Youth Offerings
Supporting 18-25 yrs through nature-centered, peer supported, action learning and creative inquiry
“The world does not need more rootless symbolic analysts. It needs instead hundreds of thousands of young people equipped with the vision, moral stamina, and intellectual depth necessary to rebuild neighbourhoods, towns and communities around the planet. The kind of education presently available will not help them much. They will need to be students of their places and competent to become in Wes Jackon’s words ‘Native to their places”
In 2023 we began researching and prototyping an action learning offering to support young adults (18-25yrs)
We are witnessing growing numbers of young people who see difficult futures ahead: juggling an overwhelm of disinformation and divisiveness, accelerating economic challenges, growing eco and climate anxiety (70% of young people - Hickman and Marks 2021), poor mental health, lack of access and connection to nature
In spite of this context there are very few opportunities and spaces, to support young people to explore these challenges, build trust in themselves and each other, to connect with their true gifts and cultivate their resilience, courage and creative capacities to imagine and build different worlds that put peace, solidarity, compassion, kinship and connection between all humans and nature at the centre.
Many of these challenges young people face are about connection and relationship and the learning and support options for relational inquiry for this generation are extremely limited.
Our intention is to serve this gap, offering co-designed, guided peer-supported action learning programs with experienced guides, diverse leading edge faculty, learning partners and intergenerational mentoring support.
We have identified a growing group leaving education and in part-time work who are seeking alternative learning support, peer community, deep nature connection practice, land access and intergenerational connectivity to help them develop a diverse range of qualities and skills to navigate an uncertain future and find their unique role in the regeneration of nature and society.
We are ready to deliver Earth-centered, action learning programs co-designed by young people (18-25 yrs) in our region to support them to develop the resilience and capacities to imagine, create and act to regenerate the places around them.
We are seeking funding partners to support and journey with us to deliver two offers: a 6 month pilot program ‘Earth Citizens with academic partner eARTh Research Centre/Bath Spa University as well as a seasonal series of weekend gatherings, connection camps and nature based rites of passage.
Intergenerational by Design
Current offers
Earth Citizens - 6 month program online and on-land
Supporting young people to build their resilience and capacities for regenerating the world around them
The program using a co-design approach will support a cohort of young people to engage in a dynamic exploration of nature and human connection, personal resilience, creativity, imagination, community and place-based regeneration. Supported by a collective of educators and experts in creative practice, nature connection, regeneration and human resilience.
The program will have a strong creative invitation, cultivating ecological imagination practices and supporting young people to develop their own creative practice informed by relationship with nature in the places they call home. Each participant will be supported to manifest a place-based project during the 6 month process based on their own inquiry to the invitation of ‘Becoming Earth Citizens’.
Working with expert teachers they will explore a wide range of topics of their choice through the lens of local places including: ecological literacy, climate adaptation, multi-species and more than human perspectives, nature based rites of passage, nature and place regeneration, resilience, social and ecological justice and creative expression.
Intergenerational learning and mentoring will be weaved throughout and we will explore how peer supported, action learning practice combined with digital tools and land access could spread the growth of Earth citizenship in young people across the UK.
Weekend Connection Camps
Seasonal gatherings to support & nourish young people who are actively exploring their role in creating change in the world.
The gatherings involve nature connection practices, community building, peer-learning, creative practices and nature based rites of passage. Creating space for young people to process, explore their deeper questions, and express themselves freely.
These will take place on Ghostwood Down Nr Bath.
“The future depends much less on the images we project ahead than
on our capacity to repair relations and build relationships differently in the present”
Ongoing support and mentoring
Following the experiences all participants have access to our ongoing community of practice, including facilitated online check ins and practice sessions organised around the Wheel of the Year.
Find connection, creativity and community with the living world
We work to cultivate the following learning values and capacities:
Creativity in service of life
We focus on creative practices that help to stimulate change through:
Embodying new ways for people individually and together to tap into the full intelligence of the body, the senses, and experience to engage with the full complexity of life, human and more than human.
Imagining different futures in ways that can be vivid and emotionally engaging; where ecological imagination is a component in all actions
(c.f Creatures Framework)
Practice-driven change
We don’t believe we can think and talk our way into ecological futures without deeper personal and collective un/learning and evolution. The systems that govern our world are alive through us and in every given moment we practice a way of storying the world. So an ongoing personal commitment to practicing the futures we long for, supported by a community of practice, is a way of sowing seeds for regenerative and ecological cultures. Our commitment is to practice ways of relating and perceiving the world which reflect our interdependence with nature and each other.
Kinship with all life
Putting relationships at the centre of learning and building regenerative and ecological cultures. Expanding our sense of self from individualised atomised self to collective self, human and more-than-human, short-term and long-time, ancestral past and future, intergenerational by design. Starting from our individual contexts and our participation in shaping our places and communities, while tuning into and acting on our relationship to the global whole.
We are particularly interested in centering marginalised youth, neurodiverse youth and those with a desire to deepen their relationship with the natural world in the communities they live.
Learning Guides
Mark De’Lisser
Mark is a poet, youth mentor, space holder and creative. He has the privilege to work with organisations supporting young people who have experienced significant challenges and giving voice to young people experiencing racism. His work includes play therapy, mentoring, yoga programmes and creative writing workshops to support vulnerable children and young people.
Mark hopes his poetry can inspire stories of change, societally and personally, and that his words can help to nurture the seeds of reverence that are planted in all our hearts. Mark is a father of two children and ADHD.
Dan Burgess
Dan helps people to see the world and their place within it differently - as part of an entangled web of intelligent life. A Regenerative catalyst, imagineer and guide, writer and DJ, committed to ongoing practice of connection to self, each other and to this more than human world, to cultivate courage and our unique creative intelligence to serve these times. Over 30 years he has pioneered brand and creative activism globally, facilitated radical collaboration and sustainable innovation projects, and led award winning creative campaigning to reconnnect with the natural world
Training with Chris Salisbury/Wildwise, Bayo Akomolafe/We Will Dance with Mountains, School of Lost Borders. Guest faculty Co-Creating the Emerging Future, Schumacher College,The Bio Leadership Project, Kincentric Leadership 23/24. Host of the Spaceship Earth Podcast.
Dan is a father of three young humans, he is Autistic, ADHD and Type 1 Diabetic
Evva Semenowicz
Evva is an experienced facilitator, ritual artist & somatic practitioner dedicated to weaving ourselves back into belonging; with our own bodies, each other and the wider collective of life.
Evva’s learnings are with organisations such as Change in Nature, Open Edge Foundation, Embodiment Institute, & Bristol Yoga Roots Projects. Her teachings also come from walking this path and putting out offerings into the world.
Evva is a Mother.
Mark Sears
Mark weaves together practices and techniques that explore how we might regrow a healthy culture through deep nature connection. He works with myth & oral storytelling, Way of Council and time spent alone in wild places as practices to deepen our connection so we might use our unique gifts in service to all life.
As a guide Mark has apprenticed as a nature based mentor with WildWise/Schumacher College. He has trained in the Way of Council with Pip Bondy of Ancient Healing Ways and apprenticed to myth and story with the West Country School of Myth. He is mentored by Annie Bloom who for many years was lead guide with Animas Valley Institute.
Mark is a father of two.
“We need an ecological concept of citizenship rooted in the understanding that activities that erode soils, waste resources, pollute, destroy biological diversity and degrade the beauty and integrity of landscapes are forms of theft from the commonwealth as surely as is bank robbery”
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