Our Vision

Back to Earth was founded by Eric Fenster and Ari Derfel during the summer of 2001. Our purpose is captured perfectly in our mission statement: We provide experiences that celebrate life and enhance our awareness of self, community, and the earth. The hope is that through deeper understanding people will begin to see that these three elements are all intimately connected and that the health of one depends entirely on the health of the others.

Our vision from the beginning has been to build the most ecologically advanced, energy efficient, consciously designed, sustainable "community center" in the Bay Area. Motivated entirely by a single, unifying principal - minimize our footprint on the Earth while maximizing our potential experience as people.

We plan to build this community center, with an organic restaurant at its heart, to provide people in the Bay Area with an exciting, progressive, inspiring place to gather. The center will offer a public arena for people to share in personal growth, education, and healing arts, and to foster awareness and cultivate community among people interested in working to improve our world.

The community center will be designed around two key elements - food and human interaction - and will take the form of four main components - an upscale organic restaurant, an affordable and unique organic café, shared community space for everything from healing arts to offices, and event space, used for gatherings such as speaking engagements, live music, weddings, etc.

The success of the center will depend on its ability to cultivate true community, and to attract people to the space for multiple reasons.

Traditionally, most community centers have been built around a specific and distinct group characteristic, such as religion, ethnicity, gender or youth and athletics

The goal of Back to Earth is to create a space where the distinct characteristic is the unifying theme that we are all people of one planet. Regardless of anything notable that makes us different from each other it is this fact that brings us together, and it is this fact that is more important today than in any moment of human history.

The world has magnificently changed in the last sixty years. It has become a place where people can communicate across physical space in seconds. Oceans, mountains, and continents are no longer barriers to developing relationships with people from far-away lands.

People can now communicate across socially constructed barriers as well. People of all ethnicities, nationalities and religions have the opportunity to ask questions, to learn from each other, and to choose a way of life.

For the first time in the history of our species, we truly are one group of people, and if we all want to experience a meaningful life on this planet, we have to learn how to share and care for this single place we call home.

Back to Earth exists to create experiences that bring this point to life.

If this vision speaks to you, please get in touch. It will take a community to make it all happen.

Back to Earth is a Certified Green Business
Click here to learn more about the Bay Area Green Business Program

Wondering if We Work in Your Area?
We regularly work in Berkeley, San Francisco, Marin, Palo Alto and the entire Bay Area. Call us today to book your event!