Currently in Portland, OR watch for Bend Fall 2010
Nov 1, 2008 Applications for Fall 2008 now being accepted
Mail Residential Program Application in PDF
Email Residential Program Application in WORD
WHEN Sept 2008- June 2009. Meets
Tues, Weds, and Thurs
WHERE The Urban and extended Wilderness & Community land of the Willamette Valley and the Pacific Northwest. Our studio space and tea house, "The Oaks" in Sellwood, OR.
*Includes 4 nights a week of optional SHIFT: Martial and Movement Arts training.
TrackersTEAMS Immersion Program
Adult Residential Program
The TrackersTEAMS Immersion Program is our 9 month Residential and the most intensive program for learning hunter-gatherer skills, keen awareness, martial-arts, green mobility and living, interpersonal clarity and peacemaking principles, entrepreneurship, permaculture and personal health. For more information Contact Us.
The TrackersTEAMS Immersion Program provides undergraduate and graduate courses that cover several core themes that significantly compliment and enhance each other:
| 1- TrackersTEAMS: Rooted in the Reality of Success Self-Organizing Teams are the new paradigm for collaborative learning and leadership. Eliminate hierarchical systems and replace them with truly democratic models of working together. We look at a family, a village, and a community as a team where everyone has gifts to share. |
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TrackersTEAMS principles come from a place you would not expect, the high-tech world of software development. Truly innovative software developers often detest hierarchy and celebrate getting work done well and quickly with common effort. They call this model Agile Teamwork. With the blessings of our elder and internationally renowned team consultant Diana Larsen, we have combined the awareness of ecology with agile teamwork principles for a highly effective way of getting things done. We call it Natural Agile Teams. TrackersTEAMS helps you foster sustainability in both learning and working. As we work through our year we take on core routines of facilitation and find that coming together generates better communication and healthier results. While many models sound great on a whiteboard or flip chart, Natural Agile Teams yields results tested by some of the most successful collaborative entrepreneurs and companies today. -Tony Deis, Core Instructor |
2- Hunter-Gatherer Skills: Habitat as Home The urban sphere of Portland is unique. The instructors make their own living gathering with seasonal rhythms and so will you. They specialize in plant propagation, gathering and preserving. The Willamette Valley of Portland, Oregon becomes your larder and home. We work to make over 50% of our diet hunted and gathered. This contributes and enhances the Personal Health and Training thematic.
Hunting is a key rite of passage OPTION for those who choose it. This is one of the few residential programs and definitely the most accessible that provides the foundation for you to experience this profound conversation with the living world. Wild edible plants are the basis for healthy living. As you progress through your year you become sewn into the dance of the seasons. Our bodies become clocks attuned to the cycles of the plants.
-David Jacobson, Core Instructor
3- The Trackers Eye, Mind & Heart, plus Bird Language Some people believe an Animal Tracker only follows footprints on the ground. Tracking can be that, but also much more. Included in its scope is the constant awareness of feedback from the land, such as the ebb and flow of bird sounds and songs. TrackersNW commits our support to the best tracking instructors in the country. Our instructors do not consider themselves your mentor but instead the true tracker considers herself a collaborator. You come into our classes knowing our instructors are there to grow with you, the land and the art of tracking.
Tracking connects you to the Hunter-Gatherer thematic and also takes your hyper-sensory awareness to whole new level. Dancing with the animals, a human being perceives and relates in many spheres of ecology simultaneously. The moving and physical body, the categorizing and dissecting mind, and the empathizing heart. You develop tools of perception that find value both in urban and wild landscape. Your mind starts to create living maps and stories telling us about an entirely different world moving on the edge of our awareness. This peels back layers of perception and we really "step through the looking glass." Check out our latest Tracking Series.
-Billy Williams, Core Instructor
4- Personal Health & Training: Health and Wellness In this culture we often ascribe an inability to surmount challenges in our lives to a lack of willpower, or skill, or other such abstract factors, yet often we can find their source in our lack of health and wellness. Mental focus, a positive mental attitude, and a joy in your physical body comes to you as you deeply reflect and act on your own unique nutritional needs, and physical expression. Using such resources as the bio regional martial and movement art SHIFT, you learn from world-class instructors on how to let your primal self out and truly express a wild and hyper competent body awareness. You receive ongoing check-ups and medical care from our in-house Naturopath, who is also a master martial artist and instructs many portions of your SHIFT classes. A core focus is practical training for Body Control including muscle attunement, consciously shifting internal temperature and accelerated healing.
