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The mission of Originateve is to reestablish and promote vibrant, regenerative connections to nature, community and spirit. Originateve is organized exclusively for charitable, scientific and educational purposes, more specifically: to create models and practices of sustainability and regeneration in Ecology, Community, Culture, and Spirituality. We recognize the impact, relationship and responsibility of human behavior with regard to the biosphere and ethnosphere. To ensure the livelihood of future generations, Originateve will assist in developing and recovering systems of education and methodologies that embrace regenerative living, indigenous wisdom and lifestyles that promote the well-being and diversity of cultures and communities in relation to nature on a global scale for successive generations.
Holistic Mentoring & Regenerative Community
A Global Community of Interconnected Learners
Since 2010, Originateve has been assisting educational organizations in several countries with the assessment and development of holistic curriculum and instructional models, methodologies, facility and classroom enrichment design as well as community building based on cultural spotlighting and recovery where loss of cultural identity is evident.  Holism refers to the entirety of the being, culture, and cosmos as each interrelate.  Holistic educational approaches are designed to provide comprehensive frameworks for human development in relationship and stewardship to the local ecology, depth and richness of culture and community accountability to future generations, and conscious service to the supersensory elements that govern the cosmos below, above and beyond our comprehension.  While many cultures across the globe still maintain a holistic lifestyle that could be called regenerative and responsible to their place, people and spirit, many more examples of homogenous, superficial specialization seem to be the stubborn convention predicting certain ruin of both the ethnosphere and biosphere of our planet.
The move toward holism in many facets is a difficult one precisely because it challenges us to rethink our current lifestyle and in many cases suggests we return to more humble methodologies practiced by our ancestors; methods abandoned for the sake of the ‘progress’ promised by industrialized markets.  Yet, time and again, we see the tradeoff of knowledge, aptitude, health, community, and culture which deteriorate into broken and lazy artifacts of the once utilized capacity of humans for art, praise, song, story and a stunningly proficient memory that served as the wisdom necessary to govern our communities over multi-generational scopes.  As we initiate the effort to build, within ourselves, our peers, and our villages, contemporary practices toward regeneration, there are some clear strategies that might be followed to avoid surrendering such a vision prematurely.
Originateve is assisting to populate a global community of interconnected educational institutions dedicated to regenerative practices for the local ecology and agriculture, the social and political climate, the international tapestry of cultures, and the planet as a whole organism.  Originateve achieves this goal by verifying and celebrating educational organizations working toward membership through a five-stage certification program that builds towards a comprehensive, cyclical system of methodologies, curricular design, contemplative practice, community integration, and spiritual contribution.
Originateve began as an evolving project of mentors Ron Green and Carl Emmons who together founded Amerikanoestudios in Esparza, Costa Rica. Originally a response to local impoverished educational environments, Green and Emmons opened the first post-colonial Holistic School in the Canton de Espiritu Santo designed around English Language Acquisition. The project quickly took on the challenges in a myriad of fields including Applied Linguistics, where we focus on Multilingual Environments as well as the Mother Tongue, Cultural Awareness and Recovery, Ecological Awareness and Recovery, Sustainable and Regenerative Practices for the Community and Environment, Social Health Services, and mentor training.   Today, Originateve has nodes of change emerging globally with a growing community of intentional stewards.
As with all things Originateve would not be possible without the work, influence and wisdom of a significant number of extraordinary folks that may or may not understand the degree to which they have nurtured and continue to inform the organic unfolding of our work. We wish to honor those who have come before tasting, investigating, listening, revering the jungles, the forests, the waters, the steppes, the deserts, the ice, so that we may have a place to craft a relationship with something too big to understand, but too magnificent to ignore. Our deep and sincere gratitude goes out to the following: Earth, our families- children, partners, husbands, wives, parents and ancestors, Martin Prechtel and folks at Flowering Mountain, Robert Bly, Michael Meade, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Leslie Marmon Silko, Rudolf Steiner, Lois Lowry, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Blake, William Butler Yeats, Joseph Campbell, Matin Shaw and the West Country School of Myth, Marcos Soto, Alvaro Perez, Sonia Quiros, Choto and the Huetares, James Terrell, Kevin Smith, Mark Herkner, Jim Jackson, Vanessa and Gerardo Rojas Rojas, Luis Carlos, Juanito Mora, Gisela Madrigal, Steve Eggleston, Jorge Debravo, Pablo Neruda, Dr. Seuss, Pablu Presbere, Evelyn Castillo and many more unnamed or unknown but endebted just the same.
