A Consciousness-Raising Movement Begins...

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2024: Book Fairy Pantry Project is awarded $25,000 from the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation for the second time.

2024: Evolved Nest Initiative's Learning Module is launched.

2023: Evolved Nest Initiative Curriculum is launched.

2023: Kindred World Publishing House is launched.

2023: Launch of Evolved Nest Initiative film collection and ENI Curriculum.

2023: Darcia Narvaez, Kindred World’s president, speaks at the the 9th Edition of the Science Summit held at the 78th United Nations General Assembly Summit of the Future.

2022: Darcia Narvaez speaks at the Humanity 2.0 Foundation and International WELL Building institute's inaugural Well-Being Discussion Series at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square, New York City.

2022: Kindred launches our dedicated, private social media platform through Mighty Networks at www.KindredCommunity.org 

2021: Meet the Wayfinders Oral History Series presented by invitation to La Leche League International’s 65th Conference

2021: Launch of ENI’s Breaking the Cycle Film with monthly live discussions

2021: Book Fairy Pantry Project is awarded $25,000 from the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation.

2021: Kindred Fellowship Program, to create the next generation of changemakers, is launched.

2020: Kindred Media launches the oral history series, Meet the Men Of ROBE: Standing At The Intersection Of Fatherhood, Infant Mortality, Breastfeeding, And Social Justice.

2019: Lisa Reagan, KW’s co-founder, is welcomed to the invitation-only Worklife Law Center’s Summit in San Francisco, California.

2018: The Evolved Nest Initiative’s virtual learning center is launched.

2016: Kindred collaborates with APPPAH to Create the In Utero Film and Resource Guide

2016: Lisa Reagan presents Kindred World’s history and vision to APPPAH students in the presentation, The New Story of Childhood, Parenthood, and the Human Family.

2015: Kindred was featured in an interview with Lisa Reagan about her passion for and long history of advocating for families in the October 2015 issue of The Attached Family.

2014: Co-sponsor the Pathways to Child Flourishing Symposium lead by Darcia Narvaez, PhD, at the University of Notre Dame.

2014: Lisa Reagan is featured in the documentary, The Love Bomb, also featuring Kindred World's godfather, Joseph Chiton Pearce. 

2014: Lisa Reagan is elected to represent the state of Virginia at the United States Breastfeeding Committee Fifth National Conference. The report of the event is posted on Kindred.

2013: Parenting for a Peaceful World, the USA Tour with Robin Grille, is sponsored by Kindred. Robin Grille visited seven US cities in 12 days during the tour.

2013: Pathways magazine received three Hermes awards for the issue featuring Lisa Reagan’s interview with Jamie Grumet on her experience as TIME magazine’s now iconic breastfeeding cover mom. Read the original interview, and download the audio, The Cover Shot Heard ‘Round The World: An Interview With Conscious Parenting Revolutionary, Jamie Grumet. Jamie now serves as on the Kindred World board of directors.

2013: Kindred World launches Parenting As A Hero's Journey, a virtual retreat with thought leaders of the conscious parenting movement who intend to "unmask modern parenting mythology with ancient wisdom teachings." 

2012: Lisa Reagan, Kindred World’s co-founder and Kindred’s editor, is invited to be the writer-in-residence at the Institute for Noetic Sciences.

2011: Kindred World collaborates with the Museum of Motherhood in NYC to host the first ever, Mindful Mothering Conference.

2011: Celebration of KW’s 15th Anniversary at the opening of the Museum of Motherhood in New York City. We co-sponsor the production, again, of the play Birth at the event.

2010: Lisa Reagan, Kindred World’s co-founder and Kindred’s editor, is trained in Worldview Literacy at the Institute of Noetic Sciences. This training amplifies and expands the nonprofit’s strategic vision and planning programs.

2010: Celebrating the Shift to Conscious Choice conference, featuring dozens of speakers from conscious parenting fields, held in Washington, DC.

2009: Kelly Wendorf bequeaths her magazine, Kindred, the first global eco-parenting magazine, to us and joins our board.

2008: Lisa Reagan presents at the Virginia Biological Farming Association's annual conference. You can read her writing on her farm in Virginia and her experiments with sustainable food production as a Community Support Agriculture farmer  on Kindred. When Lisa was the US Contibuting Editor for Kindred Magazine, before the magazine became an initiative of Kindred World, print copies of the magazine were included in her CSA members' shares. See the photo here.

