I'm interviewing this week to enter this program next year.
Entrepreneurial Skills & Agile Project Development
This is the nitty gritty of making a living. Every hunter-gatherer needs to find shelter, water, fire, and food. We want to pull people out of jobs where they work in a hierarchical organization and bring them back to a means of support that feels like a team, or even family.
Consider it a Masters of Business Administration that is actually fun and practical. We aim for ways of making a living that immerse you in energizing creativity and a conversation with what is wild. We recognize our students want to rediscover their connection to the natural world but many of them want may want more than being a wilderness educator (we are wilderness educators, we understand). What they need is a fun, sustainable way of making a living that supports their passion and responsibility. We call it "Tribal Business" from the termed coined by Daniel Quinn, author of Beyond Civilization and Ishmael. In a "Tribal Business" everyone finds themselves in the same boat and they need to make a living together. Whether for money, barter, support or all of the above.
With TrackersTEAMS, students assemble into Natural Agile Teams, and through this, effectively self organize to develop key business projects with the goal of making an immediate living for themselves and their team. The project can be anything rooted in sustainability, from an outdoor education program to a fair trade coffee stand. You also learn efficient ways of tackling the most daunting tasks for a business: accounting, organization, quality control and marketing. We look at new and common sense ethics such as being highly transparent (less sell and more yourself) and how inspiring it is to be part of a collaborative team.
-Tony Deis, Core Instructor
Hunter-Gatherer Skills: Habitat as Home
The urban sphere of Portland is unique. The instructors make their own living gathering with seasonal rhythms and so will you. They specialize in plant propagation, gathering and preserving. The Willamette Valley of Portland, Oregon becomes your larder and home. We work to make over 50% of our diet hunted and gathered. This contributes and enhances the Personal Health and Training thematic.
Hunting is a key rite of passage OPTION for those who choose it. This is one of the few residential programs and definitely the most accessible that provides the foundation for you to experience this profound conversation with the living world. Wild edible plants are the basis for healthy living. As you progress through your year you become sewn into the dance of the seasons. Our bodies become clocks attuned to the cycles of the plants.
-David Jacobson, Core Instructor
The Trackers Eye, Mind & Heart
Some people believe an Animal Tracker only follows footprints on the ground. Tracking can be that, but also much more. Included in its scope is the constant awareness of feedback from the land, such as the ebb and flow of bird sounds and songs. TrackersNW commits our support to the best tracking instructors in the country. Our instructors do not consider themselves your mentor but instead the true tracker considers herself a collaborator. You come into our classes knowing our instructors are there to grow with you, the land and the art of tracking.
Tracking connects you to the Hunter-Gatherer thematic and also takes your hyper-sensory awareness to whole new level. Dancing with the animals, a human being perceives and relates in many spheres of ecology simultaneously. The moving and physical body, the categorizing and dissecting mind, and the empathizing heart. You develop tools of perception that find value both in urban and wild landscape. Your mind starts to create living maps
and stories telling us about an entirely different world moving on the edge of our awareness. This peels back layers of perception and we really "step through the looking glass." Check out our latest Tracking Series.
-Billy Williams, Core Instructor
Personal Health & Training: Health & Wellness
In this culture we often ascribe an inability to surmount challenges in our lives to a lack of willpower, or skill, or other such abstract factors, yet often we can find their source in our lack of health and wellness. Mental focus, a positive mental attitude, and a joy in your physical body comes to you as you deeply reflect and act on your own unique nutritional needs, and physical expression. Using such resources as the bio regional martial and movement art SHIFT, you learn from world-class instructors on how to let your primal self out and truly express a wild and hyper competent body awareness. You receive ongoing check-ups and medical care from our in-house Naturopath, who is also a master martial artist and instructs many portions of your SHIFT classes. A core focus is practical training for Body Control including muscle attunement, consciously shifting internal temperature and accelerated healing.
