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Building Community Resilience, Sept. 26-29 |
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Building Community Resilience
September 26 - 29, 2008
Fair Winds Farm, Brattleboro, VT
Unprecedented shifts are taking place in our economic, social, cultural and ecological systems.
Together we will explore a regenerative eco-social response to the converging challenges of the coming years.
This three-day course provides practical skills and resources through storytelling, hands-on workshops, community networking and group experiential exercises.
You are invited to be part of a local movement to create a highly resilient, adaptive, thriving community!
Saturday Local Skills Fest
(included in 3-Day Registration)
Workshops On:
Intoduction to Permaculture/Natural Systems Design
Indigenous Mentoring Strategies for the Facilitation of Permaculture
Water Strategies
Greywater
Seed Saving
Using Charcoal for Soil Renewal
Time Bank
Housing, Energy and Community
Forest Gardening and Agroforestry
Slow/Local/In-Season Food Preserving
Retraining Ourselves in Low Technology:Repairing and Sharpening Hand Tools
Peacemaking
Coppice, Wildcrafting and Cordage
Strategies for Easy Backyard Chicken Coops
Tracking for Children
Children's Performance
Local Music and Dancing
Check back for updated scheduling and other information.
Saturday Optional Lunch and Dinner Menu:
Lunch:
Fresh organic sourdough bread with garlic-herb butter
Steamed Kale with carmelized onions and sheep feta
Hearty vegetable stew
Maple roasted Butternut squash
Dinner:
Pesto lasagne with eggplant and roasted tomatos
Roasted-garlic bread on fresh baguettes
Tossed green salad
Apple crisp with fresh maple cream
Registration Options:
Option 1: Weekend Course: September 26-29
Cost: $250 ($100 for children)
Includes three days of camping and home-cooked meals.
Option 2: Saturday Skills Fest: September 27
Cost: $45 ($25 for children) includes Local Vegetarian Lunch and or Dinner, with organic ingredients
Pre-register by September 18th to participate in our Local Vegetarian Luncheon or Dinner.
To register, contact
This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it
or 802-257-7916
Core Staff (and Presenters) Bios:
Mark Morey is a creative artist, visionary educator, cultural engineer, and consultant who designs regenerative holistic communities with timeless native principles. He founded three transformational organizations in the last 12 years: Deep Wilds, Vermont Wilderness School, and the Institute for Natural Learning, sparking a nature and community awareness movement in the Northeast impacting thousands of adults and children today. He has facilitated or co-facilitated wilderness survival and spiritual passages for teens and adults since 1997, including over 30 weeklong Art of Mentoring passages for adults, and 6 years of Sacred Fire rites of passage for boys. Mark feels inspired by the hero’s journey model and the oral history of his ancestors and native people around the world.
Charlie Laurel is a permaculture teacher with extensive experience in natural building and conventional construction. He lived in Arizona where his favorite projects involved working with Navajo communities making links between forest restoration and building traditional “hogan” homes and ceremonial structures. Charlie has mentored dozens of apprentices in the skills of natural building, greywater systems, passive and active solar applications, etc. in permaculture settings. Since moving to Vermont in 2006, Charlie has participated in nature awareness and cultural mentoring programs, while cultivating a vision for symbiosis between those programs and permaculture. He holds a M.A. in Sustainable Communities (MLS) from Northern Arizona University.
Jono Neiger has a diverse background in ecology, environmental research, conservation, restoration, land stewardship, and landscape design. A permaculture teacher and designer since 1996, he was the Land Steward and Permaculture Apprenticeship Program Director at Lost Valley Educational Center in Oregon for 5 yrs. Jono is a Conservation Biologist with 17 years experience, and currently owns Regenerative Design, a permaculture design and consultation firm in Leverett, Massachusetts. He earned a B.S. in Forest Biology from S.U.N.Y. College of Environmental Science and Forestry in 1989 and a M.A. in Landscape Design and Land-Use Planning from the Conway School of Landscape Design in 2003.
Connor Stedman brings a diverse background in beyond-organic small farming, permaculture design, and nature-based mentoring to the facilitation team of Building Community Resilience. Connor has been a student, apprentice, and instructor with nature awareness organizations in Washington, Maine, Vermont, and California. He has been studying and practicing permaculture and forest gardening since 2006. Currently Connor is in the final year of a B.Sc. in Integrative EcoSocial Design with Gaia University International, and works at a medicinal herb farm in Conway, MA. He is passionate about agroforestry, knowledge of place, and growing networks of community.