2007: The Gathering Groups program is transferred to the International Chiropractic Pediatric Association’s management to help the program expand internationally. Lisa Reagan is educational director for the new Pathways Connect, and associate editor of Pathways to Family Wellness Magazine. Over 400 gathering groups are created internationally. Pathways Connect was endorsed by Ervin Laszlo, PhD, author of Quantum Shift in the Global Brain, who said, “Wellness is the key to a peaceful and sustainable world. And wellness on the level of the family is the way to achieve it. Pathways and Pathways Connect is a precious guide for achieving this paramount objective.” Laszlo received the Goi Award, the Japan Peace Prize in 2001, the Assisi Mandir of Peace Prize in 2006, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 and 2005.

2006: Kindred World hosts the Future of Food film showing and panel discussion at Bryn Mawr College. Lisa Reagan moderates a panel discussion with food activists and book authors. See the event poster. Read about the event. Read Lisa Reagan's interview with Deborah Garcia, Future of Food filmmaker.

2006: Kindred World’s 10th anniversary is celebrated at the Whole Child Whole Planet Expo at the Los Angeles Convention Center in California.  

2005: To celebrate the legalization of midwifery in Virginia, KW sponsors the first production of the play, Birth, by Karen Brody.

2004: Nominated as a nonprofit that was, “Making a Difference: Six Causes Worth Your While” by the magazine Delicious Living

2001: Birth Options Conference sponsored in collaboration with the Women’s Studies Department of Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA. Keynotes included Marsden Wagner, MD, author of Pursuing the Birth Machine: The Search for Appropriate Birth Technology.

2001: Gathering Groups launched nationally, and one in England.

2000: Birth Options Conference in conjunction with the Women’s Studies Department at the College of William and Mary

1998: Kindred World incorporated as a nonprofit.

1997: Joseph Chilton Pearce presented “How Does Birth, Bonding, and the Learning Environment Affect the Intelligence of Your Child? at a Kindred World gathering. Pearce lived in Virginia and is considered the godfather of Kindred World. Read Lisa Reagan's tribute to Joe at his passing in 2016, here.

1996: Kindred World founded.

Kindred World (formerly Families for Conscious Living) began as a grassroots, consciousness-raising organization of parents and professionals in 1996, twenty-five years into America’s decline to the bottom of all international indicators for family, maternal, and child health. After a total fifty-year race to last place of every family wellness indicator, today, Kindred World’s mission and vision are more relevant and important than ever.

During the current climate crisis, pandemic, and political upheaval, Kindred World’s quarter century of investigating and sharing a New Story of Our Human Family is a blazed path to wholeness and wellness ready for others to follow. For a quarter century, we have explored the interconnectedness of all of the “categories” you will find on this website. This holistic approach – looking for the connections between all of life’s interdependent and diverse forms – has allowed us to discover integrated insights into creating lifelong wellness.

Below you can discover how and when we learned what we’ve learned in this past quarter century. But first, we will get to the heart of what we’ve learned so far. The New Story requires new language, so be sure to follow the highlighted words and phrases to our New Story Glossary for help in shifting your perspective and grasping these insights clearly. You are also encouraged to consider the Worldview Chart, created by Four Arrows, an International Advisory Board member, to see at-a-glance the worldview shift needed.

