The Wild Geese Collective is striving to create more resiliency within ourselves and the broader queer community. As queers we are focused on our collective liberation as well as the collective liberation of people with marginalized identities other than our own. That is why the Wild Geese Collective is listening and learning from communities outside of our own. We are actively working on deconstructing our own socialization and meeting ourselves and others with honesty, gentleness and respect. We are committed to conflict engagement and believe that many lessons can be learned by actively listening and empathizing.
The queering of nature and the queering of ourselves, how do we foster a resilient biome?
We foster resiliency through nurturing our diversity.
Unifying Statements
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- We are united in active self-education around decolonization and indigenous solidarity.
- We are united in actively prioritizing the voices of POC & indigenous people as attendees and facilitators in our programs.
- We are united in building skills that feel healing, emboldening and create resiliency.
- We are united in creating learning ecologies that foster growth and challenge our own understandings and cosmologies.
Wild Geese Organizers
Meg Gilmartin
she/her
Meg is a queer, white, able bodied, cis-woman of middle class background. She attempts to fight capitalism, racism and imperialism wherever it exists, embracing biocentrism and liberation. She prioritizes sharing skills with marginalized communities engaged in resistance and survival! She has ten plus years of experience with wildlife track and sign and is a certified cyber tracker in wildlife track and sign. She is committed to creating increasingly accessible spaces to share skills. She enjoys foraging for wild foods, especially seaweed, making plant medicine and studying mammals and birds. She is currently based in Leeds, Maine where she is building her own home, living with her chosen family, and trying to get to as many queer dance parties as possible!
Joey Wilbur
they/them
Joey is a non-binary, pagan, sober queer living on Wabanaki land in so-called rural Maine, surrounded by plants and chicken companions. They’ve been a dancer for 30 years, and now they’re interested in creating spaces of creativity and movement for queer and chronically ill bodies.
Caitlin Horigan
she/her
Caitlin Horigan has been a mentor in a wide variety of settings in numerous countries for more than 18 years. She is an advocate of self-directed education and anti-oppression changework. Her teaching weaves together Joanna Macy’s The Work that Reconnects and Bill Plotkin’s Wild Mind model with expeditions, naturalist skills, and nature connection practices.
Caitlin has facilitated both day and residential place-based nature connection programming in the nonprofit sector, public and private schools, summer and after-school programs throughout the unceded territories of Wabanaki and Abenaki people.
She is on a journey of deepening relationship with the more than human world and connecting with her ancestral lineages. Caitlin is a Wilderness First Responder, and pursuing a Recreational Maine Guide license.
In 2018 she began the multi year Wild Mind Training Program with Animas Valley Institute and in 2019 she completed a graduate certificate in Ecopsychology through Pacifica Graduate Institute. She has also participated in Helping the Butterfly Hatch, a mentorship program for facilitators of Self Directed Education. She recently began an interdisciplinary graduate program at UMaine in Peace and Reconciliation Studies. She is also a certified Forest Therapy Guide. Caitlin is committed to increasing the accessibility of programs she offers and continues to explore how to thrive in a capitalist system while creating a post-capitalist future.
When she is not working Caitlin enjoys exploring the woods, following animal trails, making medicine, foraging food, creating art, running barefoot, practicing yoga, and dancing.