-Molly Strand, Core Instructor
5- Interpersonal Clarity & Peacemaking Your skills as a tracker in experiencing the needs and emotional dynamics of wild animals will find application on a profound level in your human relationships. By increasing clarity and honesty of your own needs, and raw feelings, your understanding and empathy in your human relationships shoots through the roof. Then relating to family, village, and collaborators, loses its "high-stakes" element, and you regain balance and receive nourishment of what makes you human. In the same ways you respect the animals you track for their hungers, fears, and joys, you start to understand the people you care for and collaborate with, at a deeply rich level.
-Willem, Core Instructor
6- Natural Building & Permaculture Receive your certification in Permaculture Design AND Natural Building. You tackle real world projects that feed and shelter you and our community. Projects become celebrations, houses are refitted to greener flows. Engineering and construction is covered on all levels, including traditional skin on frame boat building and design. Permaculture activities are also abundant, we don't stop in zones 1, 2, 3 and 4 but seem to live on the outskirts of zone 5. We become stewards of our land while looking at the entire Willamette Valley as a garden waiting to happen again.
-Tony Deis, Core Instructor
7- DIY: GREEN Creative Engineering, Auto Mechanics, Welding & Industrial Design (bio fuels truth and industrial recycling) MacGyver STUFF! Ever since you were a kid you knew the value of it. Making something AWESOME from nothing! How would you really build the post-apocalyptic bus from the Road Warrior, how do you become the jack of all trades that can only see possibilities from JUNK? Students actually go to junkyards, pull parts, take out the welding torch and make hyper functional rolling, catapulting and floating art!
-Thaddeus Koster, Core Instructor
8- Wilderness Mentor & Guide Many wilderness residential programs still reinforce old paradigms of teachers, students and charismatic leaders*. They work towards a goal to create environmental educators for communities based in the natural world. At TrackersNW we leave "teaching" behind, especially in the guise of mentors, holding the real world values of collaboration, community and family close to our hearts. Plus, our certification and training works with you to develop highly marketable skills with a foundation in business, arts, team collaboration, and communication. Helping to create healthy communities rooted in the land in a way that actually works.
You receive your Wilderness First Responder certification, we teach you kayak and water rescue skills, you learn you how to put together a long term backpacking trip, teach snow and desert camping and all the other logistical nuts and bolts of your classic NOLS or Outward Bound type program. All that plus the addition of truly cutting edge social "nature-based" models of learning.
You help us make TrackersTEAMS models the foundation for community learning. Our models never stop growing and reshaping to become even more effective. We value your input. It is here classes stop being classes and we truly create collaborative places to share and learn. If you have heard of models that include white belts, brown belts, Level 1s, 2s and 3s you have heard of a hierarchal model. Our form of Mentoring is a form of collaboration that you need to experience to believe. There is never an aura of mystery with our instructors. Students cry with us, care with us and live adventure with us.
We take care with asking you to be a volunteer, when we feel confident to include a student in an internship or instructor position at one of our youth or adult programs, WE PAY THEM in order to keep relationships healthy and true. We always live by the axiom of give support, get support and we collaborate with students to constantly find ways of expanding the living of the village to meet their personal needs of sustainability.
-Molly Strand, Core Instructor
9- Art, Improv, Music & Design We explore functional ways of making music and art that really tell our story. Many of our instructors are well known Portland artists, designers and theater teachers.
In the art of improv and performance we learn how to spontaneously move together. You start to think and act on your feet and actually celebrate being "caught off guard" as opportunity to be creative. You learn to read your "partner" with subtle and silent communication.
In visual, writing, and verbal arts you develop the craft of storytelling. We feature students works in multiple art showings (if they wish) and suggest many creative possibilities for a living as storytellers who foster more life with their eloquence.
