A Learning Program for Young People living in Troubled Times
Supporting young people in becoming ecological citizens in the places they call home
Here in the UK as the prime minister announces plans to bring back National Service for the young - I’m excited to share news of a youth program offering from Becoming Crew.
While we share a common thread of service, our intention is very different:
To support young people in times of great uncertainty and change to find their own unique ways of being in service to life
- Space to freely explore their biggest questions
- To expand and deepen their relationship with the living world
- To cultivate a personal practice of action learning
- To imagine and build future worlds in the places they call home
Exploring themes like:
What does it mean to be a young human at this time on Earth ?
Are there elders and how might we connect with them ?
What might it mean to practice kinship with all life ?
What does ecological citizenship look like ?
How do I channel my creativity in service to life ?
Developing practices to:
Move into relationship with a wider web of entangled life beyond the human separation story
Connect to their own unique gifts and build trust in their own creative intelligence
Cultivate disciplines of collective imagination
Channel their creativity and energy in service of the wider whole, towards human and more than human communities.
Grow qualities of deep listening, connection, care, compassion, generosity, courage, imagination and solidarity.
Become active participants in co-creating regenerative futures in the places they call home
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Why and who ?
Most young people today continue to be educated in systems designed around the core objective of finding their place in a human-centered, energy intensive, capitalised, extractive economic system.
Fuelled by a single, dominant cultural story of human exceptionalism, infinite growth and forward progress where ‘success’ is measured through productivity and accumulation.
This exhausted story is not going to hold for too much longer.
The science is clear, we live on a planet with a biosphere, the Earth’s system, the operating system for all life is incompatible with the ongoing commitment to organising an entire economic system and way of life around this single story.
A story based on ways of perceiving and relating to the Earth, to ourselves and to each other that are divisive, violent and destructive.
Throw in climate anxiety, social technology overwhelm, a crisis in mental health, cost of living, undernourished creative practice and limited access and connection to nature and there is a growing group of young people who need and want alternative learning support.
"The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind.
It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”
DavidW. Orr
Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics Emeritus at Oberlin College
Many of the challenges young people are facing today and in the emerging future are relational, they require new ways of seeing, relating, thinking and being and the learning and support options for relational inquiry are very limited.
Our intention is to serve this gap, our research shows us that there are growing numbers of young people who are holding bigger and different questions about their futures than the current system allows, with a lack of pathways for alternative forms of learning and development.
Our focus initially is on post school ages - 18 to 24 years.
We will be offering peer-supported, practice driven learning experiences based on creative inquiry and connection to the living world and each other that help them grow values of generosity, kinship, solidarity, courage and community.
Re-imagining and bringing forth cultures in places that put love and care at the centre.
This youth program offer will initially manifest in two ways:
1. Earth Citizens - A 6 month on-line/on-land pilot in 2025 in collaboration with Bath Spa University/eARTh Research Group/ Forest of Imagination
A creative and relational inquiry, growing connection to self, others and the living world.
Each phase will be supported by live, participative learning sessions with guest teachers, mentors & guides, on-land & on-line.
Each participant will work with a live inquiry question and manifest a creative/ community place based project through the journey.
Learning Values:
Creativity in service to life
We focus on creative practices that help to stimulate change through embodying, imagining and subverting.
Practice-driven change
An ongoing personal commitment to practicing the futures we long for, supported by a community of practice as a way of sowing seeds for regenerative cultures.
Kinship with all life
Putting relationships at the centre of learning and building regenerative cultures.
Expanding our sense of self from individualised, atomised self to collective self, from human to more-than-human, from short-term to long-term, ancestral past and future, intergenerational.
2. On-land Weekend Gatherings and Camps
Seasonal gatherings to support & nourish young people who are actively exploring their role in creating change in the world.
The gatherings involve nature connection practices, community building, peer-learning and creative practice. Creating spaces for young people to explore their deeper questions and express themselves freely.
These will initially take place close to the city of Bath.
‘For me spending time on the land gave me permission to sink in and let go.
The Becoming Crew guides created a space where we felt brave and safe enough to explore and experiment, and play near our edges.
