YES Camp! Summer Day Camp

July 1 – August 4th 2012

Summary

Natural Mentors SUmmer Youth Camp is a collaboration between VISFI and Crucian Heritage and Nature Tourism (CHANT). This day camp opportunity takes place during summer for youth ages 9-16 to be engaged in a program that is focused on youth empowerment. The Natural Mentors Youth Camp is an award-winning youth heritage program with the purpose of increasing empowerment and sparking a heritage renaissance among youth in the Virgin Islands.
Natural Mentors Video, by Nate Olive

Each weekly camp will teach hands-on empowerment skills like organic farming, survival skills, music, dance, and storytelling. Junior mentors will document these performances and help the younger camp members produce a community presentation on the Friday of every week. This presentation will be held in downtown Frederiksted.

Program Components

• Safety and Supervision by trained staff
• Mentoring Skill Development
• Music and singing
• Training in sustainable food systems
• Tours of Frederiksted heritage zone with CHANT
• Organic gardening
• Nature Exploration
• Healthy Food & Lifestyle Atmosphere
• Harvesting for VI Locally Grown
• Empowerment Workshops
• Youth leadership training
• Healthy, whole grain and organic snacks and lunches (No School Lunches)
• Self-Epression and ‘nuff respect!

Cost

THERE ARE MANY SCHOLARSHIPS FOR THIS CAMP, JUST ASK!

Weekly Fee per camper: $250 per week, $200 for each additional family member
Limited scholarships available.
Food prepared by UCA’s included in fee.
Camp shuttle is additional cost.

For an Application or More Information,

Contact Us

Agroforestry in the Caribbean is a 15-day Summer Session course held on the Island of St. Croix, in the US Virgin Islands. The UGA course group will be housed and study at the Virgin Islands Sustainable Farm Institute (VISFI), a 100+ acre facility that operates educational programs year round. The VISFI site serves as a model for organic and tropical agriculture, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable forest management. Ridge to Reef Farm is the center of studies and food production for VISFI/

While only a short 3 1/2 hour flight from Atlanta, St. Croix offers a vast opportunity for learning – not only about agroforestry, farming systems and natural resources management but also about cultural heritage and community.

This laid-back rural island is a doorway to the Caribbean with a rich agricultural history dating back to 2000 B.C., from a mysterious cassava-staple people to more recent occupations by colonial powers and the Danes, who constructed hundreds of stone windmills that still stand today.

On the largest of the Virgin Islands, the VISFI campus offers hilltop vistas from the upland watersheds to the sandy beaches and coral reefs. This Caribbean course is an opportunity to experience a unique part of a diverse and interesting world!

Please visit this University of Georgia accredited course website at http://www.uga.edu/ecocarib.
3 hours of college credit may be earned in either Anthropology, Ecology, Forestry, or Crop and Soil Sciences.

Any college student worldwide is eligible to apply! Applications now being accepted for 2012 course. Contact Us for more info or contact UGA on the website above.

AoM 2010 Beach Session

Art of Mentoring Weekend Retreat

Register Now
January 4 – February 5th, 2012

Who should come?

Adults, Parents, Grandparents, Teachers, Students, Outdoor Educators, Naturalists, Farmers, Permaculture Fans, and Sustainable Communities. Visitors & residents of the Virgin Islands

Featuring

Evan McGown - Musician, naturalist, educator, co-author of Coyote’s Guide to Mentoring, and all-around entertainer with an infectious knack for having fun.  Evan has been a tour-de-force in consulting VISFI and Ridge to Reef Farm on how to create a regenerative and healing cultural presence on St. Croix. He recently founded the Institute for WIld Intelligence in the United States.

 Tahirah Abu-Bakr -

Program Host

Nate Olive - Permaculture farmer, musician, educator, started his first peer-to-peer mentoring program while in high school and was named a top ten 2010 Global Innovator by the National Geographic Society for founding Natural Mentors Heritage Farm Excursions, which is based in St. Croix, USVI. Currently he is the Program Director of VISFI and Ridge to Reef Farm.

Through a combination of lecture, storytelling, discussions, group activities, and peer teaching sessions, participants will learn:

As a result of taking this course, participants will:

Experience for themselves how powerful the “cultural context” is in education.

Take home powerful images and metaphors to cultivate a supportive learning environment in their classrooms.

Acquire concepts to facilitate development of their student’s full potentials.

Learn how to use stories and storytelling as an educational tool.

We are looking forward to seeing you here for this unique program and we are deeply thankful for your participation, as it will make a difference not only in your life, but also in the lives of the children and grandchildren to come.

Registration Options

Pre-Jan 15th Camping & Meals $475.00 Post-Jan 15th Camping & Meals $550.00 Local Commuter Rate (lunches only) $295.00 AoM+Permaculture Certificate $1,725.00

Natural Mentors Farm Camp! A collaboration between VISFI and Crucian Heritage and Nature Tourism (CHANT)

Announcing a new day camp opportunity this summer for youth ages 9-16 to be engaged in a program that is focused on youth empowerment. The Natural Mentors Youth Camp! Natural Mentors is an award-winning youth heritage program with the purpose of increasing empowerment and sparking a heritage renaissance among youth in the Virgin Islands.

Natural Mentors will offer a weekday summer camp from June 27 to August 5th.

