community restoration and stewardship. We develop working models the demonstrate the viability of centering artistic expression and collective benevolence to provide the necessities of daily life through practical training in food self-sufficiency, land use, community betterment, and cyclical living.
We work through cooperative creativity to build skills in self-sufficiency, community restoration, healing arts, and cyclical living.
Rooted in the belief that goodness is its own reward, we create a daily reality where compassion, creativity, and collaboration restore the energy lost from extractive ways of living. We create demonstration spaces that offer a way of living, moving in alignment with the beauty inherent in all beings.
No single voice or organization is leading this natural shift. WHOLEFAM simply offers an experienced stewardship network, proven road maps, community meeting spaces, project support, and shared knowledge repositories to help those navigating the return to their own birthright —a beautiful life that offers more peace, joy and ease.
*photo: Plowing the Forest Chapel Sanctuary Community Garden, Spring 2025
No Revolution Necessary
Unhelpful systems become irrelevant when more practical, helpful options are centered in daily life. We protect our energy when we focus our attention toward regeneration and community upliftment.
You are part of that bridge.
You are already home.
Let us know what you’re doing, what you’d like to do, and the kind of help you are looking for.
How Can You Help?
Whether you’re here to support a local sanctuary, build your own, share resources or skills or learn how to help in a global regenerative initiative, you’re in the right place!