what are starfish circles?
A Starfish Circle is a group in which coordination arises from people who have a sense of one another. There’s no director. The Circle is held together by the quality of attention paid where each person feels their own state of being clearly enough to be felt by the people among them, and experiencing those people clearly enough that the group can be and move together without being told how to do so.
This is the whole thing.
The felt sense of connection.
WE make home together, not by talking about community, but by building and growing things that a community actually uses, from materials the land actually provides, with people who keep showing up.
communities of practice
Starfish Circles practice through craft and cultivation. Quilting, clay, soil building, gardening, agroecological practice, cooking and ways yet to be seen. The work of hands on land-based materials in land-based places.
If economy is the management of home, what we practice is something prior. The making of home. It’s making things together. Peer learning and leading through doing and making things together, on a regular basis.
the medium
A starfish’s tube feet cannot move without pressurized seawater running through the water vascular system. That’s the seawater flowing through thousands of tube feet slowly and constantly, doing the work that makes all the other work possible.
Every Circle needs its seawater … the recurring, physical, creative work and maintenance people do with their hands. Our first Starfish Circlewas/is a quilting circle that started in April 2026 and still happening, monthly, on the island of Alameda. The second Circle was a hand building ceramics group started by a quilting circle member two months later. The medium (our seawater) is the craft we’re cultivating, the work, the circle is actually built around; sewing things, making bowls and plates, etc.
Starfish Circles aren’t meant to be a discussion venue. Discussion happens and is downstream of the making. When people make things together, connection builds in the body before reaching conversation. But when conversation comes, it’s often magical.
Let the medium shape how people relate.
facilitation
Starfish Circles form the conditions under which a group grows its own capacity to practice.
Commons literature shows that the systems that have lasting power are the ones where the people living inside the systems created the rules themselves. They tested those rules within their actual situations, and kept the rules that made sense to keep. The facilitator’s job is to protect the space so rule testing can happen. The facilitator’s job is not to determine the rules in advance.
These Circles aren’t mean to set standards for the next. Each Circle determines its own form from its own particular conditions.