Sanctuary Medicine

Check out this compelling offering from March 31 to April 4, 2025 from our comrades at Dreaming Stone.

The Sanctuary Medicine training offers skills and strategies for mitigating harm and building a more healthy and just future, fortifying our relationships, growing our capacity, and building our readiness to care for one another.

Sanctuary Medicine flows from a spiritual, emotional, physical vision of care for individuals and communities in crisis resulting from increased vulnerability. In a world shattered by climate change, racial capitalism and failing democracy, devastating storms and fires, growing unhoused populations, and growing numbers of people targeted by dehumanizing state policies, such as migrants and trans people, Sanctuary Medicine recognizes that church buildings and other community spaces of refuge are still places of first response, and creates a framework of care that includes preparedness, emergency medicine, spiritual and emotional support, and liturgical community care and mutual aid in the face of trauma.

Sanctuary medicine imagines communities of care and refuge, prepared for and able to respond to disasters and community trauma, increasing resilience, relationship and solidarity. Participants will receive training in:

  • Field medicine focusing on specific rising needs of vulnerable community members including chronic wound care, weather exposure, stop-the-bleed instruction and chronic conditions faced by those who do not have access to medical support. Trainers include certified EMT’s and WFR’s with extensive street medic experience.
  • Emotional and spiritual support for crisis care by disaster first responders, street chaplains and mental health professionals.
  • Preparedness practices, including creating community specific plans and supplies as well as organizing community medicine gardens and mutual aid that centers the most vulnerable.
  • Liturgical and ritual response and care to allow for long term processes of grief, justice building and cultural transformation.
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Time for Another Wilderness Vigil

An announcement and invitation from Tevyn East, director of Dreaming Stone Arts and Ecology Center

In early 2020, a group of comrades (Jay Beck, Jimmy Betts, Tevyn East, Tim Nafziger, Jonathan McRay, and Todd Wynward) first gathered together in response to a call from friend and colleague, Dave Pritchett. Sparked by his attendance of a “Vision Fast” held by the School of Lost Borders, where participants experienced a 4 day solo fast, bookended by group process, Dave had a desire to deepen into this practice amongst peers. His call, “to gather a cohort of folks to re-imagine how we can use the wilderness vigil to empower people in our movements, and how we can do so in ways that better pay attention to place, to history, and to the political moment we inhabit.” And thus, the first Wilderness Vigil was born. It was a significant, supportive and meaningful event for all.

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