-Shaun Deller, Core Instructor
10- Entrepreneurial Skills & Agile Project Development This is the nitty gritty of making a living. Consider it a Masters of Business Administration that is actually fun and practical. We recognize many people want to rediscover their connection to the natural world but many of our students my want MORE than in being a wilderness educator (we are wilderness educators, believe us, we understand). What they need is a fun, sustainable way of making a living that supports their passion and responsibility. We call it "Tribal Business" from the termed coined by Daniel Quinn, author of Beyond Civilization and Ishmael. In a "Tribal Business" everyone finds themselves in the same boat and they need to make a living together. Whether for money, barter, support or all of the above.
With TrackersTEAMS students assemble into Natural Agile Teams and through this effectively self organize to develop key business models with the goal of making immediate revenue for themselves and their team. The project can be anything green from an outdoor education program to a fair trade coffee stand. You also learn efficient ways of tackling the most daunting tasks for a business: accounting, organization, quality control and marketing. We look at new and common sense ethics such as transparency and collaborative teams and leadership.
-Tony Deis, Core Instructor
10.5- Pirates & Ninjas Need we say more?
11- Wrapping It Up All these skills work together to produce a truly "wild family." They create in us what we call "bad ass" factor but also hyper-competency. The ability to walk through anywhere and hold your own with confidence and care.
We learn these things as collaborators and the axiom is always "less talk and more rock." Everything becomes hands on. Conversations and debriefs do accelerate the learning yet they take on the feeling of collaborative "jam sessions" that spur your the creative process.
Core Instructors If you counted only our core instructors, we have over 75 years of combined experience in herbal medicine, environmental education, nature awareness skills, survival skills, permaculture, team skills and much more. Included beyond this is our key community advisors and members that you meet throughout your year.
Tony Deis (pictured with Molly) has always loved
his great Italian family; sitting with the grandpas
and grandmas, playing horseshoes and bocce ball with
the kids, working in the garden and eating good food
together. For the past eleven years Tony has developed and taught outdoor education classes with The Audubon Society of Portland, Metro Regional Parks and Greenspaces and other Portland outdoor education organizations. Tony eventually founded TrackersNW,
an outdoor education organization rooted in fostering community and knowledge of place. As practitioner of many martial
arts, as a writer, an artist and a maker of fantastic Sicilian pizza, Tony is working to
connect more people to the land and their families
in a beautiful way.
YouTube BIO! |
Molly Strand, Self Defense Skills Instructor, Molly has a passion for travel, foreign languages and culture, classical music, outdoors adventuring, and empowering people through self awareness and self defense. A native Oregonian, Molly received her Bachelors degree in German from Davidson College in North Carolina and spent a year in Germany, also traveling throughout much of Western Europe. | |
| She trains and teaches the martial art of Poekoelan Tjimindie Tulen and is a certified Tulen Self Defense Instructor, teaching kids and women about safety and strength. She is a self-defense instructor with Artemis Adventures and is a Trackers International safari representative to Botswana and beyond. Molly is also an avid cellist in the Central Oregon Symphony, snowboarder, fluent speaker of German, dabbler in languages such as Italian and Portuguese and lover of cats. | ||
YouTube BIO! |
Willem Larsen, Culture Mediator- Willem is Maestro of Ceremonies for many of TrackersNW's team processes. His work with tools of clarity and communication make the way for peacemaking in our business and our programs. He mixes agile and Collaborative Team tools employed by some of the top tech development firms such as Google and Nokia with Taoist philosophy and Military training methodology to form a highly effective model for wilderness education. | |
| He apprenticed with one of the lead team development consultants in the world and has been working in environmental education for 12 years. Willem appreciates "cutting through" the drama to help people find highly functional ways of working and caring for each other. He also focuses on teaching linguistics and different language matrixes to actually facilitate new mind sets for learning through his College of Mythic Cartography Blog. As an instructor of riddle-making, place-making, mythology, animal movement, and wilderness survival, Willem is the glue that keeps us tight. | ||
YouTube BIO! |
