Join Our Community of Sustainers & Donors

Join our community of sustainers and donors to help Heartward Sanctuary achieve its mission to sow seeds of a sane world where life and death are held sacred.

Short-term Goals:

A dedicated dance temple in our 100-year-old barn.
An animist church of embodiment, expression, earth-and-soul connection, and sacred play.
A burial ground orchard where death nourishes life.
A thriving center for healing, retreat, reconnection, and remembrance.
A place to sow seeds of a sane world where life and death are held sacred.

Thank You! to Our Sustainers

We are deeply grateful to the varied contributions and support to help realize this land-based project. Thank you to our Sustainers, donors, contributors, collaborators, volunteers and our beloved, generous, creative, soulful community who keep these projects and community services going! From rugged labor to creative collaboration to monetary investments, it takes a tremendous amount of energy to keep things flowing, going, mowing…

A special round of thanks to our Sustainers and Donors, plenty of whom contribute their time and energy as well.

Rachel Hadas, Shalom Gorewitz, Shane Eshu Vieira, Cathy Pascal, Susan Fowler, Rebecca & Robert Lawson, John Bainbridge, Jane Stolper, Scott Crews, Becky & Chip Crews, Coin Page, Carolyn McAllaster, Liane Salgado, JJ Hurst, Scott Campbell, Jim & Lauren Jubilerer, Tom Howlett, Natalie Shaw, Bonnie MacDougall, Jack Hebrank, Kathleen & Jack Hunter, Gary Phillips, Dan & Maria Salgado, Verena Socolar, Paula Childers, Bob Proctor, Anthony Gagnon, Lee-Hye & Sundra Coleman, Kelly Stack, KJ Song, Erin Murphy, Roger Hartsell, Toni Craige, Amrita Grace, Morgan Siem, Francesca Nicole, Gillian Corzine, Thia Elliot, Thomas Jones, David Need, EO Mendelsohn and Chris Holt.

Where Does the Money Go?

In 2021, we launched a fundraising campaign and raised $43,000.
The initial round of pledges helped us to realize Phase 1 of barn renovation which included a new, code-compliant stairwell, a massive cleaning and removal project, floor and foundation repair, new stalls for compost toilets, roof repairs, a few window openings, a finished dance floor, legal work, a lot of labor, and a new sound system!

If you’re interested to read where the money raised last year was directed, here’s a spreadsheet with a breakdown and also what’s on the wish/to-do list for 2025 (hence the much larger financial goal). We have more detailed spreadsheets of monthly & yearly operating expenses, income, and such. You’re welcome to reach out if you have any questions or concerns.

What You Are Supporting

In May 2020, we landed here on 36 acres in Chatham County, NC.

Over the years, we’ve listened, watched, honored the cycles, planted fruit trees and medicine plants, learned about the land and ecosystem here, deepened our community bonds (even through a pandemic), tended cycles of nature and life together, buried our dead, grieved our losses, healed, and danced.

This project has been years in the dreaming and many moons in learning how to ground this sacred vision on earth, to make it a reality.

The essence of the vision is an animist temple space with a natural burial ground.

Think of it as an old-school church (ancient and earth-connected, minus the dogma, add better music) with a soul-family cemetery that values ecological stewardship, diversity, embodiment, consent, respectful relations with the wider web of life, healing, ancestral tending, future generations, and courageous dying.

NC native and Heartward Sanctuary Co-Founder Julia Hartsell has spent over two decades building communities around movement, dance, ritual, and healing in the Piedmont. While she remains passionate about dance as a potent medicine, ritual technology, and community-building practice, she’s been dreaming for a decade to tend space for community connected to the natural world, with a vision of healing our relationship with death. Locally, she’s been a strong voice in befriending death, planning ahead, becoming empowered and reclaiming death in community based care.

Heartward Sanctuary’s green cemetery is already blessed with persimmons, reishi, a monarch-favored milkweed meadow, and forests. There are currently three grave-gardens. There are walking trails and collective shrines, too. The vision is to plant fruit trees atop graves in some of the open meadow space and introduce other native, medicinal plants while preserving what’s already thriving (like bioluminescent firefly larvae!)

But Heartward Sanctuary isn’t only focused on death. Death is but one passage in the wheel of life. Expect to see youth and adults alike gathering for dancing, gardening, star-gazing, learning, and seasonal celebrations that honor the rich diversity of life here at the Sanctuary. There’s equal intention to support reconnection, build culture, remember purpose, create meaning, and fuel the courage to live.

Become a Sustainer

If you value Heartward Sanctuary’s work, consider becoming a Sustainer.

Sustainers make recurring monthly, quarterly or yearly donations to support services, programs and facilities. You can become a Sustainer via our Givebutter Fundraiser by pledging as little as $5/month. Sustainers attend our Sunday dances and seasonal services for free/by donation. Sustainers also get the first opportunity to register for events and receive special invitations to occasional, more intimate gatherings.

Your collaboration, in life and death, helps bring this multidimensional and multi-generational vision into reality. Your contributions help the organization with immediate development and infrastructure goals while supporting the long-term intent for this land and assets to be held by the organization beyond our lifetimes.