• We are endangered. Humans are an endangered species because so many are disconnected from being, including ourselves (we are nature), each other, our children, and the living environment. Darcia Narvaez’s (Kindred World’s president) award-winning research shows that we are now “atypical members of our species” who have created a culture of competitive detachment that ignores biological birthrights, causing lifelong suffering.  In order to restore our connection to life we need to challenge our millennia-old industrial programming with our million-year-old biological intelligence. The Old Story should be replaced with the Ancient, Connected Story that characterizes durable societies tens of thousands of years old.
• We are traumatized. Our enculturation into a Dominator Culture, and its patriarchal, industrial, materialistic cultural imperatives is, as Riane Eisler says in a Kindred interview, “a trauma factory.” 
• Our disconnection began long ago, generations ago. The trans-generational trauma, and patterns of dysfunction and disconnection snowballed from a cultural split from nature and being, into a species atypical state of consciousness. Our deep insecurities fuel racism, misogyny, sexism, white supremacy, racism, and adultism (childism), systemic manifestations of dysregulated individuals and communities. 
• We are an indigenous species to the earth. With a return to our indigenous species’ worldview  and species-typical practices for raising children and one another, we can revamp ourselves by healing our neurobiology and our spiritual intelligence. We can restore a culture of cooperative companionship.
• We are built for love, compassion and peace–when our basic needs are met. More importantly, we can foster human beings built for optimal health, sustainability, and peace by providing our original million-year-old “evolved developmental niche” – Evolved Nest – to pregnant mothers, babies and young children, but also to everyone at every age.
• We can heal. In summary, with great self-compassion and love for one another, it is possible for us to wake up from our entranced state of disconnected consciousness and its identification with Dominator Culture values and beliefs (see Four Arrow’s worldview chart). We can break cycles of family trauma, heal ourselves and our world with the Connected Story of who we really are and what we’re really capable of to guide us. We can learn what durable sustainable cultures have always known, a process called decolonization and indigenization.
• We can act together to create a Partnership Culture and Caring Economy. In a healed, whole state of being with our indigenous worldview and its values of connection to guide us, we can then, through conscious activism, move to create a Partnership Culture and Caring Economy. 
• The USA’s global last place ranking and epidemics of illbeing, will not reverse without the New Story. The United States currently ranks 41 out of 41 developed countries for family friendly policies that would support species typical, early life optimal wellness and wholeness. Epidemics of depression, addiction, chronic illness, and gun violence are all hallmarks of a failed, disconnected population. (See United Nations chart below.) 
• We have much work to do. And in our current trifecta of pandemic, climate change, and political crises, there is a growing public interest in understand how we got here as a species, and how we are going to get out. Kindred World, and its 25 years of experience in gathering researchers, thought leaders, and activists and in serving those interested in self and cultural transformation, stands ready to help. 

Founded 25 years into into America’s 50 year decline to the bottom of all international indicators for family, maternal, and child health, today, Kindred World’s mission and vision of a Wisdom-based, Wellness-informed Society are more relevant and important than ever. Incorporated as an American 501(C)3 educational nonprofit in the commonwealth of Virginia in 1998, Kindred World began as a grassroots, consciousness-raising collaboration of parents and professionals answering a growing nationwide call to identify, organize, and promote wholeness and wellness resources, as well as supportive communities for sovereign, informed choice.

Our original inspiration and godfather to our grassroots movement was the seminal thinker and writer Joseph Chilton Pearce, who lived in Virginia and spoke at our early gatherings. Beginning with his book, Magical Child (1977), Pearce’s seminal work on human development and potential provided the foundation of the Conscious Parenting Movement in the United States and around the world. Pearce pointed to the Bio-Cultural Conflict humanity found itself facing in an increasingly industrialized world and disconnected culture: the impossible choice of nurturing the bodies, hearts, and brains of the next generation in a corporate culture that discarded life-affirming values and holistic awareness for short-term profit and colonization goals.

In 2001, the book Cultural Creatives, by social scientists Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson, helped our organization understand who we were and the two impediments for progress: visibility and coherence. “It took years to figure out that our meetings in parks, churches, homes, and community centers to sort out our mission and to devise strategies to advocate for ourselves defined us as a movement.  In fact, your book shows clearly that our efforts to bring into our culture what was missing and the struggle we endured because our values were not reflected back to us culturally, meant that we were not just any movement, but part of a living consciousness-raising movement.” says Lisa Reagan, Kindred World Co-Founder, in her Kindred Interview with Paul Ray, PhD, social scientist and author of Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing The World.

With the clarity of our identity and validation of our intuitive direction for our cultural transformation work as cultural creatives, we began to redress the Bio-Cultural Conflict with focused attention. We created visibility through our alternative media platforms and community and conference gatherings. We also partnered with nonprofits who shared our vision of a Wisdom-based, Wellness-informed Society. In 2009, Kelly Wendorf bequeathed, Kindred, the world’s first global eco-parenting magazine, to us. Kindred Media still serves as our critical alternative media platform for gathering voices, sharing new language for a new story, and creating the needed visibility and coherence to move us forward.

In expanding our visibility and connection with one another, from local in-person to international Zoom calls, we have consciously worked to create the coherence needed for our new story.

Visit Kindred’s Wisdom Archives for to view our oral histories, dynamic interviews, and a chronicling of the emergence of humanity’s new story here.

Visit Kindred’s New Story Glossary to discover our collection of new language to tell a new story here.