-Molly Strand, Core Instructor
Interpersonal Clarity & Peacemaking
Your skills as a tracker in experiencing the needs and emotional dynamics of wild animals will find application on a profound level in your human relationships. By increasing clarity and honesty of your own needs, and raw feelings, your understanding and empathy in your human relationships shoots through the roof. Then relating to family, village, and collaborators, loses its "high-stakes" element, and you regain balance and receive nourishment of what makes you human. In the same ways you respect the animals you track for their hungers, fears, and joys, you start to understand the people you care for and collaborate with, at a deeply rich level.
-Willem, Core Instructor
Natural Building & Permaculture
Receive your certification in Permaculture Design AND Natural Building. You tackle real world projects that feed and shelter you and our community. Projects become celebrations, houses are refitted to greener flows. Engineering and construction is covered on all levels, including traditional skin on frame boat building and design. Permaculture activities are also abundant, we don't stop in zones 1, 2, 3 and 4 but seem to live on the outskirts of zone 5. We become stewards of our land while looking at the entire Willamette Valley as a garden waiting to happen again.
-Tony Deis, Core Instructor
DIY: GREEN Creative Engineering, Auto Mechanics, Welding & Industrial Design (bio fuels truth and industrial recycling) MacGyver STUFF!
Ever since you were a kid you knew the value of it. Making something AWESOME from nothing! How would you really build the post-apocalyptic bus from the Road Warrior, how do you become the jack of all trades that can only see possibilities from JUNK? Students actually go to junkyards, pull parts, take out the welding torch and make hyper functional rolling, catapulting and floating art!
-Thaddeus Koster, Core Instructor
Wilderness Mentor & Guide
Many wilderness residential programs still reinforce old paradigms of teachers, students and charismatic leaders*. They work towards a goal to create environmental educators for communities based in the natural world. At TrackersNWhighly marketable skills with a foundation in business, arts, team collaboration, and communication. Helping to create healthy communities rooted in the land in a way that actually works. we leave "teaching" behind, especially in the guise of mentors, holding the real world values of collaboration, community and family close to our hearts. Plus, our certification and training works with you to develop
You receive your Wilderness First Responder certification, we teach you kayak and water rescue skills, you learn you how to put together a long term backpacking trip, teach snow and desert camping and all the other logistical nuts and bolts of your classic NOLS or Outward Bound type program. All that plus the addition of truly cutting edge social "nature-based" models of learning.
You help us make TrackersTEAMS models the foundation for community learning. Our models never stop growing and reshaping to become even more effective. We value your input. It is here classes stop being classes and we truly create collaborative places to share and learn. If you have heard of models that include white belts, brown belts, Level 1s, 2s and 3s you have heard of a hierarchal model. Our form of Mentoring is a form of collaboration that you need to experience to believe. There is never an aura of mystery with our instructors. Students cry with us, care with us and live adventure with us.
We take care with asking you to be a volunteer, when we feel confident to include a student in an internship or instructor position at one of our youth or adult programs, WE PAY THEM in order to keep relationships healthy and true. We always live by the axiom of give support, get support and we collaborate with students to constantly find ways of expanding the living of the village to meet their personal needs of sustainability.
-Molly Strand, Core Instructor
Art, Theater, Music & Design
We explore functional ways of making music and art that really tell our story. Many of our instructors are well known Portland artists, designers and theater teachers.
In the art of improv and performance we learn how to spontaneously move together. You start to think and act on your feet and actually celebrate being "caught off guard" as opportunity to be creative. You learn to read your "partner" with subtle and silent communication.
In visual, writing, and verbal arts you develop the craft of storytelling. We feature students works in multiple art showings (if they wish) and suggest many creative possibilities for a living as storytellers who foster more life with their eloquence.
-Shaun Deller, Core Instructor
Synthesis
All these skills work together to produce a truly "wild family." They create in us what we call "bad ass" factor but also hyper-competency. The ability to walk through anywhere and hold your own with confidence and care.
We learn these things as collaborators and the axiom is always "less talk and more rock." Everything becomes hands on. Conversations and debriefs do accelerate the learning yet they take on the feeling of collaborative "jam sessions" that spur your creative process.
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