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Weekly Youth Courses

"I loved my experience at Community School. No other kid my age could score as high as I did on the S.A.T. AND make such a killer bow drill set"
-Joe Tomweya, age 17

The Mission of the Wilderness Awareness Community School is to create an educational environment that helps teen-agers engage their natural intelligence and awakens their innate abilities to perceive and connect with the world around them. Our students immerse themselves in intensive, experiential studies of nature from both scientific and indigenous perspectives. In this effort, our students are instructed and supported by a large, diverse community of mentors from all ages and walks of life.

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Why Study Nature?

For millions of years, humans have lived in direct contact with the natural world, and our senses developed to attend to its rhythms and sounds. It is only in the last couple of hundred years that we have insulated ourselves from nature with things like buildings and cars and pavement. One unfortunate result of this separation is that our senses atrophy from lack of use. With no reason to pay attention to birds, we don't even see them as they fly by. We don't hear the deer or raccoon as they sneak away through the bushes. And we slowly grow deaf to our own intuition and instincts which guide and connect us to the world.

Our goal at Wilderness Awareness Community School is to reawaken this deep awareness of nature in our students. What happens when young people expand their awareness of the world around them and pay attention to their inner voice, their intuition, and their heart is truly remarkable. These students gain an understanding of the natural flow of things that puts them in better balance with themselves and the world around them. As their confidence grows, they find themselves firmly on the path towards developing into physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually centered people.

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