The 6th annual Bushskills will feature 4 days of hands-on learning about original lifeways with nature. In four days learn useful skills starting with a foundation in basic survival to how to feast using all natural and primitive methods. Come for a single day or for the entire event on this long weekend!

register now (space available)

Summary of events

• Day 1 – Primitive Survival Skills: The basics of tropical living -fire, shelter, water, fibers Featuring Snow Bear, Chris Maness, Nate Olive, & Shelli Brin
• Day 2 – Herbs and Trees: Medicines, herbalism, crafts, and food. Featuring Veronica Gordon, Tony the Palm Weaver, Snow Bear, Nate Olive, & Chris Maness
• Day 3 - Hunting and Gathering: Making hunting tools, ethical hunting and fishing, gathering from wild plants and cultivated plants Featuring Veronica Gordon, Tony the Palm Weaver, Snow Bear, Nate Olive, & Chris Maness
• Day 4 – Food Day: How to grow and prepare an all-natural island feast -an all-day bush cook out!! Featuring Chef Angletta Pascal, Veronica Gordon, Russell Cutts, Snow Bear, Nate Olive, & Chris Maness

Some specific skills taught at bush skills:

• Stone Tools, Flint-knapping
• Shell craft
• Primitive pottery
• Tree Fibers and Food
• Fire by Friction
• Jumbies, Roots, and Ancestral Songlines
• Forest Foraging
• Spears & Nets for Fishing
• Hide Tanning Demonstration
• Herbal Healing
• Calabash Craft
• Wild Edible Plants
• Indigenous root crop planting and other ancient agriculture techniques
• Primitive Cookery
• Tracking
• Primitive Shelter building

Packages

Program package (includes camping, 8 classes, and 3 meals per day)
Full Bush Skills package, with meals and camping included ($225)
Local Day Rate (year-round VI residents): $45 per day

register now (space available)

Are you looking for an empowering and sustainable way to create change in yourself, the land you live on, and your community?

Permaculture is a design science rooted in the observation of natural systems. The principles of permaculture teach us how to design ways of living that have the stability and resiliency of natural ecosystems – they show us positive solutions for creating and managing systems for food, medicine, and building materials, as well as relationships with ourselves, animals, and our communities. Permaculture always keeps in sight three ethics: care of the Earth, care of people, and sharing the surplus.

Permaculture is good news! We have solutions that are available on any scale, and we can make a change that will reach out to future generations.

Instructors:

Brian “Busha” Green, Nate Olive

Bryan “Busha” Green is an agricultural consultant with extensive experience in organic production farming, agro-forestry, farm design, and establishment of bio-regional food security systems. Bryan assists in farm startup operations around the globe. His career has taken him throughout the world including organic mountain farm consulting in the Philippines, organic potato farming in Maine, and management of a 200-acre diversified organic farm in New Mexico. He guided the VIrgin Islands Sustainable Farm Institute through a holistic management process that helped shape their award winning programming.

Bryan has a Bachelors of Science in Horticulture and Plant Science from North Carolina State University and a Masters of Science in Plant, Soil, and Environmental Science with a concentration in Sustainable Agriculture from the University of Maine.

Bryan will be a primary instructor and student advisor for the Ridge to Reef Beneficial Farmer Training course, Permaculture, and more to come as he works with Ridge to Reef Farm at VISFI for the 2011 program season!

RECENT INSTRUCTORS:

Penny Livingston-Stark

Penny Livingston-Stark is internationally recognized as a prominent permaculture teacher, designer and speaker. See her CBS interview above!

Penny has been teaching internationally and working professionally in the land management, regenerative design and permaculture development field for 25 years and has extensive experience in all phases of ecologically sound design and construction as well as the use of natural non-toxic building materials. She specializes in site planning and the design of resource-rich landscapes integrating, rainwater collection, edible and medicinal planting, spring development, pond and water systems, habitat development and watershed restoration for homes, co-housing communities, businesses and diverse yield perennial farms.

With her husband James Stark, and in collaboration with Commonweal – a cancer health research and retreat center – Penny co-manages a 17-acre certified organic and certified salmon-safe farm in Bolinas, California, called the Commonweal Garden. In addition, Penny and James are stewarding and working to restore 200 acres of land in Trinity County, California.

Penny co-created the Ecological Design Program and its curriculum at the San Francisco Institute of Architecture, and she co-founded the West Marin Grower’s Group, the West Marin Farmer’s Market and the Community Land Trust Association of Marin. Penny has also worked with the Marin County Community Development Agency and Planning Department to develop recommendations on sustainability for updating the Community Plan.

Penny is a founding member of the Natural Building Colloquium, a national consortium of professional natural builders, creating innovations in straw bale, cob, timberframe, light clay, natural non-toxic interior finishes and other methods using natural and bio-regionally appropriate materials for construction.

Brock Dolman

Brock Dolman is the Director of OAEC’s WATER Institute. He is also the director of OAEC’s Permaculture Program, he co-directs the Wildlands Biodiversity Program and he co-manages the Center’s biodiversity collection, orchards and 70 acres of wildlands. Living up to his specialized generalist nature, and rekindling the dwindling art of the peripatetic natural historian, his experience ranges from the study of wildlife biology, native California botany and watershed ecology, to the practice of habitat restoration, education about regenerative human settlement design, ethno-ecology, and ecological literacy activism towards societal transformation.

For additional information and to enroll in Ridge to Reef Beneficial Farmer Training:

• Ridge to Reef Main Page
• Contact Us