We hope you’ll join us for a free community skill share featuring a series of hands-on mini-workshops led by artists, educators, land stewards, and healing arts practitioners from across the EDC network. As part of our year-long exploration of Antidotes to Toxicity, this gathering invites us to imagine and practice alternatives to extractive models of expertise by creating space for co-constructing knowledge, honoring creativity, and practicing reciprocity while circulating skills freely within community.

Through a series of rotating workshop stations, participants will be introduced to new skills and practices while facilitators also rotate through the offerings, ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to both teach and learn. Designed to blur the boundaries between facilitator and participant, this event celebrates reciprocal exchange, collective wisdom, and the abundance of knowledge already present within our community.

Learn more about the mini-workshops below—we can’t wait to learn alongside you!

Date: Sunday, June 28th, 2026
Time: 10 am – 1 pm (to get the most out of this experience, we recommend you plan to attend the full event!)
Location: Blue Light Junction
209 McAllister Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21202

This is a FREE event, but space is limited. Please register to attend!

This event is part of the EDC’s year-long exploration of ‘Antidotes to Toxicity.’

Have a skill you’d like to share? We’d love to hear from you: collective@ecodesigncollective.org

Mini-workshop descriptions:

5 Phase Medicinal Tea Tasting & Blending Session with Alyssa Dennis
Taste works beyond simply making our food taste better. Taste is & has been a crucial evolutionary information highway. Did you know that no matter what medicinal plant you have at your fingertips that you can detect & begin to understand beneficial therapeutic qualities just by taste, touch & sensation? Flavor can inform you of an herb’s organ affinity, energetics & medicinal actions. Besides being important in terms of matching the right herb to the right person, learning the therapeutic profiles of flavor gives agency & autonomy within how we work with & understand herbal medicine. It is also integral to divesting in a one-size-fits-all modern healthcare paradigm.

Alyssa Dennis is a dedicated earth activist, spiritual ecologist, educator, interdisciplinary artist, clinical herbalist, and is the founder of Eclipta Herbal. Her work centers on reclaiming land-based knowledge systems of plant medicine as a path toward ecological & community regeneration, personal vitality, and holistic health. She completed her clinical herbalism training at the Arbor Vitae School of Traditional Herbalism in New York, where she now serves as a clinic mentor, and is the steward of a vibrant herbal sanctuary in Baltimore City—a living classroom and gathering ground for plant medicine education, earth skills workshops, creative collaboration and community healing.

Mending & Sewing: Skill-building and Q&A with Kimberly Field

Join a seasoned tailor for a hands-on introduction to sewing, mending, and clothing repair. Whether you’re learning the basics or refining existing skills, this workshop offers practical techniques for extending the life of your garments, reducing waste, and participating in a more circular economy. In a culture of disposability, mending can be a small but powerful antidote to toxicity—an act of care for our belongings and the Earth.

Kimberly Field learned how to sew as a child, watching her mother knit and crotche. She later learned pattern-making and tailoring while attending school for costume-making, ultimately working as a draper with theater groups all over the country and internationally. She now works to repurpose fabrics and clothing as a tailor. She supports circular economy activities as a mender at Station North Tool Library’s popular Fix-it-Fairs.

Outside-Inside-Out: A mini session with Michele Minnick
Outside-Inside-Out is a workshop series of ecosomatics practices in which we enter into relationship with the natural elements of our urban environment in order to discover and connect with our own vitality and inner wildness, and to attune our nervous systems to slower, more gentle rhythms. In this short workshop, taking place a week after Summer Solstice, we will slow down, connect with the environment and ourselves through direct sense perception, stillness, breath, and movement. We will invite resources to emerge that can support us as we move into the second half of the year, and seek a path of reciprocity with our more than human kin.

Michele Minnick (PhD, CMA, SMT/E) is a performance maker, somatic movement educator and therapist, and founder of the interdisciplinary arts-based initiative Vital Matters, with which she has been building networks and curating events related to climate and environmental justice, water rights, and community resilience since 2021. Michele’s artistic work includes directing and devising, solo performance work, and performative interventions in everyday life. She is a senior teacher of The Performance Workshop and Rasaboxes, and co-edited the book Inside the Performance Workshop: A Sourcebook for Rasaboxes and Other Exercises. She integrates practices and principles from this work as a teaching artist with Arts for Learning Maryland, as a director and facilitator, and with individual clients. Michele has taught extensively Towson University, at various institutions in Brazil, and at New York University, where she completed her dissertation investigating relationships between trauma, performance, and somatic practice.

Slow Seeing and Surprise: A writing makeshop with Lia Purpura
In this session, we’ll be looking at how to practice “slow seeing” and also how to set yourself up for surprise, for all you didn’t know you knew.

Lia Purpura is an award-winning Baltimore-based poet and essayist. Lia’s collection of essays On Looking was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her most recent books are It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (poems) and All the Fierce Tethers  (essays), and a new collection of poems, Gather, is coming out in 2028. A Guggenheim Fellow, Purpura served as Writer in Residence at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Awakening Attention: Nature Journaling as an Antidote to Toxicity with Lindi Shepard
In a culture that rewards speed, distraction, and extraction, paying attention can be a radical act. The practice of nature journaling is one method to disrupt the regular current of daily life and attune with the natural rhythms around us. Nature journaling is a practice that combines scientific inquiry, drawing, writing, and mindfulness to connect with the wonders of the natural world. Nature journaling invites us to slow down, closely observing elements that often go unnoticed in our surroundings. Tapping into curiosity and deep, sustained attention, participants will gaze with “new eyes” at the unseen natural wonders hidden within our urban ecosystem. Through community reflection and sharing, we will build upon the ideas of one another to co-create a deeper sense of place. Whether you are brand new to the practice of nature journaling or a long-time practitioner, every participant will find new lenses to frame their experience, expand their practices, and reflect on the wonders all around us.

Lindi Shepard is the Teaching Fellowship Director at Words in the Wild, an organization dedicated to improving early literacy through joyful, nature-based experiences. She is a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins, where she studies how human–nature encounters shape learning, identity, and stewardship. She supports community events around ecological care as a graduate fellow at the Ecological Design Collective and researches how people learn in, with, and about the natural world at the Social Psychology in Education and the Environment (SPiEE) Lab. Drawing on her experience as a classroom teacher, she develops tools and professional learning to support educators in integrating nature-based approaches that foster connections to local ecosystems, engagement with environmental justice, and more resilient, thriving communities.