CORE GUIDE

Shula (she/they) is a community ritualist, Jewish educator, and trans theologian. Shula lives as a white settler on Nipmuc Land, and traces their ancestry from diasporic Ashkenazi Jewish peoples from the Danube and Dnieper watersheds. She is neurodivergent, working-class, chronically ill, and transgender, with citizenship and education privilege. They serve movements for flourishing and collective liberation through her work with Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education and as the Program Director for Taproot. Shula is an apprentice of bird-language, the tarot, and stretching strudel dough.

CORE GUIDE

Darcy Ottey (she/her) is a writer, researcher, cultural practitioner, and educator. The descendant of Quaker settlers, British coalminers, and Ukrainian peasants, relationship-centered cultural practices have been part of Darcy’s life since her youth. As a queer, white, middle class, able-bodied woman, Darcy continues the long journey of uncolonizing herself and her people, challenging her own complicity in systems of hierarchy and division and working to offer healing alternatives rooted in ancestry, body, land, culture, and accountable relationships. The leading edge of her work is exploring the ways that such practices can inform efforts to disrupt and provide alternatives to white nationalist and other far-right recruitment efforts towards hate. Grateful for her teachers and mentors, Darcy’s work is in accountability to the intergenerational web of relationships that make up Youth Passageways, the many beings of the Methow River watershed, and her ancestors. She loves dancing (especially under the full moon), learning to make Slavic folks dolls, and preserving food and plant medicines.Darcy’s first book, Rites and Responsibilities: A Guide to Growing Up, was recently published by Lost Borders Press.

CORE GUIDE

Sharon Shay Sloan (she/her) is a community steward committed to nurturing communities and communities of practice. She is Ulster Irish, tracing her roots to where land meets sea in northeastern Ireland. Shay is practitioner of rites of passage, circle practices, inquiry/emergence, and a fierce advocate for cultural reclamation and renewal for collective liberation. Shay is a life-long learner and engages life as inquiry for healing and justice. She has especially learned from Indigenous Peoples, people of color and white settlers committed to healing and reimagining social fields. She is co-editor of the book Protecting Wild Nature on Native Lands and co-author of the report “Cross-Cultural Protocols in Rites of Passage: Guiding Principles, Themes and Inquiry.” Most recently, she served as co-director of The Ojai Foundation, stewarding the organization through fire recovery, evolving communal practices and reimagining its future. After hours, Shay can be found enjoying wild waters or playing with her son, Kian.

SUPPORT GUIDE

Will Scott (he/him) is a co-founder and lead facilitator at the Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education (www.weavingearth.org), based on Southern Pomo Territory (Sonoma County CA). Weaving Earth works at the crossroads of social and environmental systems change through restoring, remembering and cultivating an embodied awareness of our interrelationship with people and planet. Will's lineage comes primarily out of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Great Britain, Italy, Germany and France, and carries the complex weaving of both persecutors and the persecuted. As a person carrying an array of unearned privileges, reckoning with this heritage in service to transforming legacies of dominance, oppression and disconnection is part of his daily life, work, and prayer. Will has been a student of the natural world and the human-nature relationship for over 25 years, and has guided people through life transitions via nature-based rites of passages for nearly two decades. He is indebted and accountable to a rich tapestry of teachers, teachings, and places -- many of which survived despite facing unrelenting oppressive forces. Will is a wildlife tracker, naturalist, bird lover, facilitator, mentor, artist, rebel, uncle, brother, and community member. Along with so many others, he has dedicated his life to co-creating a more just and resilient future for the generations to come. In all aspects of his work, Will focuses on strengthening relationships as an essential praxis for our times. He loves pomegranates, and makes a mean cup of coffee.

