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​Inspired by a Relational Worldview 

Flagstaff College's Innovative Adventure in
Education for Justice, Sustainability, and Beauty
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Flagstaff College is a new, innovative micro-college in the mountain town of Flagstaff, Arizona. 

They admit between 12-20 students each year, providing generous scholarship support to those in need.

Their classes are small because they believe that when it comes to education, small is better.   Much better.

Their mission is to prepare students to be leaders in the democratic project of building sustainable, just, and beautiful communities and in creating ecological civilizations.  
'This major spans the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. In order to gain a richer, more complex and accurate understanding of life, we study these subjects as they apply to issues that cut across disciplines—issues like systems change, strategies for regeneration, and reinventing communities.  Our focus at Flagstaff College is on solutions and learning how to put ideas into practice. Intellectual knowledge shares space with practical knowledge. Learning and practicing community-making skills like community mapping, mobile documentary film making, grant writing, permaculture, and fundraising, are a part of the curriculum.'
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​What is a Relational Worldview?

The Flagstaff College Vision
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Flagstaff College is inspired by a deeply ecological way of thinking. We call it a relational worldview and its primary principles are:
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  • Everything is interconnected.
  • Everything has value.
  • There is a profound relationship between beauty, creativity, and life.
  • Nature is not lifeless, insentient matter and reality is not fundamentally mechanistic.
  • Reality is emergent, evolutionary, creative, and social.
  • We live in a world of feeling beings in responsive relation to each other.
  • All beings aim to enjoy the vividness of life.


some sources for a relational worldview
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"Flagstaff College is informed by the process philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), Buddhism, and Indigenous Americans. 

Writing in the early part of the 20th Century, Whitehead was inspired by quantum physics, evolutionary biology, and modern psychology to rethink how we understand the world.  He called his new metaphysics “the philosophy of organism.” Central to his thinking is the idea that all things are interrelated and that all things have inherent value.  Today this philosophy is more commonly known as process philosophy or process-relational philosophy.  
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The Buddhist doctrine of dependent co-arising—the idea that all things participate in the creation of each moment—is remarkably similar to Whitehead’s philosophy of organism, as are many of the 14 precepts of engaged Buddhism as developed by the Buddhist teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh.

Native American traditions have long held that all things have value for themselves, that all of life is related, and that we are to live in harmony with the earth and our many relations. 
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Relationality provides the philosophical foundation for ecological thinking and the study of relational worldviews is an important part of the Flagstaff College curriculum."


Small is Beautiful: A Word from David Orr

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David Orr, leader in sustainability and ecological literacy
“Small is not just beautiful, it is necessary to the sense of one's self, one's purpose, one's situation in a confusing world. "Tiny Colleges" are to learning what immersion is to the study of language: intense, direct, and personal. In this instance, two seasoned educators with broad experience in U.S. higher education propose to form such a place to enable a selected few students to discover their unique path in life, learn the kind of ideas that energize a lifetime of good work, and anchor themselves to enduring values. This is the kind of education that draws students forth into their own special greatness and it cannot be mass-produced.” (David Orr)
Open Horizons