Restoring Lifeways is a prayer for cultural healing, accountability, and resilience. Together we are building a vision of a world in which our lifeways are restored and youth are initiated into life-sustaining communities.
Our Purpose
Our Purpose
To build a network of material, interpersonal, and spiritual support around leaders and communities practicing both traditional and emergent forms of cultural healing and regeneration.
In this moment on Planet Earth, so many connections to ceremony and ancestral practices have been severed through genocide, enslavement and assimilation. We are culture workers, youth workers, counselors, wilderness guides, educators, restorative justice facilitators, and beyond, dedicated to healing and justice in our communities, who share a vision of reconnection to our ancestors, the land, and the cultural Lifeways that have supported our communities since time immemorial.Â
All our partners, collaborators, and fiscal sponsees carry this vision – engaging in work to dismantle systems that have damaged and denied these vital cultural practices and by rebuilding, re-membering, reclaiming, and co-creating culture – one person, one family, one community at a time.Â
Moving at The Speed of Trust
As a community, we are committed to being in right relations with each other, our communities and the land. In this way, we have developed a set of core values and ethics that guide all our work together – all of which are rooted in our Cross Cultural Protocols. To learn more about how we work together, and the foundational stories that brought us to this point, read on.
Kinship, Unity, and Interconnection
- We recognize the wholeness of humanity in spirit, body, heart, and mind.
- We celebrate intergenerational, cross-cultural collaboration and interspecies connection.
- We acknowledge that our work is a part of a broader effort to restore, maintain, and defend our connection to the greater web of Life.
Equity, Solidarity, and Justice
- We center the voices of those most impacted by systemic oppression and climate change in our community and engage in reparations.
- We work towards healing false dichotomies, holding the creative tension between polarities, and dismantling systems of oppression within ourselves and our organization.
- We honor and celebrate our differences and recognize lineage, sovereignty, and self-determination as essential components of wholeness.
Respect for Time and Place
- We recognize and center the leadership the first peoples of the land in which we live, work and gather. Those of us who are settlers listen for ways to support and repair.
- We listen for the wisdom and guidance of the earth, giving attention to the impact of time and place, honoring the seasons and natural cycles.
- We uphold our work as doing our part contributing to the past, present, and future generations, actively tending our relationships with our local and global communities.
Leadership as Loving Service
- We give ourselves to the vision, the work, and the community with love.
- We believe that how we do things is as important as what we do.
- We uplift shared leadership and fluid, evolving roles, creating circles of accountability and fostering transparent communication.
Cross Cultural Protocols
Serving as an anchor-point and guide star of our cross cultural community, Youth Passageways’ Cross Cultural Protocols (CCP) in Rites of Passage offer a foundational resource and map for how to lean into cross-cultural work and ceremony. Developed almost a decade ago by members of our community, guided by a powerful working group, the CCP form the baseline of how we continue to learn and move together as a community. For the full list of protocols including the introduction, click HERE
