Topa Institute

Our Vision

Topa Institute envisions a thriving, peaceful planet filled with community, creativity, connection, and care.

We honor global traditions of perennial wisdom that create peace, healing, art, and learning.

At the same time, we challenge and dismantle appropriative practices that have stripped creators and communities of their agency.

Our Mission

Building on the creative visions that have unfolded over generations in the Ojai Valley, the Topa Institute renews the historic commitment to community building through programs in Holistic Education, Arts & Culture, and Land Cultivation & Sustainability on the Dragon Ridge Land Sanctuary.

Our work brings people together on the land to learn and hone practices of deep listening and relationship through Council practice. This practice also underlies our commitment to building creative communities, by inviting artists to come together on the land to seek connection with others and draw inspiration from the natural world and from the history of the place itself. Because of the history of displacement, subjugation, and genocide of Indigenous people on this land, we have a particular obligation to reckon with legacies of violence, marginalization, and oppression through the work we do.