CoALA and the Hampina Path

CoALA (Cooperative Authentic Learning Association) is the Eldest Sister within the Office of the 3 Sisters — a community learning pathway to Indigenous higher education that replaces colonial college structures with relationship, cyclical practice, and Ayni in place of tuition. The Hampina stage is CoALA's Associates-level entry point: a time of first roots, organized through 6-day Medicine Wheel Spiritual Container credits, and held by circles of knowledge stewards and community sponsors.

About CoALA

CoALA is grounded in a core principle: communities have the sovereignty to cultivate the higher learning of their own people. It offers an alternative to traditional colonial college systems by organizing education through:

community relationship rather than institutional separation
cyclical development rather than semesters and standardized progression
Ayni (sacred reciprocity) rather than tuition debt

Education within CoALA is not a private commodity purchased by the individual. It is a community-supported process through which a learner develops gifts, knowledge, and forms of service to eventually offer back in meaningful ways.

CoALA exists as one of three polycropped organizations alongside HWSY — Hampina Wasi Sacha Yachay and the Center for Decolonial Reparatory Research (CDRR). Each learner's path is held within this wider living ecosystem.

The Full Degree Pathway

CoALA recognizes four degree stages, each representing not only an academic level but another layer of maturity, stewardship, and responsibility:

Stage	Degree Equivalency	Focus
Hampina	Associates	Foundation, grounding, first roots
Wasi	Bachelors	Holding and stewarding one's own habitat space
Sacha	Masters	Tending the wider ecosystem
Yachay	PhD	Knowledge with depth to influence broader fields and communities

See Wasi, Sacha, and the Kichwa Ecological Role Schema for the Kichwa ecological meanings of Wasi, Sacha, and Yachay as they inform these degree stages.

Hampina — The Associates Level

What Hampina Is

Hampina is the first major stage of the CoALA degree pathway. It is the stage at which a community learner begins developing real proficiency in a gift, medicine, practice, or form of contribution. Hampina is best understood as a stage of first roots — introductory, serious, and formative.

At this stage the learner is not expected to have everything clarified at the outset. Hampina is a time to begin:

developing personal grounding
clarifying values and direction
strengthening the ability to learn
discovering how to build relationship and community
identifying forms of expression and contribution that feel alive
practicing responsibility in the use of knowledge, tools, and creativity
exploring what kind of medicine or service may one day become theirs to offer

Learning Structure and Credit

Learning within CoALA is organized through 6-day Medicine Wheel Spiritual Container cycles. Each cycle is equivalent to one unit of college credit. Four 6-day cycles are embedded within one lunar cycle, creating a broader rhythm of learning, reflection, and integration.

Credit structure for Hampina:

1 medicine wheel cycle = 1 unit of college credit
60 medicine wheel cycles = completion of Hampina
Hampina = Associates-level degree equivalency

These cycles are not intended to be rushed. They are intended to be lived.

The Seven Essential Curriculum Questions

Throughout Hampina, each community learner develops living responses to CoALA's seven essential curriculum questions. These questions are not answered once and for all — they are revisited through time, practice, reflection, and maturity.

How do I maintain a connection with the highest self?
How do I establish and build community?
How do I express myself fully and truthfully?
How do I create and innovate with technology?
How do I teach and how do I learn?
How do I transform ancestral institutions?
How do I design with the Earth in mind every step of the way?

At the Hampina level these questions are engaged in a foundational way. The learner is not expected to resolve them fully, but to begin forming real and lived relationships with them.

Areas of emphasis in Hampina may include: spiritual and personal grounding; community-building and relational trust; voice, creativity, and self-expression; learning how to learn; introductory experiences of teaching and sharing; thoughtful engagement with technology; beginning awareness of institutional and Earth-based responsibility.

The Role of the Community Learner

A person in Hampina is a community learner. Their education is not understood as a purely private achievement disconnected from others. Learning is held by community, shaped through relationship, and expected to mature into something that can eventually serve life beyond the self.

The community learner is invited to:

commit to their own growth and move steadily through medicine wheel cycles
practice honesty, reflection, and accountability
remain open to guidance
begin identifying their gifts and direction
engage community with care and respect
understand learning as something received with and through others

Knowledge Stewards

Each community learner in Hampina is accompanied by a circle of knowledge stewards — mentors, guides, and subject matter experts selected to help the learner navigate their path. Knowledge stewards serve one-year terms.

Their role includes: offering mentorship, sharing specialized knowledge, listening and reflecting, asking clarifying questions, helping the learner stay connected to deeper purpose, supporting the identification of next steps, and witnessing the learner's growth over time. Knowledge stewards are not meant to dominate the learner's path; their role is to help tend it.

Community Sponsors

Each community learner is also supported by a circle of community sponsors who make a one-year commitment to help sustain the learner materially during the educational journey. Sponsors are not simply donors — they are participants in a community-supported learning process, taking part in a living act of educational stewardship that demonstrates education can be upheld by community relationship, not only by institutions.

Ayni in Place of Tuition

In CoALA, community learners do not pay tuition in the conventional sense. Instead, they participate in Ayni — sacred reciprocity — with CoALA.

Forms Ayni may take include: supporting community projects, offering service, labor, or creativity, helping tend the CoALA learning field, sharing skills as they develop, becoming a future mentor to incoming community learners, or contributing in other ways that are sincere and alive.

Ayni is not a fee, nor is it payment by another name. It is a living relationship of reciprocity that helps sustain the educational pathway and carry it forward for those who come after. Because CoALA is one of the Three Sisters, this reciprocity also strengthens the wider ecosystem by association; the learner's direct reciprocal relationship, however, is with CoALA itself.

Degree Recognition, Pathway Narrative, and Witnesses

At the completion of Hampina, the community learner receives an Associates-level degree equivalency through CoALA. This equivalency can be used in practical settings — resumes, biographies, applications, and other professional contexts.

Because each learner's educational journey is customized, the learner also helps determine the name of the degree in a way that reflects the actual shape of their pathway.

Pathway Narrative

Along with the degree itself, each learner completes a short Pathway Narrative — a reflective, biographical, and relational account of the learner's journey, written in a form more consistent with storytelling and meaning-making practices common within Indigenous research methods.

Community and Sacred Witnesses

The Pathway Narrative includes:

A section acknowledging the community support that helped shape the learner's path
A dedicated page of acknowledgement to sacred witnesses — honoring the ancestors, spiritual guides, forces of nature, sacred presences, and other more-than-human relationships the learner recognizes as having accompanied their path

Intended Outcomes of Hampina

By the end of Hampina, the learner may not know everything. However, they should be more grounded, more capable, more connected, and more prepared to carry responsibility than when they began. Hampina is designed to help the learner begin discovering:

who they are becoming
what gifts they carry
how they relate to community
what kind of contribution is emerging through them
how to learn in a disciplined and life-giving way
how to receive support and grow into reciprocity
how their education can become part of a larger cycle of benefit

Ayni — the reciprocity principle organizing CoALA in place of tuition
Medicine Wheel Spiritual Container — the 6-day cycle that is the basic unit of CoALA credit
Wasi, Sacha, and the Kichwa Ecological Role Schema — Kichwa ecological meanings of the degree stage names
HWSY — Hampina Wasi Sacha Yachay — the Middle Sister; a living sanctuary for Indigenous ways of knowing that shares the degree-stage naming schema
Center for Decolonial Reparatory Research (CDRR) — the Youngest Sister, co-composting within the Three Sisters ecosystem
Hampina Program Lead — the role responsible for holding HWSY programming and language-carrier relationships within the broader CoALA context