Dave Shaw (Santa Cruz, USA): Planet Local Sharing Circle

Hosted by Local Futures

In our next Planet Local Sharing Circle, we’ll be joined by Dave Shaw, founder of the Right Livelihood Center at UC Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz Permaculture. The Center serves as Global Secretariat for the international Right Livelihood College network, which spans eight campuses plus the Global Campus of Human Rights across five continents.

California is a place of sharp contradictions: Silicon Valley, Hollywood and industrial agriculture on one hand, and on the other a dense, often invisible landscape of grassroots, local and community-based initiatives. Dave and his team have been working to make that second California visible, mapping localisation efforts across the state and looking for the connections between them.

There’s a natural circle here. Helena Norberg-Hodge, who founded Local Futures, is a Right Livelihood Laureate, and the Center is now working alongside Local Futures to build the California localisation movement and to host a Planet Local Summit at UC Santa Cruz April 26-30, 2027.

Dave will share what he’s finding: who is doing this work in California, where the energy is, and what he’s learned from running a permaculture education farm of his own. Together we’ll explore what helps local initiatives find each other, sustain themselves, and build the collective power that wider systemic change requires.