The Ecology of Power & Privilege

A nature-based approach to anti-oppression work

A weekend workshop designed to:

  • Help heal and reconcile the fracture within the human world and in our relations to the more-than-human community.
  • Support participants in finding their place and building collective resilience with nature as our partner.

Overview

There is a powerful historical relationship between our disconnection from the natural world and systems of human oppression. By grounding our social justice work in connection with nature, and our nature connection work in social justice, we gain access to new tools and strategies to bring healing and justice to all wounded places–our psyches, our human communities, and our ecosystems. Join Pinar Ateş Sinopoulos-Lloyd, Darcy Ottey, and Kruti Parekh of Youth Passageways’ Cross-Cultural Protocols Working Group for an experiential, body-based, trauma-informed workshop. Together, we will build an ecological understanding of power, privilege, and oppression, and explore our own niche within these contemporary structural dynamics.

Participants will leave with:

  • Experience exploring power and privilege through the eyes of nature, gaining naturalist skills in awareness, observation, and tracking, and applying them to our social world.
  • Skills to help you recognize your power and privilege, your impact, how to step fully into your power, share it, and be responsible with it as a part of your ecological niche.  
  • New tools for working with trauma, addressing barriers to inclusivity embedded within your program or organization, and interrupting harmful behaviors.
  • Clarity on your personal action steps to actively challenge oppression from your social position.
  • Relationships formed and deepened, to strengthen a community of practice from the region, who can continue to uplift the intersection of nature connection and social justice work.

This program is a collaboration between Youth Passageways, Queer Nature, and local hosts.

Who’s the audience?

This workshop is designed for folks actively engaged in nature connection and/or anti-oppression/social justice work. This workshop works best with a socially diverse and racially/ethnically balanced group; the curriculum can be most effectively delivered with a 50/50 split white/BIPOC. It can be offered in both an introductory version and a seasoned version, depending on the experience level of participants.

Hosts Take Responsibility for:

  • Providing classroom space, outdoor space, flipcharts, markers, and a dry erase board
  • Recruitment of diverse participants and registration
  • Teaching Assistants (1 per 10 participants)
  • Meals for participants*

*maybe flexible on this

Our Team Provides:

  • Powerful curriculum and experience informed by your organizational culture, history and vision
  • All handouts and workshop materials
  • Additional outreach efforts through Youth Passageways & Queer Nature

Budget Considerations

$600 a day per trainer, plus travel expenses (plane flights/mileage reimbursement at standard rate, ground transportation, lodging). This includes a 20% contribution of trainer pay directly to reparations and furthering cross-cultural work.

Maximum of 40 participants; we ask hosts to be very thoughtful in pricing in order to make this an accessible and inclusive offering.

Contact Persons

Bios

Pınar Ateş Sinopoulos-Lloyd has always been allured by how the natural world mirrors one’s internal landscape and the intersections they carry. Enchanted by the liminal, Pınar is a genderfluid QTPOC (Queer/Trans Person of Color) with their mother’s side native to the Americas and father’s side from Turkey which is where they grew up. Their self-designed studies include a B.A. in “Somatic & Depth Ecopsychology” from Prescott College, graduating from the Wilderness Awareness School’s Anake Outdoor School and Wildlife Tracking Intensive as well as other immersive studies at School of Lost Borders, Animas Valley Institute, Naropa University, and Esalen Institute. Living on unceded Arapaho, Cheyenne and Ute territory informs them to keep accountable to the ancestors of the land, currently displaced and future Natives, and how to navigate this terrain as a nature-connection mentor. Pınar is the co-founder of Queer Nature, a collaborative vision with their spouse, So, to cultivate an earth-based queer community rooted in decolonial and queer rites of passage. Pınar’s passions include ancestral skills, the human animal, indigenous solidarity work, natural history, soul work, empowerment of marginalized voices, neurodivergence advocacy, radical mental health, wildlife tracking and the ecological intelligence of emotions.


Kruti Parekh is a Coach for Healing & Justice.  Currently she is coaching leaders in the healing and justice arenas to improve personal and community outcomes.  She has been working synergistically with young people and families in the most marginalized communities in both New York and Los Angeles for 20 years. Kruti’s experience includes: Youth Passageways Stewardship Council and Cross Cultural Protocols WorkGroup, Coach for Healing & Justice for YouthBuild Charter School of California and Sisterhood Rising Leadership Retreat, adult ally at the Youth Justice Coalition, organizing to transform the juvenile and criminal injustice systems; director for youth programs, including YouthBuild and serving as an educator for a domestic violence accountability program. She would like to use her experience to help create the necessary infrastructural changes within Los Angeles County to prevent harm, death and incarceration and increase health, peace and justice.  Kruti has a Bachelor’s Degree from Brandeis University, Masters Degree in Social Worker from Hunter College, a self-proclaimed PhD (People’s health Degree) from the Youth Justice Coalition and a Coaching for Transformation Certification from Leadership That Works. Her goal is to help people bring voice to the things that sometimes get caught between their chest and their throat and to transform spaces of harm and violence into places of solace and serenity.


Since her wilderness-based coming of age experience through Rite of Passage Journeys at age 13, Darcy Ottey has been dedicated to creating intentional rite of passage experiences to help young people mature into healthy, capable adults.  As an initiated European-American woman (British/Ukrainian descent), she is particularly interested in how rites of passage can help develop both the individual capacities and the cultural will necessary to dismantle structures of oppression, as well as the role inheritors of race-based privilege can have in interrupting cycles of oppression those structures cause, helping to allow for the creation of truly thriving communities. Currently Stewardship Council Chair for Youth Passageways, Darcy has worked with a variety of youth-serving organizations as both rite of passage practitioner and administrator.  She holds an M.A. in Environment and Community from Antioch University Seattle.