Wild food foraging offers us an immediate re-connection with the ecosystems we’re part of and how we too are part of nature. It’s fun, fascinating and full of opportunities to learn about more than just plant identification. Teaching and harvesting wild food can support a deeper inquiry in to our indigeneity and in to somatic awareness. It also has great potential as a catalyst to stimulate conversations about challenging topics from race and class, to climate change and mental health.

A relationship with the food that grows all around us is such a fundamentally natural activity for us human animals – how can we work with it to support interest and understanding about the wider world?

This course is an opportunity to deepen in to this beautiful and practical skill whilst opening up ways to engage with others around creative and challenging themes. We will spend time with the plants in group, solo and pair activities, with simple techniques to integrate wild food foraging into your events, and / or to take what you already do with wild food further!

You will gain information, inspiration, deepened awareness, ideas and a few recipes too.

Activities will include:

• A foraging and plant identification walk including a chance to make something together for lunch
• Embodied awareness exercises to deepen our connection while we forage
• Exploration of challenging contemporary themes including consumer culture, extractivism, indigeneity, class, race, solidarity and mental health, and how the process of foraging can support healthy conversation and inquiry in to these often difficult topics
• Stories of how foraging is, has been and could be integrated in to healthy community life
• Part of the afternoon will include time to focus on your own interest from the wider explorations with some coaching and time for questions
  

This course is for you if:

• You love foraging for wild food and want to learn more, including ways that this age old human activity weaves with other aspects of life
• Foraging is in your professional offer and you want to expand how you work with it
• You are looking for ways to talk or teach about challenging contemporary issues through inspiring, connecting and fun activities
• You’re passionate about supporting people to connect with the natural world and are looking for new ways to do that through head, heart, hands and body
• You want more tools to contextualise Nature Connection, foraging and other outdoor activities in the wider world of human activity
• You want to deepen your awareness of how foraging and nature connection can be a tool for transformative education, and to understand how it can also unconsciously echo patterns of harm in how we teach or harvest