After the day I felt less stuck and more willing to fall into my creativity’
Youth Participant
Our collaboration with Bath Spa University/eARTh Research Group/ Forest of Imagination
We are so excited to be collaborating with a leading ecology of academic and learning partners under the guidance of Professor of Imagination - Dr Penny Hay with deep experience in working with imagination, arts and creativity with young people in response to the climate and ecological crisis.
Together with our Becoming Crew collective we are excited by what we can co-design, host and learn together as practitioners and serve a learning community of young people.
As a collective we’ve been exploring and prototyping for the last year, including the youth gathering captured in the film above.
Over the coming months we will be sharing more as the program design takes shape and as we find funding partners, collaborators, guest faculty, mentors and more.
Funding this work is a huge challenge
This is an age group who are growing up with enormous financial constraints, so we need to find diverse and creative ways of underwriting the core costs of delivering these programs.
To date we have been self funding the development costs.
If you’re interested in exploring how to support any of the above please do get in touch and we can share more of our plans:
dan@becomingcrew.com
“The world does not need more rootless symbolic analysts. It needs instead hundreds of thousands of young people equipped with the vision, moral stamina, and intellectual depth necessary to rebuild neighbourhoods, towns and communities around the planet. The kind of education presently available will not help them much. They will need to be students of their places and competent to become in Wes Jackon’s words ‘Native to their places’”
David W. Orr
To continue this post I want to share some of the back story around my own intentions, how this youth offer has emerged and what I’m bringing into this work. If you want to dive deeper with me, then read on.
I was recently diagnosed ADHD alongside a late Autism diagnosis 18 months ago. There’s much I want to say about all this, the culture of neurotypicality that I grew up in and the links to learning, education, knowledge, creativity, work and connection to the more than human world. And my interest and curiosity in how neurodiverse people especially are responding and relating to these times.
But for now I’m intentionally mapping out here experiences, learnings, projects, experiments and collaborations that I’ve worked on over the years and the threads and seeds that are informing part of this youth offering.
I’ve done a lot over the years to get here, supported by many amazing collaborators and teachers. But some of that I can now see is down to my undiagnosed neurodivergent ways, particularly ADHD.
I’m writing this to help me remember and recognise these past (often intense) efforts, to acknowledge them as seeds, to see patterns and to show my workings in this ongoing evolution of work and offering. And to document things.
And also because these threads weave part of the fabric of becoming crew and this emerging offer to young people.
‘What is your responsibility to the young’? said the spirit of the vision quest
I completed a Vision Quest in July 2023, a rites of passage, a deeply challenging and most vital thing I’ve done of late.
I departed the foot hills of Snowdonia after 10 days away from home with a very strong embodied feeling of wanting to find a way to support and serve the next generation in these times.
Four days and four nights fasting alone at the foot of a Welsh mountain surrounded by young Birch and Willow trees revealed much, it was messy, complex, painful at times and some of which I’m still working through 11 months later.
But one theme of much contemplation was about the young and the context they find themselves in today, emeshed in an unravelling 500 year old civilisational story that is ending and yet locked into power systems that feel impossible to navigate and see beyond at the same time.
Specifics most alive for me following the Quest:
Endings and beginnings, death and renewal - the importance of paying attention and honouring these cycles of life and the context of these times, dark and light.
Facing into the inevitable endings of many of the stories and beliefs of capitalist modernity, taking time to compost all the things we now understand we got wrong, in order to clear the space for new beginnings to emerge.
How to create and hold space for the young to explore all of this and to help them dream, imagine and build different worlds ?
How to create the conditions and practices for new beginnings that don’t continue to perpetuate the violence and destruction of capitalist modernity ?
Intergenerational Responsibility
Much of my 20 years working towards alternative and regenerative futures has been focussed on supporting adult professionals to become active participants in the changes they want to see in the world while deepening their understanding of our entanglement and interdependence with a wider living Earth.
To be honest I’ve often thought why are we waiting until mid-life to confront this violent separation story as conditions on our planet and with our collective human health unravel at increasing speed.
