Youth Passageways

Youth Passageways is an evolving network of individuals, organizations, and communities supporting the healthy passage of today's young people through childhood and adolescence into mature adulthood. We are a cross-cultural and intergenerational network that includes a broad and diverse range of rite of passage, education, and youth and community development efforts joining together for mutual support, collaborative learning, resource and community development, and to cross-pollinate ideas and practices that foster the development of whole, healthy, and responsible human beings. We are rite of passage practitioners, youth workers, outdoor educators, counselors and therapists, educators, community organizers, scholars, elders, and many others who work to ensure young people grow up healthy, strong and resilient. We are also families and communities upon which those young people depend. Perhaps most importantly, we are youth themselves. Through holding space that calls on ALL voices from all stages of the life cycle, our mission and vision comes most fully alive. We seek unity through our diversity because we see a huge gap in our contemporary approaches to raising and educating our children, a gap through too many of our children falling and one that our experience has taught us can be filled by thoughtful, intentional and community-based initiatory experiences. We believe that in this moment in time, we can no longer afford to be raising children into adults without a deep regard for the kind of adults we want to be bringing into the world and clear ideas and strategies about how to accomplish that. Out of our collective experience over many decades of work, we have come to see that the approaches we have discovered have the potential to make a significant contribution to the wider work of building a more just, healthy and sustainable world. Our broadest aim is to revitalize rites of passage as an integral part of holistic human development on both an individual and cultural level. Ultimately, we seek to gain wider visibility for both time-tested and innovative rite of passage ideas, methods and practices and illuminate strategies to bring them to bear on the wider work of youth and community development. We hope thereby to help support the growth and development of human beings who, in turn, will bring healing to our human and earth communities.