Nature-Based Leadership Training
Feb- Nov 2021
Are you someone who longs to connect deeply with nature and learn real skills of resilience and belonging to place?
Do you want to understand more about your unique gifts and how you can be of service to others and the world at this time of great change?
This immersive, nature-based leadership program is the first of its kind in Australia. Building from many years’ experience delivering community learning that is grounded in the natural world, CERES and Nature’s Apprentice are coming together to offer a 10-month program that will create the kind of earth-based leadership and resilience we and our communities will need in the coming decades.
If you’ve felt called to connect more deeply with your passions, to nature, and be supported by a like-minded community then this course is for you. It offers transformational learning through engaging the whole person: the head, the heart and the hands.
Please tell us a little about yourself, and why you are drawn to this course at this time. We will be in touch to share more info and invite you to enrol once enrolments open.
Overview
This course recognises and builds on contributions from ecology, indigenous wisdom, environmental studies, eco-psychology, spiritual traditions, and place-based education, synthesizing and applying them to our local context.
Nature-based leadership draws on these and other disciplines to nurture leadership in all aspects of society, with the aim that people in all relationships—with themselves, others and the Earth itself—contribute to a healthy, peaceful and regenerative present and future.
Program Design
The course takes a hybrid approach to curriculum, including nature-based experiential activities in the outdoors, classroom discussions, online readings and commentary, and personalised projects.
Beginning and ending with nature immersion retreats outside Melbourne, as well as a mid-way winter residential, the program will cover six core modules that seek to explore both the philosophy and practice of nature-based leadership.
Tending the Wild
Deep Nature Connection
Village Building
The Wider Story
Leadership, Authenticity and Purpose
Spirituality & Sacred Activism
Each module will involve a set of recommended texts and readings, experiential processes and exploration of a broader context that embeds it into work for the world. The modules will be woven together into the retreats, and studied in more detail during the twice monthly workshops and webinars.
Participants will be invited to reflect on their learnings in each module through an online platform, and during a monthly peer-to-peer mentoring call. In the second half of the program, participants are invited to model and integrate the skills of nature-based leadership through creating a small project within their community.
As part of the final retreat, you will have the opportunity to enact a 24-hour Vision Quest to deepen and clarify your gifts and purpose going forth.
Time commitment
This is a 10-month program starting February 2021.
The program is centred around 3 nature-immersion retreats held across 2 semesters. These immersions are supported by fortnightly in-person classes (11 in total), online evening seminars (12 in total), and peer-to-peer mentoring and reflection sessions.
You will also have the opportunity to design and deliver a community project or activity of your choice, to integrate your learnings.
Retreats (dates + location TBC):
February 18-21
August 6-8
Oct 29 – Nov 2
Each month:
2 x Friday Workshops
1 x Evening Webinar
1 x Evening Online Reflection Session
Semester break (June + July):
Deliver a small community activity or project.
22 contact hours per month, plus 3 x retreats in regional Victoria.
Outcomes
This course will take us on a journey towards a healthier and more integrated sense of self – rooted in the ecological, biological, sensory, and emotional, as well as rational dimensions.
For the head:
Understanding new possibilities for systems change on the personal, social and planetary levels
Knowledge of contemporary eco-psychology philosophy and practice
Greater clarity of personal gifts and purpose
For the heart:
A greater sense of place and belonging
A greater depth of spiritual practice
For the hands:
Practical skills of wildcrafting and rewilding
Skills in community-building technologies, including the completion of a community project of your choice
Facilitation, mentoring and leadership skills
The Six Modules
Tending the Wild
What does “wildness” mean as an inner and outer experience? Why is it important and how do we access it when living in urban or suburban areas? The wilds of both our inner and outer landscapes have been paved over and domesticated by western culture. Our relationship with the wild is a source of aliveness, vitality and inspiration. In this component we will learn earth-skills and practices to court and cultivate the wild back into ourselves and our lives including:
Earth-living skills and wildcrafting: shelter, water, fire, fibre, basketry
Edible and medicinal food plants
Indigenous perspectives and earth intimacy
Rewilding philosophy and practice
Caretaker and stewardship
Cultivating a ‘wild mind’
Deep Nature Connection
How do we cultivate a deeper sense of belonging, right where we are? How do we start to develop an ecological literacy of place? Our natural inheritance is to feel a deep sense of belonging. Learning and applying the core routines of deep nature connection will build strong ropes of connection between us and the places where we live. By connecting deeply to nature around us, we also start to awaken our ‘naturalness’ – our unique genius.