The story of separation is so destructive once you learn to see it. For all the useful things these centuries of separation have given humanity it’s time for a consciousness shift at scale.
Surely the faster we learn to see it for what it is - an illusion, and begin to let go of that spell, to learn to see differently, relate differently, think differently, to honour our wilder, entangled selves, the lands and waters we are part of, our interdependence with each other and the wider web of intelligence we can be in relationship with - the better?
As I’ve got older, and ‘normality’ becomes more unhinged, I’ve continued to look to the young with increasing anxiety about the unravelling world that Capitalist Modernity has worlded that they are inheriting.
This might be described as intergenerational responsibility.
I know my fellow guides in the Becoming Crew collective feel the same.
Action Learning as an antidote to these times
Between 2009 and 2011 I completed an MSc in Sustainability and Responsibility, this course was catalytic for me, in so many ways, mainly because it was rooted in Action Learning and Action Research, or in my definition - continuous learning, driven by personal inquiry through cycles of action, experimentation and reflective practice. Alongside a wider expansion of different ways of knowing the world.
Action Learning co-creates new knowledge through experience and participation, (un)learning in community alongside more conventional theories and logics.
It is knowledge that is alive, there is movement, its not fixed and abstract and passed down to you into your head.
I had never experienced learning in this way, it was a total game changer and went on to inform ‘how’ I’ve approached pretty much everything since.
In this moment in 2024 where very little in the constructed world makes sense, where information is in overload and no one knows who to trust, or what to expect next week, learning to trust in your own learning and knowledge that is co-created through relationships with a wider web of life and through ongoing practices of action and reflection feels vital.
Even more vital for a younger generation already seeking answers to complex questions as they inherit decaying and exhausted structures, stories and system.
Inquiry based action learning opens up possibilities.
“How do I discover my own truth in a world of so much information ?”
Youth Participant
Action Learning will be a foundational practice in our Youth program offer.
2012 to 2019 - Wild Times - a deep dive into nature (dis)connection, learning, education and wildness.
Between 2012 and 2016 I was part of a multi-disciplinary crew who birthed the feature length documentary film Project Wild Thing and The Wild Network. One of the maddest and most brilliant projects I’ve ever been involved in.
The image above was the invite to a 48 hr Good for Nothing hack we organised early on which brought together teachers, nature nerds, designers, artists, creatives and activists and ended up informing much of the project.
The film, a creative exploration of the increasing disconnection between young people and the living world was catalsyed by the work of writer Richard Louv and his book ‘Last Child in the Woods’.
My dear friend and Citizen dynamo Jon Alexander sowed the seed for this adventure during his time at the National Trust.
Following the release of the film I played a lead role in the creation and mobilising of The Wild Network, the development of the Wildtime app and Wildtime Learning prototype for schools.
These years were an intense deep dive for me into nature (dis)connection, learning, education, how capitalist systems were shaping childhood and wider culture and my journey into wildness.
The Wild Network was a grassroots collective of organisations seeking to create and amplify ways to rewild childhood, create more nature rich communities and influence policy to recognise the need for nature rich lives in an increasingly disconnected world.
It was hard work.
Relentless and massively ahead of its time. Too much so to sustain beyond the 4 years.
During this time I discovered the writer Jay Griffiths and her book Kith, exploring ways of raising children in Western Industrial cultures vs Indigenous approaches. We managed to feature Jay in the film.
This clip from 11 years ago is still striking today, to me it reveals so much of where we find ourselves.
‘The crisis we face is one of mind, perception, and values’
Whilst lecturing at Schumacher College I discovered writer and educator David Orr who’s work Earth in Mind deepened my understanding of how Western Economic systems and ideologies have been shaping education systems to program people to see ‘nature’ as resource to the single story of human ‘economic growth’ based progress.
Economic designs that are dependent on the extraction, destruction and pollution of the living Earth as deemed normal and essential to progress.
Where humans are perceived as individuals born to compete, accumulate and consume, with success measured through productivity and accumulation metrics.
Much of what has gone wrong with the world, he argues, is the result of inadequate and misdirected education.
