Every immersion workshop is tailored to the local ecosystem, ensuring each day is brimming with content and exploration. You should plan to clear your agenda and fully immerse yourself in the biomimicry experience!

Our home base is the Well Being Retreat Center, a non-profit retreat and wellness center located on 160 acres in rural, scenic Northeast Tennessee. The Center’s beautiful meadows are surrounded by two miles of the Powell River, described by the US Fish & Wildlife Services as “one of the most biologically diverse rivers in a temperate climate anywhere in the world.” We’ll be mentored by freshwater mussels and great blue herons as we hike the wooded ridges and kayak the free flowing river, reflecting on the breadth and endurance of nature’s genius. It makes for a jam-packed week of biomimicry-based exploration.

In this workshop, we will look at nature’s strategies in three areas that are most relevant for leaders of social innovation:

Context: becoming attuned to your environment, understanding your context and how it is affected by selection pressure, using feedback loops to adapt as conditions change

Relationships: types of symbiotic relationships, factors for effective collaboration and co-evolution, fostering self-organized networks to advance change

Change: adaptation, resilience in the face of disruption, succession through stages of development

Over the course of the workshop, our expert biomimicry instructors will teach participants to:

• Practice applying biomimicry thinking to individual and team challenges
• Define leadership challenges for which nature’s examples can best provide solutions
• Re-imagine organizational leadership, strategy, planning, and operations with inspiration from healthy and evolving ecosystems
• Apply the biomimicry process to model teams and organizations after healthy and evolving ecosystems and to become skillful at adaptive change
• Be part of a diverse learning network guiding the growth of biomimetic applications for organizational development and social innovation
• Apply design lessons from nature that can help grow resilient organizations and foster a regenerative society

This workshop is open to professional and university-level participants from all backgrounds and levels of experience with biomimicry. The agenda is designed for anyone who is interested in learning from healthy and resilient natural systems and applying those insights to the human systems in which we are working, so that we can create a more regenerative society and world. These lessons are useful for organizations and businesses, but also just as compelling for people working in the public sector, or who are interested in adapting their own leadership practices so they can be more effective change agents. 

If your work involves becoming more effective in collaboration, creating robust institutional systems, navigating change in complex conditions or in times of disturbance, communication and adaptation in response to signals …this workshop is for you!

Past participants have come from a wide range of fields: nonprofits, education, public policy, community organizers, faith communities, business and more. The cross-pollination of professional and cultural backgrounds, ideas and experiences will enhance your workshop experience. 

For students enrolled in the Graduate Certificate in Biomimicry program with Arizona State University and interested in a Biomimicry Specialist Certification, this Immersion Workshop counts as one of two required in-person units. Learn more about the requirements for the Biomimicry Specialist Certification here.

Scholarships 

A limited number of scholarships are available to BIPOC leaders, change agents working in non-profit social change or climate/environmental organizations, and to students and people with lower incomes who would otherwise not be able to attend. Scholarships will be awarded by the workshop leaders with the purpose of building a broad and diverse cohort and are based solely on your answers on the application. 

The scholarship application period is closed.

Discounts 

• Student discount: Enrolled university students save $250.
• ASU Students: Enrolled ASU students save $500. 

All discounts have limited availability, are offered on a first-come, first-serve basis, and may not be combined. Details on discounts can be found in the registration form.

Cancellation Policy

Deposits are non-refundable. Cancellation 6+ weeks prior to the workshop, your deposit will become a credit that you can use at a later date or transfer as a gift. Cancellation 4-6 weeks prior to the workshop, a $500 cancellation fee plus incurred expenses will be deducted from your refund amount unless your seat is filled by someone else. Less than one month from the workshop start date, no refunds are permitted, but partial credit towards a future workshop will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

If the workshop is canceled for any reason by Biomimicry 3.8, workshop fees will be refunded in full.

Photo by Joe Roger

Dr. Dayna Baumeister | With a devotion to applied natural history and a passion for sharing the genius of nature, Dr. Dayna Baumeister has worked in the field of biomimicry with business partner Janine Benyus since 1998, traveling the world as a biomimicry thought-leader, business consultant, and professor. Together they founded the Biomimicry Guild consulting practice, The Biomimicry Institute 501c3, and  Biomimicry 3.8, a B-Corp social enterprise that helps clients find innovation inspired by nature and offers the highest level of biomimicry training to professionals worldwide.

Dayna’s foundational work has been critical to the biomimicry movement, establishing it as a fresh and innovative practice, as well as a philosophy to meet the world’s sustainability challenges. As an educator, researcher, and design consultant, Dayna has helped more than 100 companies consult the natural world for elegant and sustainable design solutions, as diverse as Nike, Interface, General Mills, Boeing, Google, Natura, Herman-Miller, Kohler, Seventh Generation and Procter & Gamble. Dayna is a natural systems thinker and brings a unique perspective to her work to help others see nature as model, measure, and mentor. She designed and teaches the world’s first MSc in Biomimicry as a Professor of Practice at ASU, co-founded, is director of The Biomimicry Center at ASU. She compiled more than 20 years of experience in the practice of biomimicry into the world’s only textbook for the field: Biomimicry Resource Handbook: A Seed Bank of Knowledge and Best Practices (2014).

Toby Herzlich | Biomimicry for Social Innovation Founder Toby Herzlich is a leadership trainer and ICF-certified coach, master facilitator, and certified Biomimicry Specialist. Toby is committed to the creation of a just, healthy, and regenerative society, and heartfully enthused about the transformative potential of applying nature’s wisdom to humanity’s sustainability aspirations. With more than 25 years of facilitation experience, she is a Senior Trainer with the Rockwood Leadership Institute, co-founder of Cultivating Women’s Leadership, and a faculty in B3.8’s Biomimicry Professional Certification Program. As a consultant, Toby advances climate solutions initiatives at organizations such as the Sierra Club and the AgroEcology Fund. With a commitment to race equity at the center of her work, Toby finds much of her purpose in catalyzing diverse networks of social change innovators, and is growing a co-evolving network of leaders using nature’s intelligence as inspiration and guidance.