Escuela del Rio Cosmico

Río Cósmico is a mestiza owned, seasonal mutlicultural prayer space. Here are just some of the ways we honor and steward nature's infinite diversity, cultivate equity, and dismantle institutionalized racism. 

Fundraising & Scholarships: 

100% of the sales from the limited edition products and artisan goods and collaborations items currently for sale in our marketplace go into our BIPOC scholarship fund. Since Opening our doors in 2017, we have awarded over 200 BIBOC Scholarships to our online and in person educational programs, totaling over $25,000. Information about available scholarships is always prominently visible on our course registration and checkout pages. Our intention is to help ensure access to healing experiences, alternative healthcare education and leadership development by groups historically and or presently oppressed under institutionalized white supremacy.

Equity Advocacy:

In 2020, we added the position of Equity Advocate to our core team. Empowerment and Equity Advocates assist in the design and implementation of community agreements, practices and policies that ensure collective mindfulness of issues related to race in our community and assist us in continually re-aligning our thoughts, actions, and policies with our values of racial justice, equity, and respect for life. 

Restorative Process: 

Students and staff are asked to agree to engage the restorative justice paradigm for instances of perceived bias, harm, inequity, and for exit interviews to ensure that whenever possible, our encounters together leave all parties feeling whole. With each new enrollment year, we establish a budget to ensure that in the event of conflict, it is possible to pay experienced professional restorative justice facilitators and mediators to help us collectively understand what happened, and what measures of accountability and repair are needed. Individual mediations are available as needed to resolve tensions, bridge gaps in communication skills or styles, cultural differences and more. If you have been a participant in experiences with us and feel that meeting with a staff member or fellow participant in a mediated setting may be necessary in order for you more fully integrate your experience, please email [email protected] to explore opportunities for restoration and mutual transformation.

Leadership Development:

In order to best to ensure competency in cultivating a diverse learning environment, our full time staff is engaged in ongoing BIPOC Leadership Mentorship under the guidance of Milta Vega Cardona, who has over 40 years of experience as a Core Trainer with The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond. Access to these spaces is offered to all BIPOC community members interested in learning how to better serve racially diverse communities. If interested in learning of the next time we begin a leadership development journey, please sign up for our newsletter updates and email us at [email protected] to let us know of your interest.

Our Commitments to this Community:

We are committed to the ongoing work of cultivating a racially diverse, multicultural learning environment for the benefit of all.

We are committed to maintaining communication channels that allow opportunities to give and recieve feedback and facilitate the possibility of transformation and healing through the inevitable differences in perspective that arise in intersectional communities. 

We are committed to an annual assessment using the Soulfire Farm Undoing Racism in the food System Training materials that have categorized organizational dynamics into 3 groups in relation to racism: Complicit, Questioning, and Dismantling. We work collaboratively with committed community members, staff, and our mentors to ensure no areas of unconscious complicity with institutionalized white supremacy.

We are committed to centering queer and BIPOC perspectives throughout our apprenticeship curriculum. 

We are committed to ongoing healing from our own racial traumas. This includes ongoing engagement of both traditional and somatic based therapy. 

Our Medicine Mandala Apprenticeship was designed to hold us as we quest the skills needed to thrive in harmony with one another as children of Gaia. It is within this space that we experiment with implementing all that we are learning on our own journey of cultivating diversity and equity in community.