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Convener: ALisa Starkweather
Creating a Culture that Protects, Sustains, and Engages our Young People in Our Present Dilemmas
We also have a resource page to visit that accompanies this page so visit there as well and contribute your skills to young people!
Session Participants: Megan, Larry, Lucinda, Jaclyn, Maya, Jane, Ali, Justin, Jennifer, Mac, Diane, Owen, Suzanna, Frank, ALisa, and others not on our paper but for some moments in our presence.
Time: 2-3:30pm
Place: Upstairs/Octagon

Session Notes: Take note that as the convener, I forgot to designate a notetaker. Fortunately I was scribbling random things down and so we have some documentation but not what we might have. Open Space Technology is so great. "Whatever happens is the only thing that could have."

Overview with ALisa of what was in her heart in convening this session.


We began with a story I told in my own words of Daughters of the Earth Gathering where in the women's council the young women asked to speak first and told us that they were waiting for us to show up and share our skills with them especially as they will be needing to deal with the difficulties that their generation will face. They also warned us of not marginalizing them by seeing them as peripheral teens but to see them as women prepared to engage with us and ready for us to recognize them for the women that they are.

I spoke of what a culture might need to support young people and that some of these things I had seen and been a part of my own experiences. This is what I listed and went briefly over:
~ rites of passage and initiation work to bring people to a new stage with both men and women present in community to honor new responsibilities given to them
(not to ask them what they want but to guide them into what we know)

~Engaging young people in circlework of many different areas. (councils, restorative justice, circles, heartshares .....)

~ teaching them forms of conflict resolution and engaging them in peer leadership and mediation

~ inviting them in with projects, thinking, design, leadership

~Mentoring

~ knowing them since birth or childhood and tracking them with a commitment that can later reflect to them who you have seen in their growing up.

~ spending time with young people

~ bringing into their lives spiritual meaning, archetypes, rituals, ceremonies and ways to be closer to the earth and their spirit

~ skill building

~ STOP DRUGGING OUR CHILDREN for things that do not need medication

~ Being attentive to what they are dealing with in their own bodies with toxic food and water disrupting their hormones and endocrine systems. Filtered water, organic food as support to their healthy growth.

~ Bring them into some magical spaces with adults to give them a sense of challenge and excitement to be part of the adult tribe. (drum, stories, song, dance, fire, earth)

~ Educate them with values that support who they were born to be and the gifts that will help them and us.

~ Giving them the joy of community that embraces all ages and stimulates creativity and relationship in harmony with earth.

Our Collective Discussion Ensues (a bit jumbled from here but there is poetry flowing):

Mentoring a child as our own. Know the magic, teach the magic of what the planet is. Teach the children what the rhythms of the earth are with sun and moon cycles, wheel of the year.
Help them to be in touch with enthusiasm and joy.
Communicate our passion.
What we give in service, comes back to us as a gift.
Nurturing spirit. Be examples of how we live our life.

Larry brings to our attention a most important book, The Last Child in the Woods. Children are not out iceskating or playing in the fields. They are so immersed with technology that they are not finding a connection to the wild.

What would be COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT?
What builds a culture for them to flourish from?

Waldorf schools were mentioned as a way for children to be educated while also fostering their character and spirits but they are expensive. Charter schools that are similar to Waldorf but have Massachusetts funding. There is money for more charter schools. Boys brought through entire years spent in Waldorf often are displaying a difference of being more wide open. Who would boys be outside of public school systems where they are sometimes forced into being tougher? Building a school culture that fosters each child to grow into who they are.

Adults often seem disconnected to young people. They want to find engagement but there is no one responding. Distracted, disinterested, out of touch.

How do we bring adults attention back to a culture that cares about young people's wellbeing and remind them?

What needs to heal?

Young people have wild imaginations. Living in this culture sucks. Even other young people are so far into a more material culture that is difficult to make contact and relationship with one's own peer group because of being taught to be disengaged.

This leaves young people who are passionate about social change work or caring of the earth feeling unsupported by both adults and people their own age.

How do we build a source of community?

Justin from NextGen says here is what we need:
~ we need to know how to do it
~ resources
~ and people who will tell us that we are not crazy

It was so great to have Justin and Ali with us from NextGen and also Jaclyn who is a young women soon to go to Ecuador and interested in communities and sustainability. Here is what we learned about NextGen and those reading if you know more or I am not getting this right you can fill it in. Okay, forget that, I am checking on line so it is more accurate.There is GEN (Global Ecovillage Network) that is over ten years old and NextGen (the future generation of that vision). There was an international conference at Findhorn in Scotland in Oct 2005 that was the birth of Next Gen.
Their mission statement: Our mission is to ignite in all youth a passionate desire to change the world and to provide the support to channel this passion into action that will meet the needs of the human community while restoring the natural world.
Their Wiki page: http://ecovillage.wikia.com/wiki/Nextgen
There are the Fellows that Ali and Justin are a part of. I noticed that there were actually more of this group in our larger group too. The Fellows are core to keep it going and then there are members that they support. They have monthly phone conferences and implement Dynamic Self Governance. There was another international conference in Mexico and they are planning another one in 2007. The northeast is ready for action here and are looking for support for their vision.

