An energy systems course explores how energy flows through living, social, and economic systems, and how these flows shape resilience, equity, and long-term sustainability.

No. This course is accessible and experiential, combining systems science with practical tools and real-world applications.

Entirely online with live sessions, group discussions, and self-paced assignments. You’ll have access to experienced facilitators, a supportive learning community, and rich resource materials.

Yes. The course is designed for people working in community development, sustainability, education, social innovation, and regenerative design.

Participants have life-long access to the course material. Though the course has a defined length, participants can go back to the material any time after the course completion.

As Albert Einstein once said, “Everything is energy, that's all there is to it.” It is the current and currency of life. It is the largely invisible, immaterial substance that propagates life and animates our bodies with movement. J. Krisnamurti said further - “Energy is thinking, feeling; it is interest, enthusiasm, greed, passion, lust, ambition, hate. Painting pictures, inventing machines, building bridges, making roads, cultivating the fields, playing games, writing poems, singing, dancing, going to the temple, worshipping - these are all expressions of energy.” From an energy systems perspective, energy refers to the crucial “flows” that are important to the long-term vitality of the system in question, whether a person, a community, an ecosystem, an economy.

Life is a pattern of energies. We might think of these patterns as systems of different kinds. Systems have a sort of integrity, perhaps defined by a border or boundary that we know is largely fictional or at least fluid. Energy systems focus our attention on the movement of resources, tangible and intangible, that maintain the health and renewing capacity of the system in question. Dr. Sally Goerner writes, “we live in a matrix of forces and flows that fuel activity, drive change, and shape behavior in living, non-living, and supra-living systems such as ecosystems and economies.”

You are energy. You are an energy system. You are made up of smaller energy systems (circulatory, respiratory) and are a part of larger energy systems (family, neighborhood, organization, society). These systems are not fixed or static. They are diverse and dynamic. Energy systems keep you alive and you in turn are charged with supporting the health of those systems, small and large.

Seeing and understanding energy flows so that we can engage with them in positive ways is core to the role of being respectful, responsible and effective human beings. As a very skilled regenerative builder and agriculturist once said to me, “The most important question to ask is ‘What am I not seeing?’ Too many still do not see or consider the importance of the flows that bring health and vitality to Life. As a result, we see the proliferation of intersecting “crises” around the world. The good news is that there are ways we can learn to better attend to energetic flows and exchanges of all kinds, at and across different scales, to align with Life’s inherent wisdom and trajectory towards wholeness.