Shared Youth Stories, Dreams & Plans

Project Name: Biotú: Sustainability Education & Awareness Projects in Mexico

Contact Person: Fernando Ausin 

Email: nando.biotour@gmail.com

Website: www.biotu.org

Story: Sustainability education and conscious environmental decisions are in nascent stages in Mexico.  Following a year and a half with BioTour, I’ve returned back home with my friends and family to pursue an ambitious goal in mind: help mobilize, energize, and activate the Mexican population with regards to sustainability and sustainable living.  Incorporating a variety of renewable energy projects come in parallel to help strengthen the project.  One of the most effective tools we will use to create awareness about the opportunities available today that we will use during our project, BioTU, will be the Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream symposium.  Following several pivotal symposiums we participated in the United States, such as the Energy Action Coalition’s Mega-Training symposium on August 2008, and the 1,000 youth environmental leaders from all over the United States that gathered for symposiums during Powershift ’09, we aim to inform, enliven, and help bring the feeling of Blessed Unrest to Mexico.  As a matter of fact, we have already begun this endeavor.  On July 9^th, four Pachamama facilitators (led by Juan Carlos Kaiten, Erik Friend, Beatriz Pineda, and Fernando Ausin) delivered the Awakening the Dreamer symposium to the over 100-person staff at the Mexican National Institute of Social Development (INDESOL.)  After almost 7 hours, the governmental leaders behind Mexican society’s social progress crafted several long lists of commitments, action plans, and proposals to live in a more environmentally sustainable, socially just, and spiritually fulfilling world.  Blessed Unrest permeates the air as social progress began to crystallize into actions.

Project Name: High School Youth involvement in ATD Symposium

Contact People: Tom Magnussen, Leslie Shankman

E-mail: tmag15@comcast.net, leslie.shankman@comcast.net

Story: Leslie and I delivered an edited version of the ATD Symposium to several high school age youth last summer. It was well received. 

This year we are going through the AV material and some of the activities with 7 teenagers focusing on getting their suggestions for making the material more relevant for teenagers. Our immediate goals are to pass what we learn on to those who are working on creating a Youth Symposium, and to make what modifications we can make locally. Our ultimate goal is to get the symposium in front of large numbers of high school age youth in our area within a year.

Project Name: Bus The Change: An Awakening The Dreamer Living School

Contact Person: Angela Romany

E-mail: angela@busthechange.org

Website: facebook.com/group.php?gid=99564908054

Story: The purpose of Bus The Change is to support the common vision and goal to roll the Awakening The Dreamer Symposium across the country in a bus by the summer of 2010, moving as a sort of school on wheels, supported by a curriculum of visionary and profound educational tools and experiences. Witnessing the powerful changes that can be initiated by the Symposium, the vision for the bus is to be able to help participants support, connect and embody that change. One of the key pieces of curriculum we intend to carry is the Youth Symposium, and it has become clear that much of the energy and focus behind this project comes from youth. We hope to be delivering the symposium to young people and through the backup curriculum address and empower youth to really be the change that they are seeking to live within. It has also become clear that a good portion of the crew will be made up of Youth Facilitators.

The idea is that the curriculum of the bus uses the ATD Symposium as the context, or backbone. The Symposium has a simplicity and clarity which comes from showing how the three issues of environmental sustainability, spiritual fulfillment and social justice are completely interconnected. The vision for the bus is that we offer other curriculum to help address the problems in living and embodying that knowledge. We imagine offering education in nonviolent communication, permaculture, co-creative living, storytelling and arts, and also sharing information about Be The Change circles, council work, maybe touching in with Joanna Macy's Work That Reconnects and other things. Basically, we are using the symposium as the centerfuge for the rest of the library of curriculum that our Awakening The Dreamer Living School will be carrying.