Community Support and Nature Connection Facilitator
COURSE PARTICIPANT 2016
Ali is our first course participant to be trained as a leader - AMAZING!!
Job Title – Support Worker with a passion to help people break free from whatever it may be that imprisons their soul
Five lives – School work / Addiction / Self Harm
Bridge Collective – Expert by Experience, Dual Diagnosis
Recovery Champion - RISE
Career / Background / R2F
I have a variety of roles – all intertwine and connect in that they are working with people experiencing difficulties with addiction or mental health. I have lived experience of both.
I passionately believe that we all have the capacity to change and grow if the conditions are right and we are willing to take a leap of faith.
In a world that I found too fast, too confusing and uncaring at times Write to Freedom offered me an alternative. I could re-connect with the landscape, notice all the beauty around me and potential within me and begin to forge connections with my kind of people. My tribe.
In my capacity as a support worker and facilitator I try to introduce key themes to people that have really worked for me in such a dramatic way: Nature, environment and connection. The importance of being grounded within myself and the world I live in. The power of creativity whether writing, art or music. The sense of power and release when pen is put to paper and that emotion/feeling is out of my head and can no longer destroy me.
I joined Rite to Freedom as I still had within me the memories of how at one I was with the Moor when I was growing up – the sense of calm, wonder and mischievous adventure. I wanted to see it through the eyes of recovery.
They say muscle has memory – when my leg muscles touched that warm damp mossy ground on my first day at Higher Heathercombe I was home.
Hopes and What I Bring
I want desperately for as many people in as wide an arena as possible to be given the chance to experience a spiritual transformation as I did in my residential.
My hopes and dreams within RTF were to grow in any direction, I have certainly been afforded that. I'm honoured, excited and slightly overawed at the prospect of being a trainee Nature Connection Facilitator, I am being given such an incredible opportunity to learn from beautiful people with such a wealth of knowledge and experience. The facilitators have enthralled, inspired and nurtured me.
My biggest hope is to grasp every opportunity to learn from these elders so that I can pass on my enthusiasm and love of the land. This in turn will hopefully light a spark or rekindle something in the participants who stand where I once stood.
I am also delighting in being an integral part of the Women's Circle, something that has taken me totally by surprise, I can now see the value, depth and growth personally in me of the work we do.
As ever I thank R2F and the land for all that I have received.
I bring my passion, exuberance, calmness, creativity - I bring all of me.