The purpose of this module is to explore how nature-based practice can be a support for embodying our belonging as members of the wider Earth community:
Learn and practice the core routines of intimacy with the natural world
Expand sensory awareness
Reading the landscape: holistic tracking, pattern recognition and nature observation
Nature journaling and cultivating ecological literacy of place
Exploring bird language
Develop daily sit spot practices
The Art of Wandering
The Wider Story: Old Stories and New
How does telling stories change anything? How do stories shape our lives, and what do the great myths have to say about the times we find ourselves in? The old story of separation is fast being replaced by a new story of connection and interrelationship. Pioneering thinkers and conceptual pathways offer a different way of locating ourselves and our work in the world: a shift from ego-centric to ecocentric:
Narratives to re-imagine the world such as eco-psychology, deep ecology, sacred economics, ecological identity, systems theory, complexity theory and spiritual ecology.
Embed yourself in the new story of interrelationship.
Explore ancient myths for modern times
Learn ecocentric approaches to human development and identity.
Gain an understanding into the philosophical and historical underpinnings of disconnection and separation from nature.
Village Building
How do we cultivate community resilience for the changes ahead? How do we form strong anchoring relationships that create a foundation of connections for our lives? One of the main roles of culture is to connect, yet the dominant culture is one of disconnection. A village-builder learns to see and support the big picture of what’s happening in their community. They can recognise needs, gifts, strengths and possibilities for greater peace, responsibility and connection in their people.
Immerse in an empowering regenerative culture
Learn the technologies of village building and how to embed them into your region, project or organisation.
Explore song, storytelling, earth-art and creative expression
Experience and understand the role of grief in community connection
Explore the role of ceremony in community and ecological cohesion
Learn peacemaking practices
Learn cultural mentoring models for developing nature-connected communities
Explore community resilience in the context of deep adaptation such as neo-peasantry and community sufficiency
Grow capacity to give and receive feedback
Leadership, Authenticity and Purpose
What are the qualities of a leader and what does nature tell us about the kind of leadership the world needs at this time? How do we become the leadership that is required? Leadership, in essence, can be seen as the courage and humility to follow our deepest authenticity. This module explores how to “be the change we want to see in the world” and move forward with our visions:
Develop mentoring and group facilitation skills and experience
Learn about patterns of power, privilege and oppression
Systems thinking: from separation to interrelationship
Explore your ‘ecological niche’: your unique purpose and appropriate delivery systems
‘Inner Tracking’ of personal obstacles and opportunities
Embedding our work in the context of the Anthropocene
Initiation and Rites-of-Passage as cultural tools
Spirituality & Sacred Activism
What’s the relationship between our spiritual practices and our world work? How do weave back together the threads of ecology, culture and spirituality? For much of our story as a people, the wider sensuous world was seen as an opening to something larger than ourselves. In this module, we will learn about different spiritual traditions and how they intersect with nature-based practices, and explore how to reconnect the spiritual with the material in our lives and work.
This module is suitable for all belief systems. It will include the opportunity for a 24-hour solo ‘Vision Quest’ on the land.
Explore sacred activism, spiritual ecology and compassionate action
Deepen your own personal spiritual practice
Expand ecological consciousness
Deepen a practice of earth-based spirituality
Expand the possibilities for authentic action in the word
Explore the different spheres of activism
Learn how to develop work that is ecological and relational
Teachers and Facilitators
This program is designed and facilitated by Claire Dunn and Sieta Beckwith with support from guest presenters and mentors.
Claire Dunn
Claire Dunn is a writer, speaker, barefoot explorer, rewilding facilitator and founder of Nature’s Apprentice. Claire is passionate about human rewilding and believes that a reclaiming of our ecological selves and belonging is key to regenerating wildness on the planet. For the last 15 years, Claire has been facilitating individuals to dive deeply into the mysteries of nature and psyche through the pathways of deep nature connection, ancestral earth skills, deep ecology, ecopsychology, soulcentric nature-based practice, village building, dance, ceremony and contemporary wilderness rites-of-passage. Claire is the author of memoir My Year Without Matches, which tells the story of her year living wild. Her soon to be released memoir Rewilding the Urban Soul explores how we might embody wild consciousness within a modern city context. Claire lives in Melbourne where she lovingly tends her garden, community and her own wild heart. www.naturesapprentice.com.au
Sieta Beckwith
Over the past 15 years, Sieta has worked in strategic communications roles in social enterprise, for-profit and non-profit organisations, assisting to discover, share and live the deeper mission and vision of the places she works. Through her work as Narrative Director at CERES, Sieta is using stories centred on universal human values, to articulate the potential power of bringing people together across divides to take action for the Earth. Inspired by the work of Emergence Magazine (US), since 2014 Sieta has been actively engaged in the emerging Spiritual Ecology movement, which seeks to explore what is the role of spirituality in social, economic, political and ecological change. She has found joy in bringing together small groups of humans from all ages and backgrounds to explore heart-centred practice, and learning to live from a place of love and compassion for all beings. Sieta also loves supporting millennials to creatively explore new ways of thinking and being together, in a time of significant challenge. Sieta was born on Noongar country but has made her home on Wurundjeri land, and loves to rockclimb, dance, weave baskets and have conversations with trees.
