COMING SOON:
Erotically Engineer A Paid Creative Offer
Check out this workshop replay where you’ll learn about the key milestones for developing a creative offer, the 4 different offer types you can develop and how to align your paid offering with your income goals. I also introduced some case studies of income generating creative offers launched by Seeda School Alumni for even more inspiration!
Coming Soon
Early Enrollment Bonus
Enrollment into the 1:1 Fall Retreat closes on Monday, October 6th, 2025 but if you enroll by Thursday, September 25th, 2025 you will receive access to a 1:1 6 month check-in to debrief on your creative offer launch and strategize improvements based on client feedback and any updated long term goals emerging inside your creative practice.
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Reclaim Your Power, Fund Your Creative Ideas
Let's work together 1:1 on cultivating the creative permission and financial resources waiting to be unlocked in your creative practice. Go from relying on outside income to support your creative practice to reclaiming your power through generating income inside your creative practice.
SESSION 1
Decide on Offer
Inside our first session we will clarify the work rooted in your "Zone of Validation" vs. the work rooted in your "Zone of Desire". This clarity allows us to design a creative offer leveraging the fuel of your erotic power and curiosity — ensuring your offer is not only enjoyable to deliver, but also a pleasure to sustain.
SESSION 2
Clarify Your Dream Participant Avatar (DPA)
Now that we have clarity on your "Zone of Desire" and your offer idea, we will begin to get clarity on who the offer is for. Inside this second session we will determine the logistics of your offer such as: the problem your offer solves, who it solves it for, your offer type and your offer price. We will work together to align your offer with the needs of your creative practice and the needs of your DPA.
SESSION 3
Engineer Your Framework
Once we design your offer, we will outline the structure and timeline for delivering your offer. Inside this third session we will determine your offer's transformation statement and the chapters, modules, session outline (etc.) that you will sell and guide your dream clients and participants through. This framework can be used to structure an ecosystem of paid offerings such as: a book, course, programming series, TV show, social media ideas and more.
SESSION 4
Strategize Your Launch
Now that we've designed an offer rooted in your "Zone of Desire" and created a framework structuring it's delivery, we will finally determine a creative marketing strategy and seasonal sales cycle aligned with your values and capacity. Inside our fourth session we will use your offer and "Zone of Desire" to determine whether your dispatch should be a newsletter, podcast, video series or some fourth multi-media form of erotic release. Lastly, we will use your framework to develop an offer launch runway and editorial calendar with dispatch ideas and titles.
"I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance"
— Sojourner Truth (1864)
Why Now?
Because we are collectively standing on the business of our breath all at the same time. We understand everything we spend our money on is a vote for our future and we want to spend our money with you.
Sacred Sales Principles
PRINCIPLE 001
Sales is not cringe, cynicism is. We can't pay you if we can't find you. Sales is a sacred invitation into your practice and all it has to offer us. Invite us in.
PRINCIPLE 002
Sales is self-regard. Experimenting with creative ways to welcome resources into your practice is responsible stewardship of your ancestral inheritance.
PRINCIPLE 003
Sales is storytelling. We remember a story more deeply, more sensorially, than we remember an ad. Ads are old world. Stories of our ancient future are now. Approach your sacred sales invitations like you do your art.
PRINCIPLE 004
Sales is erotic. When we are inside the sacred ritual of being sold an offer by an artist we respect and trust, it feels full of dignity and wet with permission. Here is where we all expand, remembering just how big we are.
PRINCIPLE 005
Sales is sincere. You don’t have to be the loudest in the room, but we do have to believe you. And the only way we’ll believe you is if you believe yourself.
PRINCIPLE 006
Sales is worldbuilding. Your offer is a proposal for a new way of learning, working, being and relating. Invite us into your proposal. Give us the opportunity to imagine and practice inside the world not as it is, but as it could be.
“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”
— Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” (1979)
Money isn’t the "master’s tool", capitalism is. Monetizing our creativity doesn't compromise the integrity of our practice, not being clear on our values does.
“The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”
— Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic, The Erotic As Power" (1978)
The 1:1 Seed A World Retreat Investment
The 1:1 Seed A World Retreat
EARLY ENROLLMENT: September 23rd — 25th, 2025
GENERAL ENROLLMENT: September 23rd — OCTOBER 6TH, 2025
A 4-week Seed A World Retreat experience where we will work together 1:1 on establishing an additional stream of income through a paid creative offer and the erotic skills already alive inside your interdisciplinary practice.
