Calling all eco-warriors, adventure-seekers & changemakers!
Do you:
Love being outdoors?
Want to make a real impact?
Like the idea of skipping class (legitimately) to rewild schools?
Then this is for you!
What’s the deal?
Every Wednesday (during school hours—yes, really), you’ll team up to transform Maidstone Intermediate from boring grass into a lush, thriving ecosystems. 
✨ What You’ll Learn:
🌳 Syntropic Agroforestry – Building Food Forests - Next-level gardening that mimics nature.
🌎 Ecotherapy – Learn how to use nature as a tool to help build resilient mental health
💪 Leadership – Lead with heart, head, and guts.
🗣 Mentorship – Guide younger kids & level up your people skills.
🎯 The Grand Finale?
An epic guided wilderness experience
What sort of student are we looking for?
- Big hearted
- Likes working with younger students and being a mentor
- Curious and compassionate
- Not afraid of hard work
- Willing to help design and plant a forest.
- More comfortable outside in nature than indoors.
- Learns better by doing things than by books.
- High energy
- Strong sense of what is right and wrong and fights for good.
- Hasn't lost hope in humanity's ability to fix what we have messed up on the planet through connection and collaboration.
Term 2: Leadership and Syntropic Agroforestry Project Based Learning
Term 2 Wednesday Program
- This term we are developing our leadership team.
- Learning Fire Starting Skills in the winter bush in NZ
- CoDesigning an Upper Hutt Food Forest at Maidstone Intermediate with Clyma Community Gardens and the community.
- The first term is learning creative leadership skills, deepening your Eco Therapy Skills and personal well-being skills, and doing project-based learning on syntropic agroforestry. (Planting in layers of height and over time to create a self-sustaining forest on the school grounds).
Term 3 - Winter Shelter Challenge
Term 3 Every Wednesday of Term
- Shelter Building Skills development
- Knots
- Tipis
- Brushshelters
- Workshops collaborating with groups from around the region.
- Food Forest planting and seed germination.
- Willow outdoor classroom planting.
Term 4: Bushcraft and Food Forest with Primary Schools
Term 4 Food Forest + Sharing Knowledge
- Leaders learn new skills
- Water Purification
- Orienteering
- Foraging for Spring Kai
- Food Forest
- Planting spring veggies
- Students put on bushcraft workshops with students at three regional primary schools.
Summer Rights of Passage
Summer Holiday - Rights of Passage
In traditional Indigenous cultures before colonisation, some still practice a form of the hero's journey with their youth as they transition from child to adolescent and from adolescent to adult.
This is done by inviting the child to shed the things of the stage that came before and step solidly into the new level of life challenge. Usually, this is done by putting them in a situation that puts them right out of their comfort zone but is done with the full support and celebration of the community that holds them.
Our rights of passage programs take a week, and we go bush. For two of those days participants go on their "solo" This means that they spend two days alone in the bush in a spot that they selected while fasting and on a vision quest for the next stage of their life. This is done with expert support from facilitators trained in rights of passage work.
The rights of passage part of the scholarship is optional. However, it is a lovely, powerful, and often life-changing way to end a year of learning and service.
It will happen in the middle of January 2026 but we do not have confirmed dates as of yet.
