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Kairos_yoga

Integrating Earth with Action

Kairos Center Year Long Program

Slated to begin in the Spring of 2008, the Stepping Stones high school program offers teens an experiential approach to personal transformation, ecological empowerment and social change. The program provides youth with the inner resources and outer skills to act for positive change within their own bioregions and beyond.
Small groups offer youth a space to be honest, to be “real” and to express themselves. Peer and mentor relationships create strong bonds that support personal exploration. The program’s innovative curriculum provides training in a range of areas: from mindfulness to conflict resolution; from permaculture to social systems education.

CURRICULUM

The yearlong program combines youth mentoring with four areas of focus:
  1. Self: Building strong foundations of inner awareness, intellect, and agency, through practices in attention, critical engagement with a wide range of information, perspectives, and understandings, and hands on training and skill development.
  2. Community: Recognizing and honoring our inherent interrelationship with one another through council practice, communications training, team building, and the study of group dynamics. Recognizing and honoring our inherent interrelationship with the greater Earth community through the study of Earth as a complex living system and our crucial role within it.
  3. Earth: Understanding the developmental process of the Earth in order to better understand all of the processes in which we are involved: internal, external, personal, and collective. Connecting to the Earth’s living systems through “nature” awareness, permaculture, wilderness experience and environmental education.
  4. Action: Cultivating true “response-ability” through social systems and anti-oppression education, media awareness, critical thinking, activism, community service, and ecological design.

PROGRAM SUMMARY

The yearlong program begins with a five to six day intensive retreat where youth participants build community and learn foundational practices for the year. Small groups of six to eight teens then meet locally, twice per month, with two trained Stepping Stones mentors. Youth gather quarterly (every three months) at a central retreat facility for daylong intensive trainings with Stepping Stones staff and leaders. The program culminates for each group with a self-designed, youth-led community service or activism project.