Payment Plan
"It’s been so incredibly powerful to see the way each prompt, each assignment, each framework, in such a short amount of time, brings the threads of my practice into harmony and makes it so the universe can clearly respond. I can’t even count the number epiphanies I’ve had since I’ve started working with you. Thank you."
Ravon Ruffin, Founder of Citation Studio
Money Back Guarantee 🖤
Life happens. If you enroll in Seeda School and a family emergency arises, your kid's schedule changes or you simply have a change of heart. Regardless the reason, you can secure your spot and rest assured you can receive a no questions asked refund if anything changes before October 3rd, 2025.
This 1:1 Seed A World Retreat Is For You If...
You have been away from your creative practice for a while and want to come back home to your creative spirit through a newsletter and income generating offer.
You're done with being 100% financially dependent on brand deals, art institutions, industry gatekeepers or universities. You desire to develop a creative offer you can sell to "turn the facet on" inside your practice whenever it needs a cash infusion.
You have an existing offer you want to scale into a business generating recurring revenue you can make financial plans and build worlds with.
What's Included?
Inside of this 4-week, 1:1 coaching container you will leave with 4 recordings of your excavating coaching sessions. Along with an income generating offer to sell and a marketing strategy to execute for recurring revenue. But most importantly, you’ll leave with a reclaimed audacity and trust in your creative practice that was waiting to be re-activated all along.
Four Weekly 1:1 Sessions
To support you with seeding a public practice, developing an income generating offer and creating a custom marketing plan and sales cycle.
The Seed A World Retreat
A 9-module course facilitating a self-guided creative retreat for launching a newsletter, developing an income generating offer and scaling to replace your primary source of income.
The Worldbuilders Way Toolbox
12 monthly workshops and guided meditations supporting you for a full year with spells and strategies for creative marketing aligned with your financial goals and your values.
The Worldbuilding Framework
Seeda School has served over 150 worldbuilders through this framework. Not only will we work together following this framework to develop your Flagship Offer, we will work 1:1 to create your own framework outlining the journey of transformation for your clients and strategize the sales system that you can run again and again for monthly cash flow injections in your business ecosystem.
The Worldbuilder's Handbook
Based on Seeda School’s Worldbuilding Framework and the black feminist teachings informing the school, The Worldbuilder's Handbook is your go-to tool for navigating the 9 modules of the Seed A World Retreat and beyond. Each chapter is a workbook with worksheets, templates, toolkits, frameworks, checklists and more helping you develop, market and sell your values aligned creative offer. Completely informed by black feminist praxis, the Worldbuilder's Handbook is a toolbox you can return to for years to come as you scale and deepen the impact of your creative offer.
Meet Your Worldbuilding Coach
Hi, my name is Ayana Zaire Cotton and I'm happy we found eachother.
I help creators build businesses. I coach worldbuilders who are tired of waiting.
Inside Seeda School we remember, just as we experiment with many methods and techniques in our creative practice, we can experiment with many methods and techniques for making money.
What if we didn't have to wait on a brand deal, art institution, film production company, record label, publisher or university to say "yes" to our ideas in order to actualize them? What if the only "yes" we needed was our own?
I have 10+ years of experience launching art projects that doubled as businesses and learned a ton along the way. Most of which I teach inside of Seeda School where we work together to discover and develop your income generating creative offer.
My mission is to help make "starving artist" an oxymoron.
Whether you're done with being financially dependent on industry gatekeepers of the old world and want to create an income generating offer, have been away from your creative practice for a while and desire a creative homecoming through publishing your own newsletter or have an existing offer you want to scale into a business — the first step is always saying "yes".
Let's work together on giving form to your "yes".
Photograph by Stephen Miller. Custom workwear created by Ayana Zaire Cotton.
WebsiteWhat Else Is There To Do?
THERE'S NOTHING LEFT TO DO BUT WORLDBUILD
As a worldbuilder, you dream of building businesses, institutions, systems and economies for the next world. You are engaged in building and maintaining creative shelter for us all as the old world crumbles around us.
As a worldbuilder, you understand attracting resources, financial and otherwise, doesn't compromise our work — not being in alignment with our values does. You are eager to step into responsible stewardship by inviting financial resources into your practice; understanding this allows us to dream inside the worlds you're building long enough to actualize them.
If someone imagined and actualized the old world as we know it, what's stopping us from imagining and actualizing otherwise?
This is creative initiation. This is dreaming at the scale of worldbuilding: remembering your desire, surrendering to your power, sacrificing the old world and practicing erotic expression toward the next world.