Hey, this goes right along with our topic and here they are! How great is this. We can do it right now.

ALisa asks poses the challenge. So if we are a part of a culture that supports certain values how are we doing in regards to young people? Are we remembering them? Are we considering involving them? What can we commit to right now in exploring ways to further deepen our commitment to them?

Mac says I can invite young people over to my home and invite them to do something as simple as repot a plant with me.

This sparks Justin.
Justin suggests MENTORSHIPS that you just cannot get in college or school like how to make that old time applesauce.

He says I want to do something and who is a resource in a 25 mile radius that can teach me? Can we create a resource list of what is available skills that can be mentored to young people (gardening, canning, ... the sky is the limit here in our imagination). He shares about being a Quaker and while traveling he can contact any Quaker in the world if he arrives to a village and be welcomed in their home. He reminds us to THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX. (Wow, I didn't learn that until my late twenties. You are already advanced thinking people).

We begin to pass a paper with our names, emails and what skills, things we could offer. We bring this to the larger circle on our first day's closing if others want to join. It is STILL an open question and we now have begun a resource page devoted to this topic if you look under RESOURCE PAGE FOR MENTORING YOUNG PEOPLE AND SHARING OUR GIFTS. You can find it under our session title under proceedings.

Jane shares the quote from Howard Thurman, an assistant to MLK.


"Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."


What makes you come alive? What makes young people come alive? Invite them in.


Some commitments pour forth.
Lucinda says maybe Earthlands can ask facilitators if they would give a scholarship 1-2 scholarships to young people (ages 16-25) and then EL would give free room and board always opening a space for a young person to be a part of things.

We are reminded to involve teens in the planning of events. Bring them into leadership and have them own the power of bringing visions forward. Train them to be active leaders by example and invitation.

Larry offers to videotape parents, grandparents and Foxfire skills.

Frank is juiced about sharing Open Space Technology with them. He offers something he heard before that mentoring is like putting a knife in your heart that turns it.
Owen, another young person who came to our circle later and names himself anarchist, shares that he sees what Frank said through the lens of a Guide who is able to give us more options, more direction and increases our freedom versus a Ruler who rules from deception, manipulation and coercion.

Maya reminds us about Jane Goodall's book, Roots and Shoots and her good work with children around the environment and ethics. She also says the Five River Council that she is involved with is going to be working with integrating children into the space. She also spoke of how animals (from her former work with children and animals in the Boston zoo) are natural intermediaries with children connecting them immediately with the natural world and the spirit of who they are.


This is long for not having taken notes huh? Remember that we have another page for resources. NextGen left with the original copy. On this page YOU TOO can contribute skills to young people. Here is where others can join up too. Look here under proceedings and this session: RESOURCE PAGE FOR MENTORING YOUNG PEOPLE AND SHARING OUR GIFTS for immediate action steps today for our youth!


We closed with another story. First of my daughter's rites of passage ceremony that took place in this very same room years ago. It was in the men's circle where Jacob had told Chenoa essentially that he was finding adults pretty boring and if she was going to be one, not to be a boring adult. The way to be close to our young people is to be cool.
I shared a short memory of a book, The Toe Bone and the Tooth by Martin Prechtel where he speaks about the Mayan elders in Santiago Atitlán where when the young people no longer showed up or cared or knew about the ancient rites of passage rituals that were held for centuries before them, on the eve during the time of the year that they would have normally been arriving on the shores in their foliage headwreaths in long canoes after their ordeal, the elders still went to the beach and spoke to them as if they were still there, (I am home now so I will get it write from the book and back up so you can receive it from the author's words), Page xiv,

" Marching with the old folks again we arrived at the lake edge where I expected to see the initiate youth of this huge Mayan town, their mentors, their chiefs, their branches and their long, loaded, hand-carved log canoes beached on the soggy shore; but none were to be seen, nor would they be.
No one expected them for there were no longer any initiations. But the old people with their headcloths over their shoulders, their hands outstretched into the night toward the Mother Waters and her mother, the Grandmother Moon, commenced to speak the exact old words of ritual remembrance as if the initiate boys had actually been standing there.

"It's good to see your faces again.
It's good to feel your breath again.
We the eight hundred shimmering
Forgetters, the big trees and the big vines
Do not forget you, our new
Fruit, whose seeds will
Be our remembrance planted in the
Deep humus of our passing.
We do not forget you,
We do not abandon you.
Yesterday and the day before,
When we saw....."

For those who'd been inside these old-time initiations it was easy to imagine the tired boys standing there with the branches strapped on their back, dancing to our words under their loads, swinging in the lake breeze. Now the village did ritual after ritual to what couldn't reply or be seen by those that had never seen it before.
After that only on half of the rituals could be done, but these were carried out so assiduously that the following generations assumed by gong through the motions they were doing the whole thing. Fifty percent of what was holy and necessary was missing. Those dedicated old beauties were the last generation to know the difference." Martin Prechtel



May we remember our young people. We do not forget you. May we not ever abandon our young fruit. We closed in circle arm in arm, knowing that we all want to belong to a circle of family that includes all of us ~ the children, the teens, the growing olders, the elders. We belong together and we yearn to belong.