First Cohort of our Circle Process Certificate
By Sayra Pinto
Six months ago, we received a request from a tribal member of our community asking for For a Loving Future to put together a circle certificate program. She said:
How come there is no certification program for tribal people that is taught by tribal people?
How come White people can get access to certificates declaring that they understand and can practice this process? Why can they get jobs saying they can do what we do, when they actually cannot do what we do, and we can’t get those jobs? How come we have to live in poverty when others are able to build careers based on what they claim is our cultural legacy?
Beyond those questions and that conversation, and after much soul searching and consultation, For a Loving Future decided to launch its own certification program in partnership with the University of Vermont’s Master’s in Leadership for Sustainability program.
This week, we are conducting our first cohort’s Introduction to Circles process. Our certificate program is building on the infrastructure created by Phil and Harold Gatensby since 1990 by engaging cohort members in the following three learning modules: 1) Introduction to Circles Process; 2) the Immersion Experience through Camp NARES; and 3) Application, Right Relationship and Accountability.
Our Introduction to Circles process tends to questions of mindset and relationship to the world we live in and other humans. Camp NARES is an immersive experience in the Yukon, with Phil and Harold’s family and community and is intended to deepen cohort members’ capacity to draw from multiple ways of seeing and knowing to anchor their circle practice. Our Application, Right Relationship and Accountability module seeks to support and anchor our cohort members’ circle practice in relationships of accountability, transparency, community, and support.
We are thrilled to announce that our very first cohort is actively engaged in completing their first module. They are a powerful, gifted, loving, kind and generous group of people that we hope will remain connected with us for the remainder of the work of For a Loving Future and the Master’s in Leadership for Sustainability program at the University of Vermont. We want to thank the Northeast Native Network of Kinship and Healing, the Academy for Systems Change and Holyoke’s P’Alante Restorative Justice for supporting this effort as members of our very first cohort. Our special relationship with you pervades everything we do and we hope this experience will bring us even closer.
It is no small matter to lead a process sponsored by a state university when you have survived the Canadian residential schools. Phil and Harold have responded and waded into the academic space on behalf of all Indigenous and tribal peoples who desire access to certification and who can benefit from being credentialed. We know that your engagement in this certificate program emerges from the very same deep well of love and care that compelled you to engage the Yukon courts to begin with. We are grateful to you always for your consistent efforts to set us free and to teach us all how to be together in a good way.
Although the For a Loving Future Certificate Program is designed for Indigenous and tribal people, we welcome others who are interested in practicing solidarity with our communities. This is an open invitation to course correct patterns of appropriation and extraction that are rampant today in the restorative justice, transformative justice and healing justice movements. There is a way to be in right relationship, partake of the gifts of ceremony and strengthen tribal communities. We are busily building that pathway and we hope you will join us in that effort.
We will run the certificate program once a year from May through December of each year. Cohort sizes will be small. Our three modules will take place between May and September of each year. A reflection essay is due to complete the certification process by the end of November of each year. We thank you for being part of our community and we hope you will spread word of the certificate program throughout all your networks.
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