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Annie has been working with young people for a decade or more. Currently she focuses on two main areas.
One is Circle of Life Rediscovery where she co-creates the residential programme of one off camps and longer youth training schemes. Annie also works on an initiation ceremony in Vermont in the US.
Circle of Life Rediscovery is a community interest company (CIC) offering unique, radical environmental educational camps.
The camps are held deep in a woodland near the south coast of England. The campsite boasts an exquisite roundhouse with mossy roof and living trees incorporated in its design. Here, young people learn woodcraft and nature awareness skills; participate in exercises to encourage self esteem; discover how to live with the bare minimum – no showers, compost loos, cooking round the fire – and always there is an emphasis on fun
through games, drumming and story telling round the fire.
Our belief is that taking away familiar props like showers and hairdryers and mobile phones and warm houses and substituting not privation, just difference – the light of the moon and the smell of wet plants and of wet plants and the pleasures of sleeping next to the earth, of lighting a
fire with just a few sticks and old leaves, of making patterns on the ground with some old fir cones, of sitting round a warm fire, wrapped in the dark, listening to a tale of long ago, realities change very fast. So after a few days a young girl can remark with surprise, ” when my mum arrived she seemed to be coming from a different world.”
In this new and ‘other’ place, change comes quickly. Here old patterns fall away and each situation is more easily met afresh. If kindness and stimulation and firmness are offered, in a remarkably short time, the response is appropriate and old patterns of laziness and resistance fade, at least for this short time. The next generation will have to deal with complex issues relating to our
environment and make decisions about what needs to be conserved. They will have to make difficult choices about transport, heating and food; perhaps have to live with extreme long-term or sudden chaotic changes in our environment. For them, these camps offer an opportunity to start learning how the natural world operates. Not in a dry textbook way but for real.
