New Visions
Cultivating Abundance & Fortifying Our Foundations
PHOTO BY AERAN SQUIRES
Late last year, Loam nested ourselves within the Weaving Earth ecosystem. Weaving Earth is a Center for Relational Education that provides nature-based education for action at the confluence of ecological, social and personal systems change. We are proud to be their publishing branch, and have spent much of 2024 exploring what it means to contextualize our work together.
Next year will mark 10 years of Loam. Although Loam was first seeded as a DIY zine in 2014, 2015 was when our vision started to cohere. As we look toward 2025, our goal is to create a structure for Loam that honors our roots as a scrappy community-powered passion project and celebrates our new home within the Weaving Earth ecosystem.
For a decade, we’ve been publishing print materials at the intersections of culture change and climate justice. Many readers have continually reflected to us the utility of Loam in their lives. Some folks have included our past magazines in their curriculum; others have used our books to design meetings in collaboration with their community.
Beauty is integral to Loam: if you have been with us from the beginning, you know that we love color, flowers, juicy typefaces. And, we are passionate about practicality. We want everything we create to feed our need for bread and roses.
Inspired by feedback from our community, our goal is to grow Loam into a dynamic print publisher that develops, designs, and distributes educational materials for the times we are in. In the face of surging authoritarianism and ecological collapse, Weaving Earth’s educational framework is medicine for this moment. Over the course of the next few years, we want to build out a beautiful and practical print library that can connect our constellation of creatives to radical curriculum rooted in earth intimacy and relational education.
Since their inception, Weaving Earth has organized in-person and online programming that shares skills for navigating the Anthropocene with compassion, rigor, skill and ecological presence. Weaving Earth is offering educational programming for youth, teens and adults that centers new (and very old) ways of relating to earth and each other. It’s our deep dream to create print materials that further that vision.
To do that, we must fortify our foundations. In 2025, we will be organizing a 10 year anniversary fundraiser to resource Loam. In the interim, we are reaching out today with a humble request for support. However you feel called to share is meaningful.
So this is our prayer: if Loam has been a source of care for you, please consider:
Making a contribution to our work by clicking the donate button below and selecting “Loam Fund” from the “Choose a Campaign” tab. Our goal is to get to 10K by the end of the year!
Subscribing to our Substack
Ordering any one of our publications to gift yourself or a friend
Forwarding this newsletter for free to a loved one
Sharing ideas for funding with us
Letting us know what Loam means to you—we always love hearing what publications or projects have been supportive
We recognize that you are likely saturated with requests for support right now. This has been a tough year, and many non-profits and grassroots organizations like us are struggling. Please know your presence is an incredible gift, and that we are grateful for whatever you can give.
Thank you for being here with us.
Kate and Kailea