Seed A World Retreat
Seeda School hosts a 9-week retreat helping you seed, deepen or return to an interdisciplinary practice, develop a cohesive narrative and release an income generating creative offer through the framework of worldbuilding.
Build A WorldThe Worldbuilding Workshop Series
PART 1: Seed A World Rooted in the Truth of Your Desire
PART 2: Resource A World Rooted in the Truth of Your Needs
Join us for this free, two part Worldbuilding Workshop series where you'll learn how to craft a digital course offering then learn how to price it!
Register for the Worldbuilding Workshop Series
Mark your calendar!
☑️ PART 1: Tuesday, April 16th at 12pm EST
🔜 PART 2: Thursday, April 25th at 12pm EST
Last Day to Enroll
Join us in the retreat from April 30th to June 27th 2024 where we meet every Thursday to finally develop the offer calling on your creative spirit.
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Learn More About the Retreat
Join this 9 week program for interdisciplinary cultural workers, artists, facilitators and organizers. Learn from 9 course modules informed by Seeda School's Worldbuilding Framework and attend 9 weekly open studio sessions on Thursdays at 12pm EST for feedback from a community of fellow worldbuilders. This retreat helps you get clarity on the story uniting your creative ecosystem of skills, curiosities and desires for collective liberation.
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Course Modules
9
Open Studios
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Income Generating Offer
What Seeda School Worldbuilders Are Saying
"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, Fall 2023
Seed A World Framework
A worldbuilding framework for interdisciplinary creatives. The Seed A World Framework consists of a 9-step path for mapping your interdisciplinary ecosystem, discovering your creative offer, building a framework for practicing in alignment with your values, learning how to sell and market your offer in ways that feel good and so much more.
The Seed A World Program is anchored by three essential worldbuilding tools: Imagination, Story and Platform.
Imagination
Story
Platform
Seed A World Syllabus
Outlined in the syllabus are 9 weekly modules helping you get clarity on the potential income generating creative offer already embedded in your practice and how to effectively communicate the interdisciplinary possibility brewing inside the world you’re building.
What Seeda School Worldbuilders Are Saying
“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
The Seed A World Retreat Session
Spring 2024 Cohort Open Enrollment Period: April 15th-29th
Sliding Scale Pricing
$1,475 - $2,950
Payment Plans Below
See You Inside?
From April 30th to June 27th 2024 join us inside the retreat starting every Tuesday when the course videos and homework is released then in open studio for feedback on module homework every Thursday from 12:00-1:30pm EST. All open studio recordings are uploaded within 24hrs and stored in a retreat dashboard unique to your cohort. Worried about missing an open studio session or "falling behind"? There's no such thing in this retreat! You'll have forever access to all retreat materials to reference as you iterate on your offer.
Tier 1 Payment Plans
Enroll using these payment options and receive all the retreat benefits, tools, support and resources listed above!
Tier 2 Payment Plans
If your financial capacity allows, enroll using these payment options and receive all the retreat resources listed above plus contribute to the 2025 Seeda School Scholarship Fund!
No questions asked full refund available all the way up to the first day of class!
Meet The Artist and Facilitator Behind Seeda School
Hi! I'm happy you're here. Allow me to introduce myself, I am a transdisciplinary artist and co-author of the non-linear, speculative fiction novella Cykofa: The Seeda Origin Story written during my Ginkgo Bioworks residency in collaboration with creative writing software I engineered at the Recurse Center. I am also the founder and steward of Seeda School, which hosts an online retreat for interdisciplinary practitioners making the revolution irresistible through worldbuilding.
Leveraging over a decade's worth of experience visioning and releasing interdisciplinary projects, today I enjoy a transdisciplinary practice braiding projects and opportunities related to: black feminist research/praxis, biotechnology, studio art, photography, fashion, ceramics, abstract painting, design, facilitation, software engineering, creative entrepreneurship, divination and speculative fiction, using the framework of worldbuilding.
