A passion for the outdoors
I’m incredibly passionate about outdoor education. During my teen years it provided me with an invaluable anchor through a turbulent time.
When I was younger nothing like the Earth Steward Apprenticeship existed anywhere in the UK. I was lucky enough to get bits and pieces from adult courses with Trackways and some teen camps in the USA. After that I realised that this was my passion and pursued this by doing a year the Wilderness Awareness School.
So the young people who come on our courses are very lucky. They have easier access to something I would have loved at their age. The relationships they make can be sustained and become deeper over time because this is a long-term and regular programme. I feel incredibly lucky to be working with these inspiring, playful and mature teenagers.
What is the Earth Steward Apprenticeship?
It grew out of a weeklong school camp, where the teens who came were hungry for more. Phil developed a programme, where we could meeting monthly from March to October, with overnights in the woods. It culminates in a survival quest, where participants must use all their survival skills and spend 24 hours outdoors with nothing apart from some water and the shelter they build. The idea is that we are giving them time to develop their relationships with themselves, their peers, their mentors and with nature itself.
Some of the practical skills we teach:
- principles of survival
- how to make shelters that will be effective in our climate
- how to collect and purify water from wild sources
- how to forage for wild food
- how to build and tend fires.
However, beyond this are possibly the more valuable lessons about pure connection with nature, how this feeds our psyches and helps us learn about ourselves. There have been some truly magical moments – swimming in the lake at night, spontaneous music making (using a rain butt), singing together and those moments of awe at nature; like when you see a woodpecker feed its young for the first time.
Sacred Earth mentors offer our young people the chance to find themselves in a supportive, non-competitive environment. This is something they rarely experience in the ‘outside world’.
What is ESA Junior?
We started ESA Jr a few years ago, when some younger children really wanted to get involved but weren’t quite old enough for the full journey with a survival quest. So we’ve created a shorter programme that runs alongside ESA for the summer months. It’s full of creativity, crafting, exploration, games and song. We will explore whatever the group gets inspired to do.
Things have evolved over the past eight years and the ESA is now starting to open out to older people. We are bringing more adult mentors in but we are also planning new outdoor education programmes specifically for adults. Watch this space!
Victoria Mew is a nature connection facilitator and member of the Sacred Earth leadership team.
