For Primary and Intermediate Schools in the Wellington Region.
Natural Leaders is a project that builds a food forest at your school and partners your outdoor loving students with a big buddy from a local highschool to help design and plant the forest.
We are looking to partner with 4 schools in the region to be our pilot schools for the 2025 Natural Leaders program.
We will provide:
- Consultancy and site plans
- Education on traditional ways of growing food forests
- Manual Labour to support the planting and maintenance
- Buddy Mentorship Tuakana-Teina style between high school-aged youth workers in training who have been given training in EcoTherapy and food forest design principles.
- Suited for a mix of Neurodiverse and Neurotypical students who learn better through practical experience.
- Training in Ecotherapy for one of your staff during the term one holiday. 12-18 April.
The school would provide:
- One teacher/teacher aide who is expected to remain at the school for several years to attend the School Holiday EcoTherapy training and who can work with the students during the weeks we are not there.
- Contribution towards initial plant materials.
- This can be money to buy fruit stock or by asking families to provide cuttings and support the project.
- Tools required for food forest maintenance and a safe place to store them at the school.
- you may already have many of these things at your school, but this is a good video to hint at what may be needed going forward. We will try and get funding to have a group of tools we can use when we visit the schools but for now we are trying to figure out what is already available and not reinvent the wheel or spend more where we don't have to.
- 10 students for the design team that will be partnered with our older students.
How to pick the best mix of students
These ten students can be taken from the strata of the school but should be students who would be able to explain it back to the rest of the students and get their feedback. Ideally sourced one from each grade level starting at year two and several from year 6-4. We will teach the students the elements of codesign and they will ask the students in their class what they want in the forest and then bring that feedback to the smaller design team.
- Qualities you are looking for in the the students.
- A person that other students listen to and respect naturally.
- They don't need to be academic but must have a love of nature and a big heart that others feel.
- Creativity is a hopeful bonus.
- We started our pilot to work with all kids that struggled to focus in 4 walls. So our first cohort was quite heavy in neurodiverse and kids with histories of trauma. Which we get, and which we love to work with. However, our greatest takeaway as mentors of the program was that we needed to make sure we had the culture seeded with kids who had ears not just painted on.
- Our Natural Leaders 2025 will comprise the most committed from our pilot, and they will pick the high schoolers they will work with. So, for the first cohort of primary school kids, please make sure, while everything is gelling, that the kids you give us to start with don't have ears just painted on until the student-led culture can handle it.
REWild your School?
If you would like to chat with us about your school becoming one of the pilot Rewilding School's please fill in the details below.
