Empowering youth change makers in Portland through holistic immersive learning and connecting participants to local projects, organizations and community members.

This week-long program is aiming to serve a variety of youth, including BIPOC, Low Income and Neurodivergent participants. The overall goal of this project is to support youth on their pathway toward growing the skills, knowledge and connections to be effective change-makers. This will grow capacity for the local network of folks caring for our communities and environment, and in turn enable sharing with the global information commons.

To meet this goal we will be offering a broad range of activities during the program integrated around the story of connection and interdependence, woven with connection to land, community and self. These activities will range from collaborative group skills to food processing to community land stewardship to mindfulness to political education, centering hands on experiential learning. Hopefully participants will leave the camp with a greater sense of place and belonging, some inspiring new concepts to explore, some new skills to practice and a good handful of new connections to accelerate their growth going forward together.

The camp will take place at Tryon Life Community Farm, a 20 year old ecovillage, Farm and learning center that has consistently held space for social change activities throughout their existence, and in the Tryon State Park hopefully with some stewardship organizations operating in the area. The program will likely be an overnight residential camp. Quinn will be the lead organizer of this program with support from Megan, Kiersten, some folks @ Tryon Life, community members that can support with accommodation, sourcing food, cooking, and other logistics, representatives of various local environmental and Justice based organizations (ideally 10 or more) to facilitate activities and share about opportunities to get involved, a few camp mentors. We have an abundance of connections to make this happen, and some extra funding to pay the right people to come on as mentors and representatives to best relate with the various demographics we aim to have present, and to be able to provide significant scholarship for marginalized and low income youth to participate will go a long way.

Reduce GHG Emissions

This project will directly address the climate crisis by supporting youth to get involved with local projects that focus on such things as ecosystem restoration through community stewardship and creating resilient local food systems both of which reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve ecological capacity to sequester and retain carbon. These are two tangible examples and taking holistic, integrative approaches to these types of projects open up opportunities to impact change in a way that becomes difficult to trace towards something like reducing greenhouse gas emissions in a couple easy steps. This is eco-cultural regeneration, its complex. Impacts happen overtime as relationships, skills, knowledge build and action is taken, influenced from the collective experience of a learning program like this.

Team Expertise, Qualifications, Skills

Megan has a Masters in leadership for sustainability education, she started and directed Jeans Farm- and educational farm for youth in SE Portland, worked in various school districts creating garden based curriculum, and has been teaching this age group for 20 years on this topic at university level doing service based community learning. Quinn (21) has volunteered with many organizations that focus on placemaking, restoration, mutual aid, growing food etc. Through different internships I’ve been apart of, I’ve taught school groups on environmental topics from kindergarten to university groups. I helped to organize the Village Building Convergence with City Repair Project in 2023. I have also helped to organize the Regenerate Cascadia tour in 2023 for multiple locations, which included classroom visits with PPS 5th graders, a day of presentations and workshops, and a network connecting event. This program is about connecting with, learning about and healing through our relationships to the world around and within.

Some of the type of activities we are hoping to provide includes food processing and preservation, healthy nutrition skills, movement for wellbeing, mindfulness practices, growing food/land tending in an ecological way, learning from the land/local ecology/nature connection, place-based history, natural building, climate resilience/earthquake readiness, community experiences/prosocial, service to the watershed/community, earth based spirituality/celebration of some form, creativity and joy, social/ecological justice, systems thinking.

This week-long program is tied to related efforts around Bioregional, or Place-Based learning in the Cascadia Bioregion and the greater Portland area. Related to the Regenerate Cascadia project, we hope to grow networks of Bioregional learning by connecting and supporting local regenerative projects, promoting Bioregional Learning Centers, supporting pathways for young people.