Today, America finds itself at the bottom of all international rankings for family health, the only developed country without paid parental leave and maternity care, and the results are disastrous. Faced with a lack of community, family, and employer support for pregnancy and birth, the leading cause of death among new mothers is suicide and overdose. The rate of women nearly dying almost tripled between 1993 and 2014, according to the CDC. American children are less likely to live to age five than children in other high-income countries. Even Americans with healthy behaviors, for example, those who are not obese or do not smoke, appear to have higher disease rates than their peers in other countries. These are only a few of many outcomes of abandoning the baselines and support systems needed for human wellness.

During the current climate crisis, pandemic, continuing maternal morbidity epidemic, and political upheaval, Kindred World’s quarter century of investigating, authoring, and sharing a New Story of Our Human Family is a blazed path to wholeness and thriving for a growing population of Cultural Creatives, Seekers, Trance-Breakers, Wayfinders, and New Cycle Makers. Kindred World’s president, Darcia Narvaez, provides Kindred World with integrative, award-winning research to restore humanity’s baselines for wholeness and wellbeing, our Evolved Nest. Our nonprofit’s original instinct, to redress the Bio-Cultural Conflict, is now possible with the Evolved Nest’s educational resources, projects, and Darcia’s ongoing research into reimagining humanity.

Darcia currently continues her award-winning research into humanity’s evolutionary pathway to wellbeing, our Evolved Nest, through her lab at the University of Notre Dame. Her work is featured in Kindred World’s Evolved Nest Initiative, launched during the past five years through a Virtual Learning Center, Evolved Nest Curriculum, and the short film collection Breaking the Cycle, The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way of Raising Children; and Reimagining Humanity. 

In an 2020 analysis, Darcia was ranked in the top two percent of science researchers globally. She currently travels to international conferences and presents dozens of keynotes, interviews, and on panel discussions annually. The public is invited to join Darcia and Lisa Reagan, Kindred World’s co-founder and Kindred Media editor, monthly for their well-attended and followed Zoom gatherings.

Kindred World’s grassroots origins and history are still reflected in the award-winning nonprofit’s strategic vision, values, and goals. For a deeper dive into Kindred World’s history, explore these resources:

Joseph Chilton Pearce and his work. Enjoy the introduction to his book, The Biology of Transcendence, here and marvel, as we do, that we still have the guidance of Pearce’s compassion and wisdom for humanity to guide us.

The Strategic Vision and Values Guiding Our Work. To learn more about Kindred World’s grassroots origins, watch co-founder Lisa Reagan’s presentation to one of Kindred’s partners, the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health, APPPAH. In this video, Lisa shares the organization’s grassroots history as context for understanding and appreciating the award-winning nonprofit’s approach to creating initiatives and projects. She shares the consciousness-raising vision of Kindred World and its strategic values and goals that allow Kindred World to champion our many initiatives.

What Is The New Story? Watch co-founder Lisa Reagan’s presentation, The New Story of Childhood, Parenthood, and the Human Family. In this video presentation, Lisa condenses her three hour workshop lecture into an hour-long overview for APPPAH students who are focused on the emergence of birth psychology into this New Story paradigm. In sharing her own story, she reveals unfolding historical events over the last four decades that coalesced into an ongoing and growing Conscious Parenting Movement in the United States. Lisa acknowledges that most people, like herself, do not realize they are participating in meta story lines that form a continuum of human consciousness. However, with this missing context, our lives shift out of an enculturated and constricted Old Story to the expansive and self-authoring potential of the New Story.

Who Are We? Listen to Lisa discuss the identity issues of parents called to follow a holistic worldview with social scientist and author of the book, Cultural Creatives, Paul Ray, PhD, in this podcast here.

Why We Needed To Create A Nonprofit. Listen to Lisa share the origin story of Kindred, and its midwife-centric village model, with forty practitioners and health care providers here. When Kindred World began, home birth and homeschooling were illegal in Virginia. Parents faced jail or loss of their children for making these informed health and education choices. Kindred World was created as an educational nonprofit to address the need for greater awareness and need for family wellness support.

How One Woman’s Breasts Inspired A Nonprofit. Lisa talks with Patty Kornwolf, RN-C, about the magic and inspiration found in circles of mothers and fathers supporting each other on their paths to wholeness and wellness while being viewed as counter-culture oddities. Patty was a mentoring mother whose full-term nursing modeled and inspired Lisa on her own path. They share fun memories in this Meet the Wayfinders interview for La Leche League International’s 65th Conference.

You can also read more about Kindred World grassroots origins on the website here.