SUPPORT GUIDE

Meagan Chandler (she/her) has cultivated herself as an embodied arts educator and a performance and ceremonial artist. Her ancestral pilgrimages have thus far lead her to the land in Alba, Éireann, Cymru, Briton, Western Europe and Scandinavia. Meagan comes from an educated, working class family with citizenship privilege, and now lives in the ancestral home of the Tewa people in Santa Fe, NM in the Galisteo water shed. She performs and directs a rich array of original works and cultural art forms and teaches people of all ages and walks of life across the U.S. and around the globe. Meagan grew up in Golden Bridge’s Youth Leadership Programs, and has served on the leadership team for 17 years. Through many creative mediums and with great playfulness she devotes herself to nurturing relational paradigms and cultivating the seeds of human cultural that will nurture the Holy Wild World for generations to come. She can often be found singing for all occasions, learning new hand crafts, and trying new recipes in the kitchen.

ACCOUNTABILITY PARTNER

is a nonbinary, Nigerian-Visayan-Hispanic+ american diasporic polymath: a liberation psychology researcher and writer invested in contributing to a more affirming Black and brown, Two-Spirit, trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive mental healthcare; an artist; youth educator, facilitator; musician; poet; skater; practical magician; model; organizer. mx. j. owns a consulting and coaching biz, Mx. Lifestyling, that aids individuals, organizations, and institutions though major life and systems changes.

ACCOUNTABILITY PARTNER

Sobey currently holds the role of President of Kathara Pilipino Indigenous Arts Society based in the Unceded Coast Salish Territories of the xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. The goals of the society are to continue to support reindigenizing and decolonizing as pilipino diaspora living away from our homelands. This includes with it a focus on rites of passage. We consult with indigenous people both in the Philippines and with the First Nations people of Turtle Island in doing our work and partner with many organizations. We also strive to be in solidarity with both the indigenous peoples of the Philippines especially those in Mindinao as well as on Turtle Island. Sobey serves as an Advisor to Youth Passageway which seeks to unite local and international rites of passage practitioners, wilderness guides and youth mentors to integrate services, create a clearing house for best practices, and help awaken mainstream educators to the elemental language of ritual.

ACCOUNTABILITY PARTNER

brontë’s work and rest is guided by the call that “black wellness is the antithesis to state violence” (Mark Anthony Johnson). as a black-latinx transdisciplinary artist, designer, trickster, educator and wakeworker, their eco-social art praxis lives at the intersections of black feminist placemaking & abolitionist theologies, environmental regeneration and death doulaship.

they embody this commitment of attending to black health/imagination, commemorative justice (Free Egunfemi) and hospicing systems of oppression through serving as creative director for Lead to Life design collective and ecological educator for ancestral arts skills and nature-connection school Weaving Earth. they are currently co-conjuring a mockumentary with musician esperanza spalding in collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony and stewarding land with their partner in unceded Kashia Pomo territory in northern California.

mostly, brontë is up to the sweet tender rhythm of quotidian black queer-lifemaking, ever-committed to humor & liberation, ever-marked by grief at the distance made between us and all of life

ACCOUNTABILITY PARTNER

I am a Counseling Psychologist with four years of experience in diverse roles including working with children with intellectual disabilities and neurodevelopmental disorders, refugee children, and children living in informal settings in Kenya, Uganda, and Ghana. I am currently training as a Somasource Practitioner with Golden Bridge where I serve on the Golden Bridge Social Justice Advisory Team and a mentor on the \Golden Bridge Support Team. I am trained in Child Protection: Children’s Rights in Theory and Practice through HarvardX. I currently work as a school counsellor at Multikids Inclusive Academy, in Accra Ghana where I support children with neurodevelopmental challenges.

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Since 2008, I have founded and helped to develop several organisations serving youth in Western Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Cameroon, and Uganda. My projects have offered training and programs to youth in the fields of literacy, social entrepreneurship, anti-violence, and youth leadership and mobilisation. In 2014, through the impact of my work with A Million Faces-Renaissance, an organisation I founded to increase access to education for children in the informal setups of Kayole in Nairobi, I was selected by A World at School to represent my country as a Global Youth Ambassador. In early 2018, I was selected as one of the Emerging African Leaders and trained in “Leading in Public Life” by the University of Cape Town, South Africa