Evolve Festival - Transform with love, Evolve with purpose
🌱 Evolve Festival 2026 🌱
🌟 Date: 6th March - 9th March, 2026
📍 Location: Gilwell Park, Gembrook (around 1 hour from Melbourne)
🎫 Tickets:
https://www.trybooking.com/DHISF
🌍 What is Evolve?
Evolve is a festival and a social movement, bringing people together to share knowledge, wisdom, and community to support culture change for a better world.
It is both a response to the global metacrisis, and an invitation to co-create the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
Join us for a lived experience of deeper connection: to yourself, to others, and to the land. Together, we’ll plant the seeds for a global network of interconnected communities and celebrate the beauty of life, humanity, and nature.
💡 Our Vision
✨ Share knowledge and wisdom for positive change.
✨ Explore how to live in greater harmony with the earth and each other.
✨ Celebrate the joy of community, creativity, and collaboration.
☀️🌳💕 Our Values 💕🌳☀️
(See below for full descriptions of these values ⬇️)
1. Learning, Growing and Evolving Together
2. Ecological Wellbeing and Interconnectedness
3. Belonging and Meaningful Contribution
4. Celebration, Creativity and Play
5. Synthesis and Collective Sensemaking
6. Collective Governance and Decision Making
7. Agency and Action
🌟 What to Expect
✔ Radical co-creation and self-reliance—come as a participant, leave as a contributor.
✔ Facilities include drinking water, toilets, and showers.
✔ Stunning natural surroundings with opportunities for swimming, forest walks, and grounding in nature.
✔ A fire circle for storytelling, connection, and reflection.
✔ Workshop spaces, community kitchens, and a cosy lounge area.
✔ A like-minded community dedicated to creating positive change.
💬 Workshops & Experiences
At Evolve, anyone can offer a workshop in an area aligned with the vision and values of the festival and the Evolve movement. We’ll also be inviting some well-respected facilitators in these disciplines and will announce more as we can.
Potential topics include:
🌿 Permaculture
🌍 Deep Ecology
🥰 Personal Development
🔆 Community Development
💞 Conflict resolution
👫🏼 Interpersonal Skills
🌀 De-centralised Governance
👥 Collective sensemaking and Synthesis
🎭 Authentic Relating
🕺 Contact Improvisation
🎶 Ecstatic Dance
🌱 Rewilding
🧘 Yoga & Meditation
🌊 Qigong
Want to run a workshop or share your wisdom? We’d love to hear from you!
🎶 Entertainment
🎧 Dance the night away with DJs on Saturday night (music ends at midnight).
🎤 On Sunday, enjoy an open mic night where the community takes the stage.
⛺ Accommodation
Camping only—bring your tent and enjoy sleeping under the stars. Van and car camping also welcome! Please let us know if you want to bring a caravan as space may be limited.
💰 Cost
Adult tickets are $140 for 3 nights, and kids $85 (under fives free). Part of your contribution is also a minimum of 2 hours of your time to help things to run smoothly. Please contact us if you have financial hardship but would really like to come. NTAFLOF (no-one turned away for lack of funds).
💡 Get Involved
What would you like to offer? Is there a workshop you’d like to run? Who would you like to see, speak, teach, or perform at Evolve? Do you have some other offering you can contribute? Let us know!
🌟 Not-for-Profit
Evolve is a community-driven, not-for-profit event. Your participation directly supports the creation of this and future gatherings.
🌳 Join Us
This is more than a festival—it’s an opportunity to be part of something bigger. Come to connect, contribute, and co-create the future we all dream of.
👉 Tickets here:
https://www.trybooking.com/DHISF
✨ Let’s evolve together. See you there!
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◯☀️🌳💕 Evolve 💕☀️🌳◯
Festival & Social Movement
☀️🌳 What is Evolve? 🌳☀️
Evolve is a living, learning community — a festival, a movement, and cultural organism dedicated to growing the inner and outer capacities needed for a more beautiful world. Rooted in shared values and guided by collective purpose, we come together to learn, heal, create, and take meaningful action in response to the challenges and possibilities of our time.
We believe that cultural transformation happens through relationships — with each other, with place, and with the wider web of life. Through shared inquiry, creative experimentation, quality sensemaking, and courageous collaboration, we cultivate cultures that are regenerative, inclusive, and alive. Evolve is not just something we attend, it’s something we co-create: a space to grow, contribute, and evolve together.
☀️🌳 Evolve’s Purpose Statement 🌳☀️
Our purpose is to learn, grow, and evolve together in community, generating the culture change needed to avert crisis and usher in a more beautiful world.
☀️🌳💕 Evolve's CORE VALUES and GUIDING PRINCIPLES 💕☀️🌳
1. Learning, Growing and Evolving Together.
We believe in the power of adaptive, collaborative cultures that are committed to learning how to transform and evolve collectively.