What else is there to do?
“What if it is not an experiment, this creative life of refusal. This rarely institutionally-funded disloyal life of practice for a world as yet unnamable. This insistence on transformation when the bank account screams “conform.” What if this life as an independent experimental artist is not itself an independent experiment? What if it’s an interdependent ceremony?”
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “The God of Every Day” published by Topical Cream on December 22nd, 2021
What Seeda School Worldbuilders Are Saying
“Ayana Zaire Cotton, is, to me, a being whose radically tender ways of loving, teaching, and questioning mirror the revolutionary labours of love of bell hooks, Octavia Butler, Toni Cade Bambara, and the list goes on. Through Seeda School, Ayana plants seeds of responsible hope, of revolutionary reimagining(s), and most importantly, of communal (and personal) pursuit(s) of the erotic into the body, mind, and soul of whoever has the chance to waltz with their teachings, with their being. Being a student of Seeda School is constantly being reminded that one’s desires are needs, and therefore that we — as people — have the power to materialize the conditions we yearn to have in order to thrive, to be free. Receiving teachings and exchanging with Ayana and the lovely beings who tap into their care-full-y crafted [offers] is a blessing that keeps on giving, and I trust that this will remain the case in near and distant futures.”
Gloria-Sherryl François (G L O W Z I), Fall 2023
"11/10 recommend joining The Retreat with Ayana Zaire Cotton. It was deeply transformative: from re-rooting into new affirmations that better support our world-building to having the guidance and community support to actually build the thing. In 9 weeks!
For years, I've worked on creative projects but avoided creating a framework because I was afraid it would feel too contrived for both me and my clients. The Retreat changed that: I now feel clear-minded and excited about guiding others through my process (I have a process!). I can't believe what we were able to create in 9 weeks together, piece by piece, week by week.
The community was one of my favorite parts of The Retreat: it felt living, breathing, and magical. The poetry! The bookish fanfare! The expressions via multi-media! Every week, I felt completely inspired by how the fellow retreaters were translating their interests, desires, and visions into offerings rooted in their rituals, too.
Ayana's teaching structure, content, and language left me feeling focused and encouraged—two vital things you need when you're world-building—after every class, every session, every week. I loved that their entire approach was informed by Black feminist teachings and guides that moved us through each topic. I come back to our Worldbuilder's Handbook daily, if not for the templates, then for the affirmations.
They've created an incredibly important, helpful, and inspiring space to participate in if you want to deeply resource your own world-building. Again, 11/10, y'all."
Karly Borden, Spring 2024
"After grinding for over a decade in the nonprofit sector, I needed support building a viable, self-directed career path to generate income rooted in my values and creativity. The Seed A World Retreat offered both the practical tools and community encouragement I was seeking to heed the creative call I have been feeling. Now I look forward to sharing this work that feels personally terrifying and necessary, and I believe in my ability to do it using the Seeda School tools. During the retreat, Ayana held space with such admirable curiosity and generosity! If you want an experienced, informed, Black feminist, imaginative hype-person to put a loving battery in your back, sign up for the Seed A World Retreat immediately."
— Jasmyne Gilbert, Winter 2024
"The Seeda World Retreat has been instrumental in bringing my coaching program to light. When I joined, I had just drafted my framework and had a fuzzy idea for my offer. Every single week of the Retreat helped me clarify and strengthen my initial ideas. It felt like starting with a block of marble and then sculpting and chiseling until what was truly important emerged.
I loved the structure of the Retreat. It has everything you need to birth your offer and business. We had the tools and time to work autonomously and in-depth. Then, we had our amazing Open Studio Calls, where the communal revolutionary spirit made its magic. In between, the asynchronous support via Discord and email was a guiding light and helped me feel never alone.
Today, just two weeks after the Retreat's end, I started softly launching my program. I may not have been here without the Retreat!
More than this, the 9 weeks together have been a time of creative expansion and personal and political evolution for me. I'll always be immensely grateful to Ayana and the marvelous human beings I was honored to have by my side during this journey."
Giada Centofanti, Coach at Care to Impact, Spring 2024
"Words cannot express enough how grateful I am for the blessing that is both Ayana and Seeda School. Enrolling in the retreat was an immediate yes for me — where the weekly meditations and facilitations from Ayana felt like sacred invitations to return — return to community, return to self, return to Spirit, return to our gardens. Like The Artist's Way, but through a decolonial Black feminist lens, I continue to find Seeda School and its Retreat as an evergreen gift and artistic nourishment that, as a result, enriches the tending of my spiritual and literary practice — The Conflicted Womanist.”
