Traveler, your footprints are the path and nothing more; There is no path. The path is made by walking. From: Traveler, There is No Path. By Antonio Machado
This section contains detailed materials, a roadmap to inform and guide your work to “transfer innovations” – adapting and advancing youth & community development through rites of passage. It is a resource that includes a description of the highly acclaimed book: Coming of Age The RITE Way: Youth & Community Development through Rites of Passage, (Oxford University Press, 2016). Plus, multi-volume set:
Guide for Promoting Youth & Community Development through Rites of Passage.
RESOURCES
Coming of Age the RITE Way: Youth & Community Development through Rites of Passage. Oxford University Press (2016).
Coming of Age the RITE Way: Youth & Community Development through Rites of Passage addresses the absence of community-oriented rites of passage. This book is distinguished from others in that it combines almost fifty years of scholarship and practice to examine the concepts of rites of passage and sense of community, as it exists in literature and life. It focuses on the reciprocal relationship between rites of passage and sense of community and ways for it to impact the development of children and the health and adaptability of their community.
This text raises and answers some of the most fundamental questions facing parents, schools and communities; How do we raise our children to be resilient, self-reliant, capable adults who are competent and with compassion that is manifested in civic engagement for social justice? The book sets forth guiding principles and clear methods for putting into practice a whole systems approach to youth development through rites of passage. The approach involves connecting and enhancing environments and building competencies, which promote the positive development of children and youth in their families, in their schools, among their peers in their community and with a strong connection to the natural world. It provides extensive narratives and case studies to illustrate how a framework of rites of passage is used to weave a common language throughout the community and links techniques for youth development with prevention, identification, intervention, and treatment and strengthens the fabric of community support.
“This groundbreaking book provides profound and practical community strategies for promoting the positive development of youth. It is a must read for educators, human service providers, and policy makers who aspire to improve community institutions that successfully raise knowledgeable, responsible, caring, contributing youth on their way to happier, more fulfilling lives.”
– Roger P. Weissberg, PhD, University/LAS Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Education, University of Illinois at Chicago and Chief Knowledge Officer, Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL)
“Coming of Age the Rite Way is a thought provoking and a healing manual that addresses some of the fundamental ills of the world today: In presenting rite of passage and community development as inseparable, the book reveals the profound wisdom that highlights how focusing in our youth is focusing in our communities. This book comes at the right time as a gift to parents and communities everywhere concerned about the future of their youth and longing for tools to fertilize their imagination. This book is a generous contribution to modern consciousness challenged by the decay of human creativity and imagination.”
– Malidoma Patrice Somé, PhD, West African Elder, teacher, and author of Ritual: Power, Healing and Community and Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman
“David Blumenkrantz offers a compelling—sometimes provocative—vision of rites of passage as a powerful yet neglected responsibility, resource, and focus for community and youth development. He weaves together his practical experience working in communities with stories and insights from many divergent sources to offer an integrative vision of rites of passes that transmit values, ethics, skills, and commitments from generation to generation. In the process, he shows how intentional rites of passage transform adolescence from what too often has become a time of alienation and rolenessness into a meaningful journey into both individual thriving and community strength.”
– Eugene C. Roehlkepartain, PhD, Vice President, Research and Development, Search Institute, Minneapolis, Minnesota
“David Blumenkrantz has done it again. His previous book, Fulfilling the Promise of Children’s Services, provided readers with a wide-ranging exploration of the myriad factors that either make or break prevention efforts targeting children, families, and communities. In this new book, Dr. Blumenkrantz creates another comprehensive examination of human services work, this time focusing attention on concepts and activities related to rites of passage. This is a tour de force, a book that contains encyclopedic coverage of concepts and activities related to the various ways in which societies provide their youth with pathways toward adulthood.”
– Stephen M. Gavazzi, PhD, Dean, Ohio State University, Mansfield
“I’ve witnessed the transformation of many children into young adulthood via rites and rituals. In Coming of Age the Rite Way, we learn adolescent becoming, moral and otherwise, finds fuller expression in the reciprocal reconstitution and growth of communal elders responsible for receiving their youth beyond their passage. A master storyteller, Dr. Blumenkrantz weaves narrative and theory into a magnificent study and celebration of initiation and rites of passage.”
– Rabbi Craig Marantz, Congregation Kol Haverim, Chaplain Connecticut State
Legislature
“Coming of Age the Rite Way is a timely publication and its attractiveness is far-reaching. This book is strongly needed and is a welcomed addition to the literature. I applaud David Blumenkrantz for his keen attention to detail and creativity. Clearly a must-read for anyone who has the noble responsibility of providing guidance and direction to today’s youth. Blumenkrantz has done a masterful job in presenting stories as well as factual data that will help synthesize our understanding of Rites of Passage and its curative value. I am pleased we now have a vivid and comprehensive body of work in one volume that will advance how to help youth move from one stage of life to the next.”
– Keith A. Alford, PhD, School of Social Work, Syracuse University
“To read this book is to experience an awakening. It provides tools and understanding to take action in changing this story—through restoring and innovating the rites of passage that our youth and communities so urgently need. Drawing upon research from diverse fields of study, as well as upon the author’s own life work, Coming of Age the Rite Way contributes vital new thinking to youth and community development. It also inspires us to imagine new possibilities in emergent design for co-creating the narratives and rites that are needed to change our trajectory and reorient our planet toward balance, responsibility, and well-being. A must-read for parents, teachers and all those working for social change.”
– Joanna Cea & Jess Rimington, Visiting Scholars, Stanford University Global Projects Center
“David Blumenkrantz’s life’s work expressed in this seminal book gives us the philosophy, the foundation and the tools we need to support our children and young people at a time when they are experiencing so much neglect. We should have inherited this road map from our ancestors, but I am so grateful that David has reinvented it and given it to us as a gift for ours and future generations.”
– Mark Weiss, PhD, Education Director, Operation Respect, former New York City schools principal
In his book “Change the Story, Change the Future,” (2015) David Korten writes: “When we get our story wrong, we get our future wrong,” (p.1). If the children are indeed our future than the stories about how we educate and help them come of age are the most important stories to get right. Our present reality is the future produced by yesterday’s stories of how we educated and helped our children come of age.
I wrote in Change the Story, Transform the Future ( 2014): “Rite of passage stories can weave together elements of the sacred in secular forms that convey values and ethics essential to the survival of the Earth, all our relations and ourselves. Children are a product of their thoughts and dreams. What they hear and see they remember and become. The stories our children hear today will fuel their dreams for tomorrow. Children are our dreams for the future. How we raise our children will determine the future.”
Community oriented rites of passage are authentic and potent when they are refined by conversations between citizens, youth and adults, that honors and respects the unique culture and setting in which they can be adapted.
Click here for the rest of the story: “It Takes a Whole Child to Raise a Village.