Join us for five days of deep connection and practice embodying what is essential for bringing your vision into reality.
The Byron Fellowship Program is crafted around three design elements –
Envisioning
Purpose
Transformation
Embody the practices and ways of being essential for powerfully bringing your vision into reality.
Program Overview
Our five-day program supports participants in articulating and sharing their vision, clarifying and aligning with their purpose, and embodying the practices and ways of being essential for powerfully bringing their vision into reality.
Byron Fellowship is offered to exceptional changemakers who are making a profound difference in their own communities and keenly attuned to the challenges we share globally.
The Uplands Center in Upstate New York
The 2024 Byron Fellowship program will be hosted from August 4th–9th at The Uplands Center, a values-aligned retreat center built to support changemakers.
Located 2.5 hours from NYC on 290 acres of sweeping farm and woodlands in the western Catskills, The Uplands offers spaces for team-building, sharing and innovation, as well as spa amenities, yoga, meditation and creative arts studios, and an organic garden, all amid the peaceful serenity of the Catskills.
To learn more about the Center, visit their website here.
The Evolution of Byron Fellowship
Byron Fellowship incorporates a mix of informative and transformative learning. Throughout the Fellowship, participants are invited to contemplate their own unique abilities and personal values, to develop a clear vision for their vocation, and to articulate it for others. Participants are encouraged and challenged to reflect on and call into question their existing assumptions or mental models and to play with expanding their repertoire of ways of being in the world.
The Byron Fellowship is highly adaptive and changes each year based on the feedback and direct contribution of our fellows. Over our 20-year history, more informative learning around change-making and sustainability has become available within and beyond the academy.
Our fellows are highly educated (typically highly formally educated) and enter the program with an existing depth of knowledge and on-the-ground experience in the specific issues they’re working to address. Byron Fellowship has evolved from a hub of interdisciplinary sustainability learning toward supporting Fellows in their personal and leadership development in pursuit of the contribution they wish to make in the world.
As Byron Fellowship grows toward transformative learning, we rely more on the existing knowledge and experience of the fellows, and our mentors are participating in their own transformation while serving as guides rather than topic experts.
Past Topics of Exploration
Values Systems and Theological Foundations for Sustainable Community and Action
Stories of Place, Local Cultural and Natural Heritage
Natural Systems, Human and Environment Interfaces including Agriculture
Authenticity, Vulnerability, Mindfulness, Ontology and Transformation
Presence, Dialogue, and Co-creation
Navigating Pitfalls, Pathways and Paradox in the pursuit of Sustainability
Integral Theory, Systems Thinking, U Theory, and Design
Appreciative Inquiry and Positive Deviance
Envisioning and the Creative Process
Crafting, Sharing and Inspiring Vision, Values, Purpose, and Passion
Systems, Policy, Economic and External Structures in support of Flourishing
Fostering Trust, Intimacy, Relationship, and Design for Community