Education systems that value ‘cleverness’ over intelligence. ‘Know how’ rather than ‘Know Why’
The crisis we face, Orr reckons, is one of mind, perception, and values.
David Orr introduced me to the frames of ‘ecological literacy’ and ‘ecological citizenship’.
‘We need an ecological concept of citizenship rooted in the understanding that activities that erode soils, waste resources, pollute, destroy biological diversity and degrade the beauty and integrity of landscapes are forms of theft from the commonwealth as surely as is bank robbery”
David W. Orr
Exploring and prototyping behaviours and concepts of Ecological Citizenship will be foundational in this youth program.
Awakening the intelligence that lives in connection, relationship and not knowing
In 2013 as part of my own personal rewilding, I set out on a one year nature connection/outdoor learning guide program ‘Call of the Wild’ under the mentorship of Chris Salisbury as did fellow Becoming Crew guide Mark Sears.
Chris introduced me to another level of connectivity with the living Earth, through connection practices, solitude in nature, living wild in community, exploring heart intelligence, story, myth and the imaginal realm. The importance of awe and wonder to the human psyche and imaginal capacities.
Guest teachers like David Abram and Martin Shaw, opened me up to this relational, mysterious dance called life, between humans and more than human territories, the ecological and mythological self as part of a wider web of life.
Working with story, myth, poetry, music, arts, performance, imagination and creative expression and its rootedness in connection with the living Earth through solitude, nature solos and rites of passage will be foundational in the youth program.
We are intimately entangled with the living world
In 2016 I helped co-create and birth the We Are Ocean collective and educational platform World Ocean Day for Schools exploring the deep human connection and interdependence with our blue planet, planet ocean.
When you understand that over 50% of the oxygen we all breathe comes from a complex interspecies relationship in the ocean, then paying attention to its health and halting the destructive stories, policies and behaviors seems obvious and urgent.
And yet ocean health continues to decline from staggering abuse from our capitalist modernity systems.
Growing ecological literacy will be foundational in the youth program.
Learning for a future that won’t exist
In 2019 I started heloing the fledgling Youth Climate Strike movement in the UK with communication support via Good for Nothing.
I had been spending time on the streets listening to school climate strikers, speaking of their frustration of being stuck in educational and political systems that were not preparing them for the futures contexts that are coming.
This was the first time I had experienced groups of well informed young people looking at their elders in power with increasing disbelief, growing anxiety, anger and sense of betrayal.
Through collaboration platform Friday Future Love - we went on a mission to agitate and encourage the creative sectors to work in solidarity with the young to help raise the alarm bells for the first Global Climate Strike.
The story of separation shapes the design of our human systems, our relationship with the living world and to each other
2019 also began 18 months of work exploring story and cultural narratives and how they inform our beliefs and behaviours and shape the design of our extractive economic systems and perpetuate our destructive relationship with the living world and each other.
Stories for Life which emerged from this inquiry, explores the story of separation in our modern Western culture and how we got here. Not only its destructiveness but also to help others notice the illusionary nature of this story today.
Because Western science has finally caught up with ancestral wisdom and what our indigenous brothers and sisters have always known - we are not separate selves, but part of a complex entangled relationship with all living beings and a bio-intelligent Earth, part of nature not apart from it.
Stories for Life has shaped and influenced the core foundational inquiry of Becoming Crew, the composting and re-imagining of this dominant story of our time - the story of separation.
Stories for Life will feature in the youth program as inspiration and provocation.
(un)learning together
Our work at becoming crew carries a belief that we are not alone, as separate selves but rather entangled relational beings, and we are not supposed to navigate this life alone.
We can choose to learn to connect with a much wider community of life, fellow humans and more than humans.
To (un)learn and evolve together in community.
Do you remember community during the pandemic ?
I will finish with this short film from The Dream Space, a project I co-created with fellow Becoming Crew guide Evva Semenowicz during the pandemic. An initiative which created space for communities in Bath to listen to each other, to share and process challenging issues and to dream and imagine different futures.
It’s a reminder that so much is possible when we create space for connection, courage and community and put care at the centre.