Krista Oarcea graduated from the Waldorf Institute at Sunbridge College in 1993. In 1993-1994 she lived in Romania where she researched horticultural practices and indigenous food strategies of the seasonal based local agriculture. This experience inspired her to adapt and develop these practices in the Northeast. Krista founded and has taught for ten years the Morning Garden Home Nursery Kindergarten where she guides children to discover the wonders of the earth and attune to the natural cycles of the year. She has lead nature awareness programs for children at Vermont's Art of Mentoring and Red Fox Friends in NY. She is an herbalist, wild-crafter, avid seed saver, and plant breeder who mentors on cultivating land stewardship with children. She is a member of the Rondout Valley Growers Association, supplying food to several families in her community. She has co-developed an intentional neighborhood where she lives with her family in the Hudson Valley.
Kevin MacGregor A personal experience of traumatic brain injury
and attempts at helping others with brain injury has lead Kevin to the
patterns found in Nature. These patterns have proven useful to Kevin
and he strives to share those experiences in Nature with Children.
Kevin's work with the International Clubhouse Movement, Permaculture
design, and the Art of Mentoring have solidified his values of Unity
and Standing Together. Through storytelling and the building of new
relationships, Kevin strives to share his experience with others and to
live his vision of building strong naturalist communities.
Dyami Nason-Regan
David Yarrow, dowser, teacher, writer and Earth Advocate, grew up in Syracuse, New York. He co-founded Wellspring: Syracuse Center for Self Healing and the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York. David tested and taught using powdered rocks to renew the topsoil, and thus all of Nature. In 1991, he began to teach Indigenous Permaculture, but was electrocuted and shattered his spine while in Wisconsin to research an article on the hazards of power lines. David's survival and recovery is a gift of God and angels. Fire in the Water, David's first new writing since his catastrophic injuries, is a message of hope and a plan of action. David currently lives at Turtle EyeLand Sanctuary in the Hudson Valley, where he dabbles in gardening, explores ancient forests of eastern New York, and develops a business to distribute trace element soil amendments.
Janet Bailey, Fair Winds Farm, Brattleboro, VT
Ken Green is co-founder of the Hudson Valley Seed Library. The organization locates and preserves Northeast heirlooms, makes them available to gardeners through a library lending program and seed catalog, and teaches people how to save seeds in their own gardens. "Seeds are living histories," says Greene. "The best way to keep their cultural and genetic legacies alive for future generations is to get the seeds into the dirty hands of caring gardeners." Online and print catalogs will be available starting in December 2008 at www.seedlibrary.org.
Dalia Shevin : Dalia Shevin is a local freelance cook, and a baker and pastry chef at Amy's Bakery in Brattleboro. She farms and gardens locally, then for fun goes home and cooks for dear friends. Independently educated by too many wonderful teachers to list here, she has been cooking professionally and recreationally for the past thirteen years. She is concerned and intrigued by issues of localism and food security, and looking to learn more. She is honored to be joined by cooking partner Alia Clary, an extraordinary farmer and chef.
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Reclaiming Our Elders: The Foundation of Cultural Education |
Click here to register for the CNAP elder weekend
Why reclaim our elders?
During a nature-based mentoring program held many years ago, I met a native man, Paul Raphael. He was impressed with our description of how to live in indigenous culture, close to the earth. But, he said, it's not going to work - there are no elders here. "What do you mean" I responded. "What elders, where would we find elders?" I thought of elders as a relic of the past, picturing in my mind the likes of Sitting Bull - nothing I had access to. Paul then began telling stories of his quest of searching out elders for himself, and finding the old-time teachings from different people. And so I started to realize that throughout history, all over the world, the set of complex relationships of a community has been facilitated by the oldest people in that community, not books, not TV, not the current experiment of modern education. What has gotten us here today as modern human beings is the wisdom cultivated by the elders of each individual lineage and community in our past.
