It is time that we as individuals and organizations lead and demonstrate a new way of learning and community in a multispecies, multigenerational, and multicultural context. We need to address the disconnection between humans and nature, and provide tools and support for adults to help children who thrive when they are able to connect to nature and animals.
Children do better if unfettered in nature without negative value constraints placed upon them by their peers, family, and community, which hamper their formation of relationships that empower them and increase their resilience. Adults facilitating children and youth flourishing need to understand the emerging paradigm that sees humans as deeply embedded, belonging, and nurtured by nature and our relationships with other animals. They must also face the challenge that we as a society don’t know how to support learning and nature connection in a way that that crosses generational, cultural, and species walls that humans have constructed. Barriers also arise from our own evolutionary biology. We need to capitalize on engaging with this changing paradigm to produce the happiest and most connected adults we can who can in turn empower and sustain their efforts to save the planet.
To best serve children to grow into this future, adults accompany them in their development through their teens and young adulthood. This mentorship needs to happen in relational community where adults understand and live this paradigm of loving all nature, including human nature, and for this reason, adult leaders need to be trained in these techniques and understand the foundations so that they can pass this on in an embodied and intuitive manner. They become the change they wish their charges to see and be in the world.
For this reason, One Earth Conservation is expanding its Nurture Nature Program to include guidance for teachers and facilitators who lead multigenerational nature and animal experiences, and learning of all kinds. One Earth Conservation believes that a multigenerational, multicultural, and multispecies milieu is the bright hope for the future of our children, and for that reason we provide learning and tools for adults to bring this to their work, relationships, and programs.
Our kickoff event is a workshop on Saturday, October 7 in White Plains, NY. For more information and to register, go here. We will be following this up with webinars, a course on the Nurture Nature Academy, and a book, Nurturing Nature: Facilitating Compassion in a Multigenerational, Multispecies, Multicultural World.
We hope you will join us.