Now is a time of great imbalance for many individuals and cultures of the Earth as well as the planet itself.   Modern obsession with materialism, reductionism, positivism and hyper-consumerism is replaced with increasing homogenization.  With technology advancing faster than culture can keep up with, the disconnection of meaning, community and values has contributed toward an increasingly narcissistic and nihilistic world community. These products of the Disposable Age, where responsibility is mortgaged to public and private institutions, abstractly corrupt any social contract and thus propagate, “dead pledges.” They have been core afflictions contributing to the indifference with which much of humanity exploits and poisons it’s environment at the expense of neighbors and grandchildren. Any ecological repair must also have a modification of social values that will encourage the destructive behaviors to cease. In turn, no social change can be reasonably comprehensive without a substantial rewiring of our relationship to nature. For this improved rapport to be possible we must admit the failure of the western positivist conviction that the dimensions beyond physical sensory experience are without merit for consideration. Indeed, any view of nature as simply an object, or a thing will be unacceptable for one does not have relationships with things. A deep investigation into indigenous wisdom can help guide us to a reconnection with understandings that will not be so new as they will be reestablished. In some cases we are fortunate to still have communities on the planet with a healthy memory of these values and behaviors. We do not know all the answers but we can learn from the cultures who have not forgotten and turn our study of our own cultural history to a focus on recovering these values where they were once cherished.
Cultural Triage and Healing
Amerikanoestudios, launched in early 2011 in Esparza, Costa Rica, was designed as a prototype school for revitalizing culture. English is the dominant instructional language medium, however the material with which we begin the journey is first local, then ancestral. Relevance to the rest of the world is focused through these lenses so that while English is acquired , so is a strong identity and connection with the native language, community and traditions. Most English as a Second Language (ESL) programs cannot help but be imperialistic in action unbeknownst to the facilitators of the instruction. That is because most ESL methodology and, more importantly, textbooks, are produced in the English speaking countries. While this is understandable on the surface, it is also quite destructive to local cultures that do not identify nor share the same cultural values or heritage that is implicit in western countries. When one begins to unpack the cultural assumptions of the imperial language, the messages that Western text books blatantly demonstrate is an attitude that says, “Be like us!” English is certainly important as the most common intercultural World Language and we love teaching it. However, we come from the perspective that every culture should start from a curriculum of cultural relevance, and therefore, we begin working in a community by learning about it and its stories with great depth and respect. We use that information as the content for beginning to learn English always emphasizing the lack of sophistication that English will be able to translate from the original indigenous tongue. The overall goal is to build back a bridge to the native and indigenous languages and a motivation in every learner to chose to cross that bridge on their own accord.
The Rocky Mountains have been known for thousands of years as "The Shining Mountains" by the native Ute population. They lived in a complex spiritual and ecologically revering way of life. Their language was built on the landscape of the jagged apexes and juniper foothills. This is Coyote country, Wolf country, Bear and Cougar land. Yet, despite a magnificent and long relationship with this landscape, the modern population has but superficial knowledge of the sustainable and regenerative cultures that thrived throughout the Americas prior to the immigration of Europeans and forced re-population of indigenous Africans. The local history presented in modern schools, is generally a bleached history that began two hundred years ago.
Originateve is looking for the rest of this story, for all stories of the current inhabitants of this area inclusive of their own personal heritage, which may extend to many other landscapes of the world.  We are searching for healthy manners of connecting these citizens to their home with a sophisticated spectrum of learning for teachers, students, private and public institutions and the general public.
Employment and Volunteer Commitment
Adopted by the Board of Directors on 5/15/2012
Originateve does not and shall not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion (creed), gender, gender expression, age, national origin (ancestry), disability, marital status, sexual orientation, or military status, in any of its activities or operations. These activities include, but are not limited to, hiring and firing of staff, selection of volunteers and vendors, and provision of services. We are committed to providing an inclusive and welcoming environment for all members of our staff, clients, volunteers, subcontractors, vendors, and clients.
Originateve is an equal opportunity employer. We will not discriminate and will take affirmative action measures to ensure against discrimination in employment, recruitment, advertisements for employment, compensation, termination, upgrading, promotions, and other conditions of employment against any employee or job applicant on the bases of race, color, gender, national origin, age, religion, creed, disability, veteran's status, sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.
Originateve is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Your gift is tax-deductible as allowed by law.