Chinyere Erondu, Fall 2023
“Being led through the Seed A World Retreat by Ayana offered me the sea I know I can rely on to float me above all that attempts to drown me. Each of the nine action steps helped to buoy my practice & deep sense of embodiment utilizing the full power of Audre Lorde's uses of the erotic.
Ayana's excavating groundwork reminds us that the ability to float already resides in the power of our expansive breath. If we can dream it, then it is safe to trust that it is already done for not just ourselves but folks dreaming of the work we are producing.
The world you desire to build already exists within you & the worldbuilding framework helped me realize that our work can support so many others if we break through the fertile ground where we stand alone. In fact, through the worldbuilding framework, Ayana facilitates that we are never truly alone because the Sankofa sensibility circularly connects us to our past, present, & future.
If you're ready to invite folks to wade into the sea of your worldbuilding & transformative offer then sign up! Trust that when it rains it pours & your abundant desires will grow & be witnessed by the outstretched limbs of folks in the Seeda School community with you.”
Kay Brown author of Assemblage: Baby's Breath, Spring 2024
“It was such a pleasure being part of Seeda School retreat and be in community with a cohort of talented, caring and loving souls. This offering is a soothing and refreshing balm to each and everyone wanting to delve deeper into their inner being to bring out unknown treasures to the world. Ayana, the creator and facilitator of the retreat is its living proof. They are a bottomless well of inspiring, exciting, creative, experimental and spirit-led knowledge and I’m deeply grateful for their work and their willingness to share with us all that they know with so much grace and care.”
Keren Lasme, Fall 2023
“I find it difficult to express in words just how impactful the Seeda School Retreat was for me as a clayworker, herbalist, teacher, and activist. Seeda School contextualized our work as multidisciplinary artists in the revolution and helped us all to abandon mentalities of scarcity that are upheld by colonialism and white supremacy. Ayana has put so much time, effort, and care into every piece of her retreat and it shows. Even as someone who already had a creative offer established, I gained so much wisdom from the content and discussions that I am confident will only improve the success of my offers, along with one of the most tender, caring, and uplifting communities that anyone could ask for. I am infinitely grateful for the work Ayana does in bolstering us artists and creating containers for the radical dreaming of better worlds.”
Taylor Rae, Fall 2023
“The Seed A World Retreat offered by Seeda School was an invitation to revisit the primordial womb; a safe and warm place for meaningful growth and expansion of our deepest desires. Ayana's passion and deep community care shone through as she guided/facilitated the cohort to transform the seeds of our deepest desires into tangible and beautiful offerings to the world. The carefully curated Retreat Workbook allowed us to seed, tend to, grow (and prune when necessary) our ideas into structured next steps. I'm so happy to have had the opportunity to commune with other like-minded, community-oriented folk who share the same passion for building worlds that provide ample space and opportunity for radical, free existence and communion.”
— Yen C, Fall 2023
"The Seeda School experience has been such an affirming and generative experience for me. I am often seeking out classes and opportunities to learn new skills, be in process with my peers, and engage in self-development and personal growth. My experience with Seeda School, via Ayana's generous facilitation and framework, felt so deeply aligned with my values, my creative praxis, and my worldview. Guided by the brilliant offerings of Black feminists, Ayana has cultivated such a sacred space with an inspiring cohort of people. Since participating in the cohort, I have revisited the curriculum, and it continues to be a transformative guide as I chart my path forward."
— Jessica Valoris, Winter 2024
"The Seeda School is unlike anything I have experienced before. It's a mix of personal, intimate, and necessary inner groundwork, visioning for the future, and practical tools for business and financial sustainability, all within a liberatory framework of black feminism and worldbuilding. I found it to be such a necessary container for reflecting, visioning, developing ideas, dreaming up possibilities and then bringing them to life with the many tools that are offered throughout the course. Ayana is a brilliant and generous facilitator, and has thoughtfully curated a safe community of support among like-minded artists and creatives. I am telling everyone I know about Seeda School as I feel like all interdisciplinary artists and creatives need this kind of facilitated retreat experience to bring their ideas to life and offer them to the world."
