I’ve been wanting to do something like this for literal years at this point, so I’m extremely happy to finally make it a reality.
Open Study Night is a public online meeting space for herbalists to learn, share and grow together. All are welcome, whether you’re an active/aspiring practitioner or building skills to manage your own health. Meetings will be on the 2nd Thursday of every month from 5-7pm PST over jit.si and have:
- Introductions, so we can all get to know each other
- Participant announcements, which can be upcoming workshops/events/fundraisers, or just news in the herb and health world you want to get out!
- Show and tell: What have you been working on? Read any good herb books recently? Met any cool new plants? Made a new discovery? Had success with a remedy? Just came across an interesting tidbit? Sharing stories is an important way to propagate information!
- Questions and, hopefully, answers: Do you have a question you want help with? Are you stuck on problem solving a health topic and could use input? Just curious if someone else has a different way of doing something than you do? Let’s get into it and help each other out!
Additionally, I’m hoping to have AMA-style sessions with guest specialists—Most herbalists who’ve been around the block a few times have a topic or two we tend to focus on, so here’s a chance to come infodump about it in an informal setting! Email me or DM on instagram if you’d like to have this roll in a meeting 🙂
Can’t make a meeting? You can still stay in the loop!
There’s an email list, which you can sign up for here: bit.ly/herbalopenstudy
This is how I’ll send out the meeting link every month, as well as collect announcements, questions etc. for the meeting agenda—just reply to the meeting invite email with whatever you want to add. I will ALSO be sending out a newsletter-style email after each Open Study Night with a summary and meeting notes, including all announcements. Even if you don’t attend the meeting, you can still put topics on the agenda and receive the meeting notes 🙂
If there’s any topic you want to talk about at a meeting but have omitted from the newsletter for privacy or any other reason, just let me know! Announcements and questions can also be anonymous and you’re welcome to use a nickname too.
Space expectations:
My role here is as a facilitator. I want to put my energy into projects that align with my values, so I’m laying out a few things participants can expect—including the things I’m not willing to facilitate and how I intend to respond to conflict. I don’t anticipate any problems and these are the exact same expectations as other spaces I’ve hosted with zero issue—I just think it’s important to be clear and upfront!
- This is an anarchist space, created out of a deep belief that advancements in healing knowledge and techniques come from horizontal collaboration and freely-shared information. You don’t have to ascribe to any particular ideology to attend, but it’s important to me that people understand where I’m coming from and what the intention is.
- Open Study Night exists in part to help break down the financial barriers that box impoverished people out of holistic health. If you work as a practitioner, don’t treat Open Study Night purely as an opportunity to grow your business, and please don’t respond to asks for help by advertising paid workshops or services. You’re more than welcome to plug your offerings in the announcements, and it’s fine to talk about your practice generally.
- Transmisogyny and gender essentialism will not be tolerated in any form. These issues run rampant and largely unchecked in alternative health spaces and I am not willing to enable the torrents of microaggressions that exclude transfeminine and AMAB nonbinary people. Dogwhistles will be addressed and if behaviors aren’t changed, I will ban people from the meetings and email list.
If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out via email (mildewamyx(at)protonmail(dot)com) or IG messanger (@herbalist_at_large).
Can’t wait to see you there!