Coming of Age:
A Nature-Based Program for Teens
Please Join our Community Conversation for Parents of Teens Monday, April 6th from 5:30-7:00pm at Fauna Forest Farm
As a first step toward bringing this rites of passage program to fruition, we are excited to offer this Community Conversation for Parents of Teens. In this space we are eager to hear from parents of teens about your perspectives, challenges, joys, and hopes as your teens come of age. We will also be glad to share about rites of passage and what our upcoming program may look like.
Meet the Guides
Shae’s commitment to supporting teens in the pivotal, often difficult passage that is adolescence grew from her years guiding adolescents and young adults in the field of wilderness therapy. Over and again, she heard teens express how lonely, isolated, and unseen they felt in their lives and in their families as they did their best to navigate the coming of age trials in modern-day times.
Through these experiences, Shae witnessed young people share and confront their sufferings in a context that offered the resourcing and support of the natural world, skilled mentors, and a caring community of peers. She witnessed, through this intentional context, teens turning their pain into a claiming of their own story, agency, and lives. In the words of one teen, “I realize, now, I am on a quest.”
These experiences led Shae to pursue a degree in Clinical Mental Health from ETSU and to partner with Dr. Novotny in the development of a Nature-Based Therapy Graduate Certificate.
Shae brings to this program a love of the developmental passage that is no-longer-child, not-yet-adult, and years of practice supporting young people in their journey of becoming through therapeutic nature-based arts, songs, myth and storytelling, emotional literacy, creative expression, conflict transformation skills, psychoeducation, and the creation of a safe container to hold it all.
Photo by Kennedy Hunt
Kevin brings years of experience working with youth as a forest school instructor, nature-connection mentor, teen mentor, and rites of passage guide. Kevin is passionate about supporting teens with the deepening of aliveness, curiosity, introspection, and creativity that is the hallmark of the adolescent years.
From his personal experiences of being a teen himself at one point and in mentoring teens, Kevin knows the deep instincts that come online in teens for experiencing and exploring the inner self, identity, the emotional world, existential meaning, cosmos, heritage and shifting relationships. To support these explorations in a way that fosters healthy maturation, Kevin calls on myth and story, nature connection, the study of history, ancestral cultures, and philosophy, authentic group connection, emotional literacy practices, and creative expression.
For more info about Kevin’s approach and other offerings see his main bio and/or website
Our Approach
We are excited to be moving towards a long-time dream of offering rites of passage programs on the farm. These programs will be specifically designed to support the beautiful, often difficult, passage that is the teenage-years.
We recognize this passage holds an immense opportunity for adults in teens' lives to support them as they deepen into questions about life, relationships, their emotional worlds and changing bodies, meaning, purpose, and identity. We are committed to contributing to the creation of a vital cultural fabric within which this potent developmental time of self-inquiry, change, depth, identity formation and individuation are held with soulful and attuned mentorship and presence. We believe the teenage years to be a sacred portal meant to ready young people for a thriving young adulthood.
Working with adolescents in a therapeutic capacity over the years has highlighted the modern-day cultural tragedy of far too many young people spending their teenage years largely feeling lost, purposeless, lonely and without positive role models and mentorship. We believe this important time of transformative potential deserves, instead, to be held in community-- with connection, resourcing, creative expression, self-discovery, heartful sharing and witnessing, and experiential learning that supports young people along the journey of maturing into their authentic selves.