About the BILD
A 501(c)(3) Field School for Living Design
The Biocultural Institute for Living Design (The BILD) is a nonprofit field school, creative institute, and living laboratory exploring how life grows possibility—and we can too. Rooted in evolutionary biology, biomimicry, biocultural knowledge, art, design, and the particular nature of place, BILD brings together people carrying meaningful work to learn, make, experiment, and develop new capacities together.
It is a living laboratory for growing possibility.
What we do
Learn from life.
For nearly four billion years, living systems have been adapting to constraints, developing new capacities, forming relationships, exchanging resources, experimenting, and becoming capable of things that weren't possible before.
BILD explores what those patterns can teach us about the things human beings are trying to bring to life.
[Living Design]
Build capacity.
We work with mission-aligned organizations and initiatives to develop the capacities their work requires—not only funding and plans, but relationships, knowledge flows, complementary capabilities, experimentation, learning, and adaptive capacity.
Our Living Design Capacity Builder can accompany aligned grant-funded initiatives from proposal through implementation.
[Capacity Building]
Invest in people.
BILD Fellowships support people carrying meaningful work and bring important capacities, perspectives, knowledge, and relationships into the larger BILD ecology.
Fellowships may stand alone or be funded as part of a Living Design Capacity Builder engagement.
[Fellowships]
Create the conditions.
BILD has its physical home on 86 acres adjoining Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.
It gives this ecology somewhere to take root—a place to think, learn, make, experiment, gather, and encounter people and possibilities we might never otherwise have found.
[The Place]
Or just come see what's growing.
Events, salons, field experiences, work weekends, gatherings, art, experiments and unexpected things.