Rites & Responsibilities: Restoring Rites of Passage for Healing, Justice, and Liberation

an online communal inquiry and initiatory journey for white, white-assimilated, and white-passing folx committed to generating healthy* passages in their lives, families, and communities.

Guided by Darcy Ottey & Shay Sloan Clarke

February–November 2024

For more information or to register, please visit the the Rites & Responsibilities program page

Rites of passage are a keystone practice in human cultures: many other elements of cultural health depend on meaningful, relevant, and intentional transition rituals to mark the cycles and seasons of our lives. When such practices are lost or destroyed, everyone suffers. When they are restored, the whole community can flourish. 

Through these processes of initiation, individuals shed what has become too small for them, and are challenged and supported in developing the inner resources and understandings to bring their unique gifts forward – into a world that urgently needs what they have to offer. 

Designed for educators, therapists, guides, healers, organizers, mentors, parents, youth and community leaders, this curated, online series is based on Rites and Responsibilities: A Guide to Growing Up, a recently-published, seminal guide for rites of passage today. 

Over nine months, in a slow-and-steady arc, we will build a community of mutual care and accountability designed to support each of us in bringing meaningful, culturally-responsible rites of passage ever more deeply into our lives, families, and communities. As we study, share, reflect, practice, grieve, organize, and celebrate, we will create space for our points of connection and shared experience as well as honoring the intersectional differences between us. Participants will receive individualized support for the specific contexts they are working in and/or work in caucus spaces as supports their initiatives.

Why a course for white people? Isn’t this curriculum important for everyone?

As white, white-assimilated, and white-passing educators, guides, mentors, parents, youth and community leaders, we have particular responsibilities when it comes to reclaiming, restoring, and regenerating rites of passage. We must attend to legacies of theft, exploitation, suppression, and commodification of the practices of our Black, Brown, and Indigenous kin, alongside broader issues of ongoing violence, genocide, and injustice. And, we must deepen our understanding of the harm our ancestors endured, the ways we face oppression today, and the role of rites of passage and related cultural practices in healing ourselves, our families, and our communities. Most white folks are settlers in others lands that were forcibly taken from Indigenous and local communities and live outside of our ethnic and cultural contexts. As a caucus space, this course makes room for the complexity of this terrain.  We celebrate and uplift the work of other important efforts that are reclaiming, restoring, and regenerating passages for People of the Global Majority. More details and resources to access these important efforts coming soon!

What will you learn and explore?

Participants will:

  • Connect with others working to bring forth meaningful processes and practices for change and growth into their communities

  • Dive into key orienting frameworks for transformation 

  • Explore the resurgence of rites of passage today, and how these efforts fit in with the decolonization and other global change movements

  • Explore human development from neurological, psychological, cultural and ecological perspectives

  • Reflect on the impacts of sexuality and consciousness-shifting substances in their own initiatory journey, and the roles they can and do play in rites of passage more broadly

  • Explore the role of identity development in rites of passage, including: dynamics of power, privilege, oppression, and difference; the ways these manifest in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, ability, class, citizenship, and more; and how this impacts our work and those we serve

  • Investigate the causes, consequences, and complexities of cultural appropriation, and co-create ancestrally-rooted, culturally respectful alternatives

  • Build capacity to design and/or lead healthy passages, for themselves or others in their community

Who is this course for?

This course is for you if:

  • You are committed to healthy passages for yourself and your community

  • You value learning in community

  • You are committed to healing and justice

  • You yearn for authentic, meaningful, emergent culture

  • You see a connection between individual and cultural healing, wellness, and transformation

  • You are able to show up care, grace, and self-awareness in community

  • You are committed to ongoing learning and inquiry regardless of how much work and learning you have done already

This course is not for you if:

  • You are committed to specific outcomes and deliverables on a set timeline

  • You’re not interested in the connection between rites of passage and social justice

  • You aren’t willing to make space for others who use different language than you do 

  • You don’t have time and space in your life to devote to the ongoing study aspects of this course

  • You are looking for fixed answers to the questions we are engaging

*Notions of what is and isn’t healthy are complex and politicized terms. We use the term in the spirit of the definition put forth by Health Justice Commons: “all that affirms and supports life, allowing us all to live in harmony and dignity with ourselves, one another, and the planet.”