Thaddeus Koster, Lead Instructor & Resident Genius, Thaddeus was 4 years old when he would pick up bent nails at his dad's construction sites. He would then straighten them and use them for his own building projects. In the rural outskirts of Portland, practically living in a junkyard, Thaddeus learned how to weld, make anything run from any parts and specialize in "creative engineering" learning instantly read all the tolerances of all our gear and equipment (as he often is the one who made most of it). | |
| Thaddeus spent 2 years as crew leader in the Youth Conservation Core, 3 more years in environmental education, he is certified by several long term survival skills programs and is one of the foremost experts on primitive skills in Portland. He is trained to avalanche level 1 and also a former fire fighter. This is the man who can create anything from nothing! Our lead in training "McGyver™ like" skills. He is also a highly experienced white water and sea kayaker, boat builder, dog sled musher and motorcycle enthusiast. | ||
YouTube BIO! |
Dr Mike Owen, ND , Naturopath & Fitness Trainer, has been doing martial arts since he was born. Mike's parents raised him in one of the most acclaimed knife fighting, kali stick, ju jistu, muay thai, american boxing and jeet kune do schools in the country. After training with his parents, Mike went on to work with key masters in each of these respective styles. | |
| He become a naturopathic physician and practiced medicine for over a year in small Nicaraguan village. Dr. Mike says that his time as a professional skateboarder has done more to inform his skill as a martial artist than anything else. | ||
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Billy Williams, Jedi Master- Billy enjoys training and coaching Brazilian Ju Jitsu, observing life and nature, connecting to the land through ancient skills, raising a family., playing old time music, spending time with friends and family and cutting metal in the machine shop. Many trackers take note that no one really knows the limits to Billy's skills and perception. We often rely on him for our Jedi Training Programs. |
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David Jacobson , Skills Instructor -David enjoys eating good food and draws from his background in botany, wildlife ecology, and wilderness living skills in order to eat well on our programs. Combining urban, and wilderness foraging strategies he assists students in learning to create crawfish stew and wildcrafted meads. David also graduated with a BS in Botany from the Evergreen State College. During his time as a "Greener" he took it upon himself to do extensive independent study contracts in pressure release study and other aspects of tracking and natural history. One critical aspect of David's educational philosophy is his attentiveness to safety of students and the requirement that every lesson needs to functional. "I will never ask a student to do something that does not have a real purpose. We learn about tracking to actually find the animal, not simply as an academic study." |
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Shaun Deller, Lead DIY Instructor -Shaun is an artist, designer, bicycle fanatic, observer and participant in the wild and urban landscape. He grew up in Pennsylvania and moved to Portland after graduating from The Maryland Institute College of Art. His interests in art and the wilderness then converged into an exploration of wilderness arts. This includes skills such as hide tanning, sewing, fire making, tracking, shelter building, and awareness of plants and animals. He loves to share this knowledge and excitement with the world around him. His company Deller Recycled Apparel specializing in high quality bike style hats from recycled material. |
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Urban Scout has a deep ancestral relationship with this land; his great, great grandfather lies buried in N.E. Portland. He proudly dropped out of high school at 16 to begin his life-long unschooled journey of rewilding. He manages a non-profit, mythmedia, that he founded at 19 years old, keeps a popular blog about rewilding and created a popular international internet forum and wiki for fellow people-who-rewild. Locally, Urban Scout has been an environmental educator with CascadiaWild, Friends of Tryon Creek, Audubon Society and TrackersNW. He has received both local press in the The Oregonian, Portland Mercury, Willamette Week and national press in ReadyMade Magazine. Despite all of this, he still remains a penny-less celebrity anarchist. Well, he does have one Penny… And her value far exceeds that of your average coin. So there you go. |
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Emily Porter, Tracker of Plants, Breaker of Hearts- Emily enjoys trips to the roadkill graveyard, identifying and gathering never before seen (at least to her eyes) mushrooms. Emily has a degree in environmental studies from the University of Pittsburgh. Her commitment to the natural world was solidified when she ran away in a dugout canoe when she was 16 years. When she is not diligently hunting and gathering around the urban landscape or Portland she is up keeping her Penny Scout blog. Yes that is she. |
*aside from the occasional weekend rendezvous with Urban Scout we really work hard leave behind the notion of charismatic leaders
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