Guest Facilitators
Dr Maya Ward
Maya is passionate about deepening the connections between body, ecology and culture through writing, dancing and tending the earth. Her PhD explored shamanistic and somatic metaphysics, and she runs workshops on the role of embodiment in facilitating ecological and spiritual connection. She has worked as an urban designer, outdoor theatre director and permaculture teacher where she focussed on developing intimacy between the human body and the places we dwell by creating humane and intimate environments. Her memoir The Comfort of Water: A River Pilgrimage detailed her walk from the sea to the source of the Yarra following the length of an ancient Wurundjeri Songline. She lives in the mountain village of Warburton, Australia, where she co-creates pilgrimage-based ritual, runs contact improvisation dance classes, and grows food and replants forest with her home community. Informed by the philosophies of deep ecology and indigenous knowledge systems she dances with trees, exploring the embodiment of the vegetal realm.
Visit Maya’s website mayaward.com.au
Dr Beth Emily Hill
Beth studies and writes about the relationship between humans and the more-than-human-world, questioning the categories of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. Her research is concerned with the cultural and psychological dimensions of climate change: beyond adaptation and mitigation, in the possibility for transformation that climate change represents. Beth also designs and facilitates workshops for those coming to terms with the complex alchemy of hope and despair in these times of climate crisis.
Patrick Jones: Dr Patrick Jones currently works at the School of Applied Neopeasantry, Tree Elbow University, Dja Dja Wurrung country, Australia. Patrick teaches permaculture living courses (PLCs) and does research in Permaculture, Sociobiology and Applied Ecology. His most recent publication is his chapter, 'Reclaiming accountability from hypertechnocivility, to grow again the flowering Earth' (in Perma/Culture, Routlege 2017)
Dr Patrick Jones
Dr Patrick currently works at the School of Applied Neopeasantry, Tree Elbow University, Dja Dja Wurrung country, Australia. Patrick teaches permaculture living courses (PLCs) and does research in Permaculture, Sociobiology and Applied Ecology. His most recent publication is his chapter, 'Reclaiming accountability from hypertechnocivility, to grow again the flowering Earth' (in Perma/Culture, Routlege 2017)
Gilbert Rochecouste
Gilbert is recognised locally and Internationally as a leading voice in Placemaking and the creation of vibrant, resilient and loved places. He is a sought after speaker and skilled facilitator for community and stakeholder engagement activities and has worked with over 1000 cities, towns, mainstreets and communities over the past 25 years. Gilbert co-founded the EPOCH Foundation promoting the adoption of business ethics.
He has been on the boards of Ross House, Donkey Wheel House Trust and Hub Australia. Gilbert leads a multi-disciplinary team of Placemakers, researchers and designers.
Dr Yin Paradies
Dr. Yin Paradies is an Aboriginal-Asian-Anglo Australian of the Wakaya people from the Gulf of Carpentaria. He is Professor of Race Relations at Deakin University, where he conducts research on racism and anti-racism as well as teaching and researching Indigenous knowledges and decoloniality. Yin is a climate and ecological activist who is committed to understanding and interrupting the devastating impacts of modern societies. He seeks meaningful mutuality of becoming and embodied kinship with all life through transformed ways of knowing, being and doing that are grounded in wisdom, humility, respect and generosity. He is a current Moora Moora resident, having moved to the mountain in 2020 to be in community, cultivate a closer connection to Country and engage in an ethos of down-shifted collective sufficiency, voluntary simplicity, frugality, direct democracy and radical localisation.
Rita is a self taught Eco-Wellness Facilitator. After starting a career in Environmental Engineer, Rita moved into Transpersonal Counseling and played extensively with ecopsych-education, rewilding, earth emotions, forest therapy and regenerative culture making. She has facilitated practices in Possibility Management, Deep Ecology, Non-Violent Communication, Deep Adaptation and Empathy Circles. Rita is the founder of an EcoResilience business called Be Regen, which offers Regenerative Culture mentoring and workshops, to process ecoanxiety, climate grief and other earth emotions, to create thriving livelihoods and societies that are also good for the planet. Rita lives in an intentional eco-sharehome in Melbourne and in her spare time she loves creating intuitive art, dancing or swimming in the river.
Amrita Bhohi
Amrita is a UK-based spiritual ecology facilitator and educator. Her work offers experiences to reconnect people, the living world and the sacred. In 2015 she co-founded the spiritual ecology programme at St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation & Peace in London, and was instrumental in embedding young leadership and sacred activism into the organisational strategy. She developed the UK ‘Spiritual Ecology Leadership Programme’, a training and project incubation course for emerging leaders in the next generation, exploring how to integrate spiritual values into practical action, and supporting projects through a seed funding scheme. Amrita facilitates and teaches internationally, offering workshops, retreats and events, including in Europe, the USA and Australia. She is currently a facilitator at Emergence Magazine and is writing a book about her work.