Find Your Conscious Choice Community
About Pathways Connect
"WE WERE NEVER MEANT TO DO IT ALONE." -- Robin Grille, author of Parenting for a Peaceful World
Join Lisa Reagan for a Pathways Connect Orientation and Training Workshop on January 28, 2012.
Find or Start Your Local Pathways Connect Group.
Families for Conscious Living's mission, from our beginning in 1996, has always been to provide the information, resources and support to families who want to explore wellness and informed choice-making with a like-minded community. Today, we have found the best way to fulfill our mission is through collaboration with sister nonprofits who help us to meet the growing demand for holistic family wellness education. This demand took a quantum leap this year as FCL's former Gathering Guide for Parents was transformed into the Pathways Connect program and released worldwide through the conscious choice magazine, Pathways to Family Wellness. Over 150 local, conscious choice communities have been created in the past year alone!
After 15 years of working with families to create local, conscious choice communities, FCL believes we now have a rich and sustainable program to offer parents - for free! What our many years of experience taught us is local groups needed a way to keep going financially and practically long after founding families moved or their children grew up. The amount of resources and energy to create a group once would save everyone from "reinventing the wheel." So here is how the Pathways Connect program works, and why it is so successful after one year of launching...
1. Find a Sponsor. First, sponsors of a Pathways Connect group must be a member of either the Holistic Pediatric Alliance or the International Chiropractic Pediatric Association. This is how the program is free to parents. Group facilitators may be parents or practitioners. Pathways to Family Wellness provides the practitioners with bulk, wholesale orders of the print magazine for distribution in their offices when they sign up for the Pathways Connect program. (Pathways is also available in a digital version for individual subscriptions.) The sponsors and facilitators are given the Pathway Connect’s Gathering Guide, an online resource that gives step-by-step instructions and hyperlinked resources for starting and maintaining a group. These resources include practical flyers and brochures as well as fun icebreaker games by the play professional Howard Moody.
2. Announce Your Meeting Dates and Topics. The Gathering Guide provides tips and materials for starting your group. After your core is established, you can decide as a group what you would like to discuss in meetings. To help with this process, a few weeks before the quarterly issue of the magazine is published, a Dialogue Questions and Resource Guide is emailed to all of the group facilitators. Because groups are self-organizing and self-directed, each group decides what sort of meetings they would like to have: weekly, monthly, morning, night, speakers, group discussions, group field trips, group meals, etc.
3. The Point: Information, Resources and Support for Your Conscious Choices. The groups do not have to use the Dialogue Questions and Resource Guide, but it, and The Gathering Guide materials, are what make the program "turn-key". Here’s the practical piece of this guide: facilitators can send it out to their groups to review before the meeting, or hand out parts of it during a meeting.
4. About the Dialogue and Resource Guide. The D&R Guide is designed to facilitate discussion because of its Talking Points and Dialogue Questions for each article. This way, in case you don't remember the article or didn't read that particular article, you have a cheat sheet to help you get the major points. Remember, you’re here in a Pathways Connect group to meet other parents and find support for your wellness choices, so remembering something you read in Pathways isn’t necessary. This is not a test!
The second part of the Dialogue Questions and Resource Guide, after the Talking Points cheat sheet, is the Dialogue Questions. These questions are carefully crafted to help us think differently about wellness issues and to feel confident to make informed choices. The discussion questions are thoughtfully designed to promote respect for individual choices and to steer clear of polarizing the group on sensitive topics.
The third part of the Dialogue Questions and Resource Guide is, you guessed it, the resources, which are hyperlinked to books, organizations or supportive material mentioned in the article or supporting the article’s information. In every issue, we try to include hyperlinks to our exclusive Trail Marker Moment series of You Tube videos. These short videos on conscious living issues run from A to Z and feature interviews with leaders in their fields such as Bruce Lipton, PhD, Gabor Mate, MD, Ina May Gaskin and others. Trail Marker Moments videos are great for groups to view and discuss together at any time.
The Dialogue and Resource Guide for each issue, as well as The Gathering Guide, are always posted online where group facilitators can refer back to them and plan future meetings around different topics. The Trail Marker Moments are always up on Pathways Connect You Tube channel.
5. Share Your Experience. Your questions about groups can be posted and discussed with other members on our Facebook’s Pathways Connect Central page. Please enjoy the photos there and post photos of your group as well! Monthly orientation meetings are held for all groups through a teleconference, and a dedicated Pathways Connect e-newsletter will let you know dates for calls and links to materials! Discussion boards are on the way!
It is our nonprofit collaboration's privilege to support you and your conscious choices for family wellness. Please give us feedback on how we're doing, info@familiesforconsciousliving.org, and support us with your tax-deductible donations!
About Pathways to Family Wellness
Pathways is a quarterly print and digital magazine whose non-profit mission is to support you and your family’s quest for wellness. Our magazine is content rich, with minimal advertising. Experience for yourself the variety of stories amid visually striking imagery... Request a FREE ISSUE.
Pathways not only champions your conscious choices, we also help you find the support you need in like-minded families through our free Pathways Connect program. Find or start your local group here.
Read Lisa Reagan's Column on Pathways Connect
Attached is Lisa Reagan's column on Pathways Connect groups in a pdf format, straight from Pathways to Family Wellness' December 2011 issue. Lisa shares a few visits with groups in Virginia as well as the thumbnail version of how to get your group started!
- Pathways_Connect_Column_by_Lisa_Reagan_11-11_3.pdf 204kb
- Adobe PDF Reader required, download it here...
Listen to Holistic Practitioners Talk About Starting Their Group
In this video, three holistic practitioners who started the Pathways Connect group of Fredericksburg, VA, talk about:
1. Why they started a Pathways Connect Group.
2. How they work together as a chiropractor, integrative pediatrician and naturopath to provide the best care for their families.
3. How Pathways Connect helps them as practitioners by providing support to parents for their informed, wellness choices.
Every Pathways Connect group is unique to the needs and wants of that particular group. This is why the groups are self-directed and self-organizing. Your group will be the way you and your group members design it for themselves!