Steph Rue, Winter 2024
“The violence is endless under empire and white supremacy, but so is our capacity to imagine new worlds and to love on each other” – a thought Ayana offered us early on, amid the grief, heartbreak and rage at the apocalypses taking place close and far, is also the best summation of this heart-and-possibilities-expanding retreat. Under Ayana’s effervescent, loving, wise guidance and expansive vision, these 9 weeks were a space for us to practice loving ourselves – breathing through fear, taking our desires, curiosities and oddities seriously, seeing a divine throughline in our journeys, choosing to start without having all the information – in order to answer the call from our people, past and present, and bring about the futures we need today. I told everyone I care about of the gift that is the Seed A World Retreat, looking forward to revisiting our session recordings and completing the worksheets (that I know my life depends on). I am so grateful I followed my intuition (and desire!) and chose to invest in myself through this course. I am grateful and forever charged/changed by this offering, that Ayana had dreamt up and powerfully-beautifully woven into being.”
— Aisha Jandosova, Fall 2023
“Ayana has created a retreat that is immensely valuable. Seeda School has been able to anticipate needs that I was uncovering myself with richness and depth in ways I never expected! I wholeheartedly recommend this retreat for creatives ready to immerse themselves in their hearts desires.”
— Vanessa Murchie, Fall 2023
"Seeda School gathered me and all the threads of my creative practice. I came in with an idea and left with a digital course rooted in ease and pleasure. The workbook is beautifully laid out to include a framework for building out a curriculum, sustainable marketing plan, and sales funnel. Ayana's affirmations each week are a remedy to the uncertainty I experience beginning something new. This retreat has been grounding and deeply supportive."
Brandi Cheyenne Harper, Winter 2024
“This Seed a World Retreat has been been such an eye-opening journey that has shown me that I don't have to fear claiming the things that I am because the current world that I participate in says that I can not be all the things that I am. Ayana, it is clear what you want to put forward - a world where everyone is fully themselves and living in a world of love. I felt that throughout the experience, and felt as if I was being asked to take a chance in believing in and being a part of that type of world - a world built from love. Through a facilitator of love, a community of love, and words/frameworks of love, I felt affirmed and empowered to go on an be the interdisciplinary researcher, director, curator, and writer that I want to be. I feel as though I have so much of the foundational tools and essence from Seed a World and I can wait to launch, and see all the other worlds that are launched from this beautiful retreat.”
— Bo Dautruche, Fall 2023
“Through the Seed A World Retreat, Ayana offers rich, juicy, tangible frameworks for attendees to tap into our deepest desires so that we may then be led by them in our endeavors to develop and share values-driven creative offers. Each retreat session was equal parts meditation, sermon, and playdate. It was an invaluable experience to imagine within a world where Black feminism was the bedrock, where attendees could start replacing self-rejection and scarcity with self trust and generosity, where showing up fully for our practices would sustain our livelihoods in the ways we dream of and deserve. I’m eternally grateful and excited for how what I learned in the Seed A World Retreat will propel me into a more expansive and abundant future.”
— Dkéama Alexis, Fall 2023
"Seeda School is the most nourishing, electric, brilliant, inspired, held space I have been lucky enough to be a part of. I entered the retreat from the depths of a creative winter, and Ayana built the container for a true and revelatory spring. She has architected the balance of structure, rigorous tools, juicy inspiration, accountability, and relational support that will help you (finally) recognize and birth the thing that has been calling you. And more than that, Seeda is the invitation to manifest the luscious version of a life you didn’t know you were allowed to have."
Olivia Vagelos, Winter 2024
"Ayana has created a thriving Black feminist counterpublic that combines the speculative imaginary with the power of presence and action to manifest worlds that exist outside of and beyond oppressive systems, reminding us that we don’t have to cut off any parts of ourselves in the work.
As a participant in the Seed a World Retreat over the past year, I have found that accepting Ayana’s invitation into communal worldbuilding has completely transformed the way I think about both engaging with and funding my creative practice. Their gentle invocation around returning consistently to our work to build a nurturing cadence of outreach via the weekly dispatch, with its focus on curiosity and research, as well as their guidance on developing an income-generating offer has shown me the value of cultivating a creative ecosystem where all parts feed into and nourish each other.
I came for the emphasis on grounding our art in interdisciplinary wildness and opacity. I stay for the soft weave of community that grounds us all together in what Alexis Pauline Gumbs calls “an interdependent ceremony.” Ayana and my fellow worldbuilders are holding each other through this time of escalating genocide and rising fascism worldwide and together we are creating full universes of possibility to, in Christina Sharpe’s words, “imagine otherwise.” Join us?"
Elliott Silverstein, Spring 2024
FAQs
Question not covered below or inside the Worldbuilding Workshop Replay? Feel free to reach out at [email protected] for clarification before enrolling!
