08 Déc Rites of passage for healing, justice, & liberation 30 April to 4 May 2025
Rites and Responsibilities:
Restoring rite of passage for healing, justice, & liberation
With Darcy Ottey and Carine Roth
A 5 days immersive seminar
Switzerland
*In english with french translation.
This program is for rites of passage guides, pedagogues, educators, teachers, mentors, social workers and for anyone working with youth who believes that rituals, relations, and community matter in education and mentoring.
Rites of passage are a keystone practice in human cultures: many other elements of cultural health depend on meaningful, relevant, and intentional transition rituals to mark the cycles and seasons of our lives. When such practices are lost or destroyed, everyone suffers. When they are restored, the whole community can flourish.
Through initiatory processes, individuals shed what has become too small for them, and are challenged and supported in developing the inner resources and understandings to fully bring their unique gifts forward – into a world that urgently needs what they have to offer.
Over five days, a small group of educators, guides, and community leaders will come together to explore key rite of passage frameworks and practices essential for bringing meaningful, culturally-relevant rites of passage into the lives of young people in Europe today. We will build a community of mutual care and accountability designed to support each of us in bringing meaningful, culturally-responsible rites of passage ever more deeply into our lives, families, and communities. As we study, share, reflect, practice, grieve, organize, and celebrate, we will create space for our points of connection and shared experience as well as honoring the differences between us. Participants will receive individualized support for the specific contexts they are working in and/or work in caucus spaces as supports their initiatives.
Participants will:
- Connect with others working to bring forth meaningful processes and practices for change and growth into their communities
- Dive into key orienting frameworks for transformation
- Explore the resurgence of rites of passage today, and how these efforts fit in with the decolonization and other global change movements
- Explore rites of passage throughout the lifespan, with an emphasis on adolescence and young adulthood
- Explore the role of identity development in rites of passage, including: dynamics of power, privilege, oppression, and difference, and the ways these manifest in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, ability, class, citizenship, and more – and how this impacts our work and those we serve
- Investigate the causes, consequences, and complexities of cultural appropriation, and co-create ancestrally-rooted, culturally respectful alternatives
- Build capacity to design and/or lead healthy passages, for themselves or others in their community
Please register by February 20th. This will help us ensure adequate participation to run the course by the time we need to commit to the venue.
Where we will be
In a beautiful old chalet in the pré alps in french speaking Switzerland near Les Paccots, Vaud.
More information when you register.
For more information or to join the course,
please contact Carine
We will ask you to write a short letter of intent about why you want to participate to this course. We will also ask you to fill in an health form and to come ready for some time out in nature.
Facilitators:
Darcy Ottey (she/they) is a cultural practitioner, educator, writer, and researcher. The descendant of Quaker settlers, British coal miners, and Ukrainian peasants, rites of passage have been part of Darcy’s life since her youth. This path led her to guide wilderness trips for teens, serve as Executive Director of Rite of Passage Journeys, venture to the lands of her ancestors to understand more of her history, and more. Most recently, she served as Co-Director of Youth Passageways, and recently helped co-found Re-Calling our Ancestors. As a queer, white, middle class, able-bodied woman, Darcy continues the long journey of uncolonizing herself and her people, unlearning hierarchy, scarcity, and division and re-establishing healing alternatives rooted in ancestry, body, land, culture, and accountable relationships. 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 published in 2022 by Lost Borders Press.
carine roth (she/they) is a Swiss Nature and Forest Therapy Guide and a Nature Fast guide with experience in these fields from all over the world. She was also a picture editor and professional photographer for Swiss daily newspapers, and can navigate between the world of industrial knowledge, and of indigenous knowledge. She is the founder of “ceux d’ici” and co-founder of the Swiss organisation “Rite de Passage”, promoting healthy modern rites of passage in Nature for youth and adults.
MONEY:
The question of money is central to the content of this program
Please take a moment to read this invitation 🙂
We ask participants to contribute $470-$2000+ for the 5-day seminar:
- $470 meets the minimum per person cost
- $980 meets minimum course expenses, if we have 10 participants
- $1350 helps to move toward thriving, and/or helps meet minimum course expenses if some contribute less than $980
- $2,000 (or more) supports long-term viability of the work
We ask for a deposit of 470 chf in advance to cover the fixed costs of this offering, and we will invite your further contributions toward helping us reach our needs for the full course offering.
If 470 chf is prohibitive, please contact us to discuss options.
Food will be healthy, delicious and vegetarian.
Accomodation is mainly dormitory
R&R Switzerland
Resource Flow Framework
“Money is like water. Water can be a precious life-giving resource. But what happens when water is dammed, or when a water cannon is fired on protestors in subzero temperatures? Money should be a tool of love, to facilitate relationships, to help us thrive, rather than to hurt and divide us. If it’s used for sacred, life-giving, restorative purposes, it can be medicine. Money, used as medicine, can help us decolonize.” – Activist and author Edgar Villanueva
“The way isn’t forward, it’s awkward.” -Báyò Akómoláfé
As humans today, facing many pressures that disconnect us from the earth, from each other, and from a depth of relationship with the sacred, it is a precious gift to step away from our day-to-day lives and come together, on the land, to learn and grow. This is a gift not just to ourselves, but to our families, communities, the land and waters, and to Life.