We support each other’s development as individuals while cultivating an emerging cultural transformation that holds and guides us to become capable of meeting these times together.
Personal growth and healing deepen our capacity for collaboration and strengthen the effectiveness of our community action. Our shared purpose provides a powerful motivation to learn, grow, and evolve — both individually and collectively.
We actively share the knowledge, skills, and wisdom we have that help us to make a meaningful, positive difference in the world.
We understand learning to be a lifelong, relational process, and recognise the importance of collaborating across difference.
We embrace honest reflection, welcome feedback, make sense of life together and approach experiences with curiosity, humility, and a willingness to be transformed.
2. Ecological Wellbeing and Interconnectedness.
We recognise that we are nature — deeply interdependent with all living systems. This understanding guides us to act with humility, reverence, and responsibility toward the wellbeing of this Earth and all beings.
We listen to ecological wisdom. We attune to the intelligence of ecosystems, honouring local place, cyclical time, and the voices of the more-than-human world. This relational awareness informs our sense-making, design, and action.
We design for sustainability, regeneration and balance, and we implement effective feedback systems. Our choices are guided by a commitment to regeneration over extraction, harmony over dominance, and long-term thriving over short-term gains.
3. Belonging and Meaningful Contribution
We believe that everyone has inherent worth and a place in the whole, and we practise love, compassion, and non-violence with all beings.
We honour difference as a source of strength and strive to create spaces where all people feel seen, safe, and valued – accepted as they are, and free to express and explore.
We recognise that we all have different skills, passions and capacities. We support people to find and explore their part to play within Evolve that is personally meaningful and valued by the community.
We co-create cultures of safety, trust, and mutual respect that allow us to grow at our edges, and expand into our wider creative potentials. We offer opportunities for authentic connection and shared experience that strengthen our sense of belonging and deepen our collective capacity.
4. Celebration, Creativity and Play
As we turn to face the challenges of our time, it is more vital than ever to celebrate life and cultivate joy, gratitude, and an appreciation of beauty. These practices sustain us, deepen our resilience, and help us embody the wonder and appreciation of this precious life.
Creativity sparks innovation, strengthens our lifeforce, nourishes resilience, and brings new possibilities into being. We invite exploration and experimentation to discover the connections and potentials that will help reveal the path forward.
Play builds trust and collaboration, accelerates learning, stimulates creativity and opens space for emergence. We harness the power of play to develop our capacity for openness, curiosity, and joyful creativity.
5. Synthesis and Collective Sensemaking
We commit to seeking truth together — not as a fixed destination, but as an ongoing, shared process of dialogue, exploring diverse views, and integrating perspectives. This collective sensemaking helps us better understand what is unfolding in the world, including the root causes of disharmony, and how to respond with creativity, integrity, and care.
We strive to understand the individual and cultural challenges to good sensemaking. We create spaces and systems that support generative dialogue, mutual understanding and conflict resolution. We practise humility and self-reflection, aiming to listen deeply, reflect honestly, and meet conflict in ways that build trust rather than erode it.
We honour the dance of opposites, seeking integration over competition. We synthesise diverse perspectives into deeper, shared understanding — recognising that it is through integration, not necessarily agreement, that collective intelligence emerges.
We hold complexity with openness and curiosity, allowing something wiser to emerge through the tension of paradox.
We take time to reflect before acting, considering the broader context and long-term consequences. This practice supports us to act with greater clarity and coherence, and align our insight with action in service of transformation.
6. Collective Governance and Decision Making.
We seek to understand and implement governance and decision-making systems that best serve Evolve’s mission and are guided by its core values. Our structures are designed to be responsive, adaptive, and in service to the collective good.
We aim for a fair and equitable distribution of power and agency within the Evolve organism — minimising centralisation wherever possible. We recognise that inclusion leads to greater trust, wisdom, and accountability.
We prioritise transparency, active feedback loops, and clear checks on power. We recognise that good governance depends on meaningful participation, honest reflection, and systems that support continuous learning and evolution.
7. Agency and Action
We understand that creating positive change in the world can be quiet, slow, and subtle, as well as bold, clear, and tangible. We seek to be part of transformation across this full spectrum, recognising that all forms of meaningful action matter.
We use our shared sensemaking and inspiration to generate ideas for real-world projects we believe can make a difference. Drawing on our collective skills, talents, and resources, we bring these ideas into action.
We take time to synthesise diverse perspectives, and consider the broader context and potential impacts of our actions, allowing shared understanding to foster wise, grounded action.
We reflect on and learn from our projects and experiments in an ongoing, iterative process. By integrating insights and experiences we continually refine how we participate in positive change, together.
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