Community & Connection

Yeah, ShadeTree Multicultural Foundation was designed to support young people finding their purpose, getting out of trouble and into community. So people called, in the '80s, '90s, the 'at risk youth.' Well, every youth is at risk of following something that people don't encourage them to do. This was the problem. We started to host young people to allow themselves to first enter into the ceremonial mind, that when the logical mind is restricted by the absence of certain formal knowledge, the initiation mind begins to open. We saw now they were seeking context for something that no one was truly acknowledging in their lives, which was a ceremonial space. So the multicultural space is the fact that we took them through all these cultural protocols of ceremony, and they recovered a sense of connection to energy, then meaning, then life, then world. So it's been 28, 29 years now that that organization has been in the world, where we've moved from youth development to community development to organizational institutional development, and now to a certain way, prophetic hospitality, or hospitality for the prophetic world, the world of beings that constitutes our higher shared purpose.