Website
The Worldbuilding Framework
Seeda School's Worldbuilding Framework consists of nine critical action steps with three major milestones: Deciding on your creative offer, developing the framework for your offer and releasing your offer. Leveraging the worldbuilding power of storytelling the framework takes the form of a story circle, invoking a circular practice you can return to for years to come.
The 3 Milestones
By the end of this retreat you will...
Decide On Offer
After locating your true desire for your creative practice using the Element X Quadrant we will map your entire Creative Ecosystem to get clarity on the offer you will workshop throughout the rest of the retreat.
Create Your Framework
Now that you've decided on your offer we will develop a narrative and framework around your offer informed by your values and the people you dream of serving. You will be able to use your framework to sell and validate your offer before it's fully created.
Invite the People
With an offer idea rooted in your desire and a brand narrative established you will learn creative marketing and sales strategies to release your offer to your first 100 participants in order to generate income you can count on this season and beyond.
What's included in the Seed A World Retreat?
Your desire makes space for our collective imagination and liberation. Join us inside this creative retreat and embark on a journey through 9 course modules and attend 9 weekly open studios based on Seeda School's worldbuilding framework. You'll develop your creative offer alongside a committed community of fellow worldbuilders who will offer feedback and accountability.
Seeda School's Worldbuilder's Handbook
Seeda School's Course Library
9 Weekly Open Studios
Seeda School's Discord Community
The Worldbuilder's Handbook
Based on Seeda School’s Worlbuilding Framework and the black feminist teachings informing the school, The Worldbuilder's Handbook is your go-to tool for navigating the 9 weeks 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 in 9 weeks. 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.
What Seeda School Worldbuilders Are Saying
"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
This Retreat Is For You If...
You are wanting to seed, deepen or return to an interdisciplinary creative practice that has the potential to become your primary source of income in a year.
You are a multi-hyphenate creative with a constellation of skills and curiosities who craves community who will support you in gardening the constellation instead of flattening it.
You're craving support and values-aligned creative marketing and branding strategies for locating and communicating the narrative thread that weaves together your research, projects and offer.
You thrive in decolonial learning environments centering the values of collective liberation and benefit from structured frameworks, templates, timelines and accountability.
You love your full-time job or freelance practice but want to establish yourself as an artist outside of that work through offering your skills to your creative community in new and empowering ways.
You have an existing, income generating, creative practice but lately it has felt misaligned with your deep desire and values keeping you in loops of procrastination, disinterest and burn out.
You have an existing creative offer but have hesitated on scaling it to become your primary source of income, worried monetization will compromise its pleasure and integrity.
You are working a full-time job or stringing together gigs misaligned with your values, politics, income goals, pace of working, and/or the needs of your body.
What Seeda School Worldbuilders Are Saying
“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. <3”
Taylor Rae, Fall 2023
Why Now?
Collective Liberation through Collective Divestment
Rewind to 2018, I had just gone through a software engineering bootcamp and was recruited to teach coding at a campus in Brooklyn rooted in increasing access to tech careers for marginalized folks. What I didn’t realize at the time was my self worth was completely wrapped up in external validation. I dove head first into my 9-5 and abandoned my creative practice and myself for two years.
I felt trapped inside a suffocating construct of survival where my primary source of income was connected to a way of working deeply misaligned with the pace of my body, my neurodivergent needs and my black feminist politic. Leveraging the power of worldbuilding and the wisdom of black feminism I spent years healing and cultivating tools to craft a creative vision for my life rooted in my deep desire to make revolution irresistible through worldbuilding.
Why now? Because we need YOUR creative vision now and that creative vision needs you whole and your material needs covered. If any of this resonates the Seed A World Retreat was created with you in mind and heart. Join us when the time feels right, we'll be ready whenever you are.
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
“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 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 <3). 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
“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
Money Back Guarantee 🖤
Life happens. If you enroll in the Seed A World Retreat and a family emergency arises, your kid's schedule changes or you have a change of heart. Regardless the reason, you can secure your spot by enrolling in the Seed A World Retreat rest assured you can receive a no questions asked refund if anything changes before the first day of class.
FAQs
Question not covered below? Join the free upcoming Worldbuilding Workshop or reach out at [email protected].
