The Starter Track is your first year with the Collective: 12 months, 12 traditional skills, sequenced so each one builds on the last. Finish it and you'll have a genuine working foundation in traditional food and home skills - not a folder of things you read about, but twelve things you can actually do.

Beginners. If you've been circling traditional food skills for a while — saving recipes you never make, feeling like everyone else got instructions you missed — this is built for you. No prior experience assumed, no special equipment, no homestead required.

You're welcome here, and probably more useful than you think.

Most people who arrive with experience are experienced in one or two things. You might have been baking sourdough for years and never rendered tallow, or have grown sprouts and have no idea where to start with fermentation. Twelve skills is a wide net, and very few people come in already holding all of them.

Where you already know the material, the community is where that knowledge goes to work. Answering someone's panicked question about their starter or telling them the thing that took you three failed batches to learn, is a real part of what makes the Discord good.

Written and designed to be used, not watched. The downloadable guides are made to sit open on your counter or hang on your fridge while your hands are busy. There's no video component right now.

Our founder, Madeline, creates and designs every guide, with the help of her dream team of contractors. It's all material created specifically for this program - not collected from around the internet, or repackaged from elsewhere. It's designed the way she wishes someone had explained these things to her when she was starting out.

Not necessarily. Everyone starts at month one and moves through the same twelve skills in the same order, but your calendar runs from your start date. Someone who joined in January is on month three in March; someone who joined in March is on month one. You'll always find people in the community who are exactly where you are, and plenty who are further along.

Not currently - the twelve are ordered deliberately, and the sequence is part of what makes it work for beginners. A choose-your-own path is something I'd like to build eventually.

Your next guide still unlocks the following month, but nothing disappears. Everything you've already unlocked stays yours permanently, so you can circle back whenever you're ready. Some months are busier than others - the program is built to be doable in a month for busy schedules but can be picked back up if needed.

Yes. Content accumulates as you go - by month six you have all six guides, not just the newest one. And because every guide is downloadable, you can keep your own copies as you receive them.

Yes - it's month to month, and you can cancel any time but we encourage the one year investment to truly build a strong foundation.

You keep every guide you've unlocked - those are yours permanently, and you'll still have anything you downloaded. You won't receive new skills going forward, and you'll lose access to the Discord member community and its resources. We will always welcome you back when you’re ready!

You've finished the Starter Track and you now have twelve skills and every guide you unlocked along the way, permanently.

Membership continues at $15/month after the Starter Track end unless you choose to cancel. What continues is the community. The Discord is the heart of the Collective, and members who stay keep asking questions, refining the skills they've picked up, and going deeper into the ones they loved most.

You also keep your place at our events and meetups. Twelve months in, you'll know which of these actually became yours - the bread, the ferments, the tallow, etc - and the community is where you keep going with them, including finding or starting local things like a ferment club near you.

We are building a more advanced Year 2 Track for people who want to go further in one direction. I'm deliberately not designing those in a vacuum: what gets built depends on what members tell me they want. This is meant to be community-led, and month thirteen is where your voice starts shaping what comes next.

Most activities take 15-30 minutes of active time. The magic happens while you sleep (literally, with fermentation). The skills are designed to be very doable for busy schedules.

We focus on minimal equipment. Most months require just basic kitchen tools. We are sure to give you a heads up when coming months expect more.