Nourish -Taking active care of body, mind, spirit, nature, and community

* Subject to change based on participant availability and continuing stakeholder conversations

This year, the Summit is focused on what it takes to “Nourish” – looking at how we take care of ourselves through food, hospitality, and the arts. We will work in interdisciplinary teams on projects to solve real issues with creativity and lots of fun. Together, we’ll come up with innovative ideas to be presented at a final Hōʻike, or showcase, that celebrates the work of the previous three days.

Journey 1: Economies that Nourish

This journey will explore how we could build economic systems that have societal health at their core. It will bring together entrepreneurs, investors, nonprofit leaders, and community builders to examine the nuts and bolts of creating more equitable economic models — including how decisions are made, how resources move, who benefits, and what kinds of support help enterprises thrive over time.

Over three days, participants could move from shared framing to applied design: first identifying what makes an economic model more equitable and community-serving, then looking at examples of shared power, governance, capital, and accountability, and finally working in small groups to shape a practical model or set of principles. Groups of 15-20 could each focus on a different tension, such as access to capital, ownership, growth, or accountability.
Participants develop a short set of principles, model, or decision-making framework for building economic systems with greater shared power, community benefit, and long-term accountability.
Shared Power, Shared Prosperity
How do we build economic systems with the communities they are meant to serve? This session explores what changes when community leaders, entrepreneurs, funders, and institutions share more power in shaping economic models — from ownership and access to capital to decision-making, governance, and long-term accountability. Together, participants will consider what it takes to move from inclusion toward real agency, and how more equitable models can take root in practice.
Scaling Without Losing the Plot
How can businesses and organizations grow without extracting from the people, places, and values that made them possible? This session looks at the pressures that come with scale — capital, supply chains, market demand, efficiency, and growth expectations — and explores the choices and structures that help keep a mission rooted over time. Participants will consider how growth can expand impact without flattening complexity, compromising purpose, or disconnecting from community.
To be announced soon

Journey 2: Nourishing the People

This journey will explore how we can blend tradition and innovation in the quest to nourish our communities physically, culturally, and economically — from the ingredients we grow, to the products we bring to market. Participants working across food, health, agriculture, and business will share techniques, strategies, and products as they look to create products that can come to market and dishes that can come to our tables.
This journey could combine conversation, tasting, and applied work around food as health, culture, memory, and enterprise. Across three days, participants explore how culturally rooted foods move into broader markets, examine the role of innovation in food systems, and then work in small groups to develop a dish, product concept, menu idea, or food experience that reflects nourishment in physical, cultural, and economic terms.
Participants create a dish, recipe, product concept, or food experience that demonstrates how food can nourish people physically, culturally, and economically while honoring its source and context.
Food as Memory, Moment, and Market
Food carries health, culture, memory, and economic possibility all at once. This session explores what happens when culturally rooted foodways, ingredients, and practices move into broader markets — asking how they can create new pathways for access, enterprise, and innovation without being flattened, extracted, or disconnected from the communities they come from. How do we honor the relationships and histories behind what nourishes us while allowing food traditions to evolve, travel, and reach new audiences?
Innovation for Who?
The future of food will not be shaped by technology alone. This session explores how new ideas in food, agriculture, and climate adaptation can better respond to culture, health, land, labor, access, and community need — asking who food innovation is meant to serve, who gets to define progress, and how we can imagine the future without losing the knowledge and practices that have long nourished people.
To be announced soon

Journey 3: Nature and Finance

This journey will explore how financial and natural systems can be integrated to better nourish our communities while providing new opportunities for stakeholders. It will feature leaders applying Indigenous knowledge and principles of biomimicry to business, a diverse group of entrepreneurs and managers exploring innovative ways to deploy capital for regenerative outcomes, and leaders in agroforestry and regenerative agriculture working to retool our food systems to improve human and planetary health.
This journey brings together finance, land stewardship, and regenerative agriculture through a mix of case studies, field-based learning, and applied design. Participants begin by exploring how capital can support long-term stewardship, then examine the human and ecological infrastructure needed for regeneration, and work in small teams to develop a proposal for aligning financial and natural systems.
Participants develop a practical proposal, investment lens, or stewardship model that connects capital, land, people, and ecological outcomes in support of regenerative systems.
Capital That Stays
What becomes possible when capital is committed for the long term? This session explores investment models that prioritize stewardship, continuity, repair, and resilience over short-term return or eventual exit. Looking across patient capital, family offices, and place-based funding, participants will consider how finance can support businesses, farms, and communities in ways that remain accountable to people and place over time.
Regeneration Beyond the Soil
Regenerative agriculture depends on more than healthy soil; it depends on the people, knowledge, labor, and relationships that make stewardship possible. This session explores the human infrastructure of regeneration — land access, farm labor, succession, training, knowledge transfer, and the economic realities facing growers. Together, participants will ask what is needed for regenerative systems to endure not only ecologically, but socially and economically.
To be announced soon

