The 6-Day Art of Mentoring

Creating a Living Culture of Awareness

Dates: Monday September 23, (Check-in 3p-5p, 5:30p Dinner)

to Saturday September 28, 2013 noon

Location: Farm & Wilderness near Plymouth, VT

Cost: $650 until May 1st, $700 after May 15th. Includes meals and lodging.

All Art of Mentoring Programs Enrollment Form (Send as soon as possible).

Art of Mentoring for First Time Participants

This is a workshop for parents, mentors, grandparents, aunties, uncles, instructors, teachers, environmental educators, community organizers, permaculturists, and many more. This is really for anyone who wants to deepen your relationships with nature, family, friends and neighbors, and enrich your life.

Guided by a team of experienced facilitators from throughout the Northeast, Art of Mentoring participants come together to experience, learn from and co-create a joyful, engaged learning community. You will walk away with tools and embodied practices of regenerative community design, mentoring techniques, deep nature connection, and an amplified passion for learning. Our hope is to activate and inspire you to create healthy communities right in your own back yard!

The course is taught through group experiential activities, lectures, storytelling, and music. We will be both indoors and outside exploring in the field.

"I did not know what to expect, but I got way more than I bargained for. Art of Mentoring shifted my perception of life from that of a trek (that I sometimes feel too exhausted for) to one of an immersion-learning experience--- relating to nature as a responsive partner, rather than a place. Socially speaking, the training offers medicine for the effects of extreme individualism. It offers an experience of how one's role can take form in a truly human dimension . Whew! I'm so glad you are doing this in earnest- the program design is amazing. Thank you!" --2010 Participant

The skills and practices that you will experience and learn to apply at the Art of Mentoring have been incorporated in a variety of settings including public and private schools, universities, at-risk youth programs, businesses, mental health practices, legal and prison system as well as in families, neighborhoods, and the network of wilderness schools, nature centers and programs affiliated with the 8 Shields Network.

Lead Presenters & Facilitators for 2012 Currently Projected as:

Mark Morey (Institute for Natural Learning)
Amy Hyatt (Vermont Wilderness School)
Saskia Vanderhoop (Sassafras Earth Education)
Evan McGown (Institute for Wild Intelligence)
Walker Korby (Montague, MA & many AoM based schools)

Small Group Facilitators

To be announced.

Adult Nature Immersion Experience: For Returning Adult Participants

Going Deep with the Core Routines

Cost: $650 until May 1st, $700 after May 15th. Includes meals and lodging.

Remember the stories from past 2nd time participants of seeing Coyote and tickling the brook trout? Now that you have been introduced to the Art of Mentoring and inspired by stories of Nature Connection and Core Routines, we invite you on a journey of going deeper in nature connection with a group of other adults. You will be guided and inspired by experienced staff from throughout the Northeast on your nature immersion journey throughout the week including sharing your experiences with first time participants and taking them on a journey into nature connection developing your experience in applying the Art of Mentoring.

Pre-requisite: Attendance as a first time participant at the Vermont Art of Mentoring or another affiliated Art of Mentoring Workshop (United Kingdom, Ontario, Wilderness Awareness School, California)

Lead Facilitator:

Connor Stedman, Vermont Wilderness School

Assistants

To be announced.

Towards Elderhood: For Returning Older Adults (50+)

Building Community - Celebrating teh Place of the Elder

Cost: $650 until May 1st, $700 after May 15th. Includes meals and lodging..

"In my community we can tell the difference between an older and an elder. The elder is the one that the young ones turn to." --Paul Raphael, Odawa Elder (Native American)

The Art of Mentoring (AoM) is an experiment in the design of a healthy, sustaining and regenerative community. A study of healthy communities reveals that they are made up of extended community relationships. These relationships extend across generations, generally exist over time and include mentoring principles as we have come to understand them. In these communities all generations are part of the weaving and the elder generation holds its own unique place of both value and responsibility. As AoM strives to be a model that embodies such a community, as well as a teaching ground, it demands a core group and a growing number of fully developed elders. What does that mean?

In the Towards Elderhood program we will endeavor to explore the answer to that question. Part of the process is one of “re-membering” that which personal lives and distortions of culture have caused us to forget. Part of the process is developing tools that have been honed and that help to build relationships and communities. Part of the process demands a knowing of self, of personal gifts and of resistances we might have put in place that block the expression of these. Part of the process is understanding cultural elements practiced by many indigenous cultures that sustained both individuals and communities over long periods of time and the place of the elders in these. Part of the process is apprenticing with others that have been experimenting with stepping into this place both within and outside of the Art of Mentoring. Most of all, it requires the sincere desire to give back to a world that has sustained us until now and in the process, to build strong communities.

If you have already done the first time program at AoM and feel yourself fully in this stage of life, if you have already begun to step into the practice of some of this in your own community and want to go further, the Towards Elderhood program may be for you. During the mornings of the week of AoM there will be rich experiential learning exploring an introduction to human development, rites of passage, the role of elders in ceremony, skill training and practice, cultural competency and diversity, and more. During the afternoons you will be matched up with Staff Elders for apprenticeship experiences in the larger AoM community. Expect as much play as depth and a profoundly rewarding engagement with all ages of the AoM village.

We highly recommend the Adult Nature Immersion program for the 50+ if you have not already had a similar experience. As a returning participant, feel free to choose your focus--please let us know on your registration form your intended focus.

Elders

Miriam Dror : Lead Elder Facilitator
Helen Armstrong
Cara Benedetto
Jannie Dziadzio
Will Flanders
Judy Hyde
Rosalind McIntosh
Paul Tobin