Listen to Mark's experience seeking elders: - Finding Elders - Elder Implies Two
In this time of a lot of changes and new ideas being introduced very rapidly to our children, who is our link to the timelessness of values of our community? That rightful place is in the chair of the elder. So the question is, how do we reclaim that? Three approaches come to mind right away. I have some experiences with seeking elders myself. How do I approach someone who's older but doesn't experience themselves as an elder?
Listen to becoming elders: - Become elders ourselves
If we look to indigenous cultures for the map of how they predictably created older people called Elders, who cultivated wisdom and could guide and direct their entire culture, when did they begin? When they were 70? 60? 50? 30? And when they were 20 and when they were 10, who were they looking to the whole time to get their information and lessons from? And it dawned on me that they were practicing their whole life to become an elder. So I start now. I begin today.
What does it mean to practice to become an elder? One of those qualities is the willingness to self-examine, to begin looking at the lessons of my lifetime, not as wounds to be regretful of, but as opportunities for teachings. So, as Paul has taught me, What's happening, What is this teaching me, and How can this help me help others? This one practice is pivotal to becoming an elder.
The second one is to begin to see what's happening from another viewpoint besides the physical mind - looking at the world from a spiritual mind. When I'm listening to this young person's story I'm discerning what's the teaching here, what's going on for them?
Listening is a profoundly intimate experience in surrendering the thoughts and judgments that are going on the whole time as the listener, and continuing to put myself back in a place of curiosity and inquisitiveness. An hour might have gone by, and I'll have said nothing. Deep listening. And then something I've picked up from elders is surrendering the need to answer when a question arises, and saying “Well, let me think about that” I don't need to answer that right away to get the right answer. So, perhaps surrendering looking good might be another way of saying that.
Listen to facilitating youth: - Facilitate youth becoming elders
Facilitating content
Current Developments
Reclaiming Our Elders: The Foundations of Cultural Education
February 1, 2 and 3, 2008
Guest Instructor Paul Raphael
 Paul and Mark have worked together for 7 years teaching the Art of Mentoring, sharing back and forth the best approaches to mentoring the next generation. Paul has made significant contributions to the reawakening of elder conciousness in our nature and community awareness programming as well as mentoring us about how to recognize and work through issues of grief and broadening our understanding of the Eight Shields Mentoring Model Paul, having grown up with elders, has a living memory of what it means to be one. At this stage of his life is able to storytell and teach on the practices and qualities of becoming an elder.
Elder Resources
Articles
Eric Utne and career coach Richard Leider on mentoring, wisdom, and why boomers can still save the world
—By David Schimke, Utne Reader
Utne Reader September / October 2007 Issue
Books
The Elder Within
Elder
by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
Project History
Project History content
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International Relationships in the Nature Awareness movement |
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September of '05 launched a European Art of Mentoring with 15 wilderness schools from four countries participating. The entire event was in another language and everything needed to be translated, including the Acorn staff meetings. Attended by Jon Young, Paul Raphael and Mark Morey, the event was a huge success in creating unity amongst the neighboring wilderness programs and created an instant network of collaboration in the months that followed. More programs in Europe will be scheduled in the future, including possible youth exchanges with Germany and Austria.
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"The event was a
huge success in
creating unity amongst the neighboring
wilderness programs and created an instant
network of collaboration in
the months that followed."
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National Relationships in the Art of Mentoring movement |
National Relationships in the Art of Mentoring movement
This year I will be traveling to CA in September to North an AOM at
Jon Youngs RDNA program. This will be an exciting launch of much
closer ties between the Art of Mentoring movement and the
Permaculture movement. Both of these operate from native awareness
and ecological principles.
As well there will be an AOM in Idaho this spring at Twin Eagles
Wilderness School. Tim and Jeannine, founders of Twin Eagles are
former VWS apprentices, spending 5 years of their training at VWS.
Launching an AOM at a new location in the country at a new wilderness
school will be an unprecedented and exciting event. It speaks well
for the future.
National curriculum meetings are being attended via conference calls
to discuss impact on american environmental movement. Participating
schools form a national round table: Wilderness Awareness School, Jon
Young's RDNA, Wilderness Youth Project, White Pine Programs and the
Institute for Natural Learning, representing the northeast wilderness
network.
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"Last spring....
was a tremendous breakthrough
in our ability to coordinate
our collective power of unity."
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