Remembering Our Roots (ROR) is a Community Interest Company based in Cornwall. We offer support through 1:1 and group programmes, both in person and online, indoors and outside in therapeutic settings to help people:
- acknowledge, open up to, heal and integrate traumatic events,
- develop a strong sense of nature connection
- learn bushcraft & wilderness skills
- receive support on the journey into successful and fulfilling adulthood.
The groups we primarily work with are: victims of crime, vulnerable children & adults, military service personnel, veterans and their families, fathers, children in care and care leavers.
I love this work, am a director of ROR and work closely with fellow director James Oecken. In the past few years, I have regularly staffed for ROR on long weekend retreats in woodlands. Some of these have been ‘Rites of Passage’ weekends for teenagers struggling at school, and have had a powerful and lasting impact, not least on me.
Others have been with larger, general school groups, with a greater emphasis on nature connection and adventure. I’ve also learned Bushcraft alongside struggling young men through an ROR programme, and worked for ROR in mentoring a troubled young boy in foster care, often spending time 1:1 in nature, supporting him for a return to school and a new life with his father.
Many young men who have been supported 1:1 with ROR have made a successful progression to the group Rite of Passage Mentoring Programme through the national charity ‘abandofbrothers’, www.abandofbrothers.org.uk. I am one of the leaders of the Cornish Community and many of us staff both ROR and ‘abandofbrothers’ Rites of Passage weekends, supporting teenagers and young men.