Environmental Leadership and Community Resilience—A new 6-credit immersive, place-based, living-learning course (Summer 2026)

Trade your screen for a week of real-world impact. Applications closing soon for this unplugged residency focused on environmental leadership and community resilience. Designed for emerging environmental leaders, this 6-credit graduate course combines experiential learning with community-based practice. Held in a beautiful Southern VT location. Sliding-scale lodging and scholarships available; see flier for details. A week offline could change how you lead for a lifetime.

What?

Environmental Leadership and Community Resilience is a 6-credit, graduate-level summer intensive designed for people who feel the call to lead—even when the path forward isn't clear.

If you're navigating environmental despair, social disruption, or the limits of business-as-usual solutions, this course offers something rare: rigorous interdisciplinary learning in community with grounded, place-based engagement.

Interweaving natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and applied leadership practice, the course prepares you to respond meaningfully to environmental challenges, misinformation, biodiversity loss, climate change, and energy transition.

Over the course of a week immersed in nature and community, you'll engage through dialogue, group and individual projects, field-based inquiry, and hands-on service, while developing real-world skills in group facilitation, conflict negotiation, systems thinking, and adaptive leadership.

In addition to the seven-day living-learning residency, pre- and post-intensive online sessions will help you connect theory to practice, integrate ethical and justice-centered perspectives, and design solutions rooted in your own professional and community context. Along the way, there's space to reflect, share, cultivate resilience, and rediscover why this work matters—to you and to the world.

Who

Open to:

• All newly-matriculating M.S. students in Environmental Studies (MSES)—low-residency, online, or face-to-face
• Current MSES students
• New certificate students in Environmental Studies
• Students from other AU programs (Education, IMA, CPT, GMS, etc.), space permitting

Enrollment limited to 20 participants (10 spots reserved for new, summer-start MSES students)

When?

Residency: July 19–25, 2026

Optional field trips: July 26 (day 8) with AU Environmental Studies alumni and community partners

Zoom sessions: Three meetings before and after the residency, Dates: TBA

Why?

In a time when meaningful, face-to-face connection is more important than ever, the world needs passionate, innovative, and skilled environmental leaders—those who can tackle complex challenges by fostering connection, leading with empathy, and strengthening resilient communities.

The world needs you now.

Where?

Basecamp at Beaver Falls, West Halifax, VT

An off-grid, immersive learning environment in nature—just 35 miles from the Antioch New England campus in Keene, NH.

Course Highlights

• Build practical leadership skills for uncertain times
• Apply systems thinking and resilience at multiple scales—personal, communal, ecological
• Engage in community-based, place-centered learning
• Join a cohort of peers committed to care and collaboration
• Lay a foundation for Antioch's Environmental Studies M.S. or certificates

Cost

Tuition: $1,204 per credit x 6 credits = $7,224
Lodging: $100 per night x 6 nights = $600, payable on a sliding scale / pay what you can