We believe that it is essential that experiences like this are held outside of capitalist exchange, and instead are offered as a way to practice gifting, trust, and reciprocity with one another. We understand capitalism to be both cause and symptom of ever-deepening disconnection from our bodies, land, and life-giving community. We hold a vision where how we gift, share, and exchange resources is itself a form of ceremony, supporting us to transform feelings like fear, shame, greed, a sense of scarcity, that can often emerge around money.
We believe that for our practices to truly be part of cultural healing, they cannot be available only to those with wealth – and nor should cultural healing practitioners be left without adequate financial support themselves.
While economic systems rooted in scarcity, hoarding, and coercion have come to dominate globally, many communities have resisted these pressures by preserving and regenerating systems based in dialogue, choice, mutual support, trust, and free-flow of resources. For years, we have been part of communities exploring liberatory ways of engaging with money rooted in accessibility, reciprocity, and reparations, including sliding scales and gift economy, as an essential component of the work of restoring rites of passage in our lives, families, and communities. We have been inspired by those efforts in our networks as well as in broader movements for justice. We give special gratitude to Orland Bishop, Gigi Coyle, and Krystyna Jurzykowski who helped root us in this path, as well as projects like Solidarity Economy, Decolonizing Wealth, and Nonviolent Global Liberation that motivate and embolden us.
Based on our learning to date, these core principles guide our way with money:
- building trust through incremental change
- resource flow based on needs & reparative action
- gift-centered, non-coercive resource flow
- transparent & collaborative ways with money
Toward these ends, we are committed to making our ceremonial work available to all who seek to participate, regardless of their financial means. It is essential for us that finances are not a barrier to participation. At the same time, we ask all participants to deepen their inquiry into their own relationship with money and its relationship with community and with ceremony, as part of this journey.
Each of us has our own unique money story, based on family of origin, current financial circumstances, and more, that can make deciding what to give and what to ask for challenging. We welcome any and all questions into the particularities of our financial circumstances, what programs “charge” for offerings like this, what issues and opportunities have come up for us in gifting processes like this, what else besides cash may serve us in our lives, and anything else.
We are aware of these realities:
- There are direct financial expenses (food, lodging, etc) associated with each participant in the ceremony. These expenses are approximately 470 chf per person, plus an additional 1500 chf collectively. Funds received will first be allocated to cover these direct expenses.
- This offering represents a significant portion of our working energy. We wish to do it well, with sufficient time available to serve each participant and the process fully.
- Neither of us have independent wealth and we do need regular, ongoing, and sufficient income to cover expenses, plan for our futures, and contribute mutual aid for family, friends, and those in our networks who do not have sufficient resources to meet their basic needs.
- We hold a responsibility to the redistribution and reparations of funds directly toward cultural restoration projects toward healing the wounds of colonization that is so deeply intertwined with this work. The last two years this project put 20% of all funds received after direct expenses toward three local Indigenous-led efforts efforts in USA.
Taken all together, this shows us a constrained need of 8200 chf, actual need of 13,429, and 20,830 for thriving support for this Rites & Responsibilities seminar.
We ask for a deposit of 470 chf in advance to cover the fixed costs of this offering, and invite your further contributions toward helping us reach our needs for the full course offering. Cash gifts as well as non-cash, trade or other creative offerings are all welcome.
We know that inviting you into this level of detail may be a lot to receive, and that it can feel easier to simply see a cost and decide if you can afford it – and perhaps to negotiate, apply for financial aid, etc.
We ask you to stay with the complexity as a step toward healing, justice, and liberation. Breathe into it. What do you feel in your body? Where do you feel it? Where do you constrict, where do you expand?
We ask participants to contribute $470-$2000+ for the 5-day seminar:
- $470 meets the minimum per person cost
- $980 meets minimum course expenses, if we have 10 participants
- $1350 helps to move toward thriving, and/or helps meet minimum course expenses if some contribute less than $980
- $2,000 (or more) supports long-term viability of our work
As you consider your own contribution towards the total budget, we ask you to:
- Imagine the possibility of not contributing anything financially, and just receiving the gifts of the seminar. What is it to feel welcome, and not obligated?
- Imagine the possibility of giving generously to this important culture-building offering. What is it to feel abundant and generous, whatever that means for you?
- Imagine the possibility of giving so that it feels like a stretch – but not an overstretch. What is it to move with dignity, honoring your real capacity?
In addition to cash, ways you can support are by:
- Helping to spread the word about the seminar
- Coming with a friend/family member or small group and encouraging others in your community to register
- Asking your community to financially support this offering, and your participation in it, as an investment in community wellness and capacity building
- Brainstorming non-cash ways you can support the work of the seminar and sharing those with us
NOTE: If this is all overwhelming, please start with imagining giving $1350 upfront for the seminar. If this truly doesn’t feel possible, adjust downward until you find an amount that does. If $1350 does feel possible, adjust upwards until it feels like too much. If you find you tend to overstretch, consider contributing just a little less. If you find you tend to constrict, consider increasing your giving just a bit. Don’t overthink it! And please reach out to if you have questions or need support.
This document is an adaptation of the Needs-Based Resource Flow Framework from the Rites & Responsibilities 9-Month Course developed by Shay Sloan Clarke and Darcy Ottey of Adjacent Education & Consulting. Special thanks to Erin Selover for her introduction to Nonviolent Global Liberation’s Needs-Based Resource Flow Model and the work of Miki Kashtan, especially Miki Kashtan’s talk “Living a Gift Economy in an Exchange World.”
“We are a village”