Journey 4: Nourishing the Soul Through Music & Art

Collective music making, dance and art has long been at the center of the human experience. In making art together we share stories, feelings, and information while strengthening the social and communal bonds that help us endure and thrive. In this journey, world renowned artists, dancers, writers, and musicians will help shape works of collective art – all the while helping us engage the creativity within all of us, and its power to help us commune, innovate, and thrive.
This journey captures both reflective and productive elements of art. Participants begin by exploring how art, music, dance and storytelling help communities process change, then move into guided creative exercises, and finally collaborate on a shared artistic expression. The final product does not need to be polished; the emphasis should be on process, participation, and what collective creativity makes possible.
Participants create a collaborative artistic expression — such as a performance, sound piece, visual work, written reflection, or shared ritual — that reflects the role of creativity in connection, resilience, and collective meaning-making.
Art As A Way Through
Art, music, dance and storytelling can help us move through moments that ordinary conversation cannot fully hold. This session explores creativity as a source of connection, reflection, and resilience in times of conflict, grief, uncertainty, and change. Participants will consider how creative practices help communities listen differently, process what is difficult, remain in relationship, and imagine what comes next.
To be announced soon

Journey 5: Nourishing Spirit And Curiosity Through Travel

Few things open our mind to new possibilities like travel. Whether as a host or a guest, travel gives us all the opportunity to meet new people, experience new places, and see our own homes and environments through different eyes. These moments of discovery do more than just delight and stir the development of new ideas, they also recenter us in the larger world, making us feel at once smaller and yet more connected to the problems and possibilities we share with others on this planet. In this journey, participants will work together with professionals in the travel and hospitality spaces to create a hosting experience especially for Summit participants.
This journey focuses on what it means to arrive, host, and welcome with care. During the Summit, participants explore the responsibilities of guests and hosts, examine examples from travel and hospitality, and then work to design a hosting experience or welcoming space for Summit participants. The work will be practical and place-based, using the campus as a testing ground.
Participants design a hosting experience, welcome practice, or physical space that helps people feel oriented, cared for, and connected to place.
Arriving with Care
What does it mean to enter a place well? This session explores the responsibilities that come with travel, hospitality, and cultural exchange — how guests can arrive with humility, curiosity, and care, and how hosts and institutions can create clearer pathways for respectful participation. Together, participants will consider how travel can move beyond consumption toward relationship, engagement, and a deeper responsibility to place.

Beyond Welcome
Hospitality is not only about opening the door; it is about what happens after people arrive. This session explores how spaces, gatherings, businesses, and communities can move beyond the performance of welcome toward deeper practices of orientation, participation, accountability, and ongoing care. Participants will consider what it takes to sustain belonging over time, after the first invitation has been offered.
To be announced soon

General Sessions

The general sessions will create shared moments for the full gathering to come together across tracks and explore how the Summit’s core themes connect. These conversations will look at nourishment as something that is built across systems — through food, finance, agriculture, art, hospitality, community, and place — rather than held in any one field or practice.

Nourishment in Concert

This closing conversation brings together voices from across each journey to explore how the ideas surfaced throughout the gathering can work in relationship to one another. Rather than treating food, finance, agriculture, art, hospitality, and community as separate areas of work, the session asks what becomes possible when these approaches are used in concert — and how they can support more nourishing systems for people and place[1.1].

The Nourishment Lab

This working session invites participants to move from reflection into practice by examining the choices, tradeoffs, and structures behind the systems they are part of. Drawing on themes from across the gathering, participants will work through real tensions — growth and rootedness, access and ownership, innovation and tradition, welcome and extraction, return and repair — and ask where good intentions may fall short without the right conditions, accountability, or design. Together, participants will identify more concrete choices and collaborations that better align with care, responsibility, and long-term impact.

A Day at the Common Ground Summit