Kindred World initiatives

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Kindred Media has chronicled the breakthroughs and insights of the Conscious Parenting Movement for over 20 years. Our wisdom archives and oral histories present and preserve this living, consciousness-raising movements efforts, and those of families to thrive despite America's ranking as the "worst place" to raise a child among developed nations.  Kindred Media is a collaboration of over 200 contributors and organizational partners who have collaborated to building a New Story of Childhood, Parenthood, and the Human Family. Discussions around the site’s New Story posts are facilitated by a Mighty Networks platform and a monthly newsletter, as well as multiple media outlets. A New Story Glossary on the website helps the readers discover new language for our New Story.

To tell a New Story, we're going to need new language, new storytellers and new, courageous vision of our human potential. Kindred began as first global eco-parenting magazine in 2002.

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Check out the New Story Glossary of Terms.

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The award-winning science of the Evolved Nest brings the integrated, interdisciplinary fields of usually siloed science together to help academics and politicians understand the innate wellness-driven worldview of parents and caregivers. An educational project spear-headed by the award-winning neuroscience research and books of Darcia Narvaez, PhD. Extensive resources for parents and professionals to discover the baselines for lifelong wellness.

Subscribe to the Evolved Nest monthly newsletter to stay-up-to-date on Darcia Narvaez's science, research, presentations, and posts.

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Check out the Evolved Nest's Self-Directed Learning Center.

Visit the Evolved Nest's website.

The Book Fairy Pantry Project is a grassroots family literacy movement to support bonding and attachment through reading to babies and children. This is Pam Leo's vision to reach at-risk families. Includes Little Freedom Libraries. A community-based, international initiative. Her book Please Read to Me was the 2021 recipient of a Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation grant. Learn more about how to start your own local family literacy Book Fairy Pantry Project on the initiative's website.

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The Kindred Fellowship Program takes college students on an innovative social justice educational journey to reimagine activism that  transforms the systemic roots of social injustice in childhood - Kindred Activism. This fellowship program began in May 2021. Watch the showcase presentations of fellows and program presenters on the website.

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TThe moving and inspirational six-minute film illustrates our capacity for breaking our current Cycle of Competitive Detachmentand returning to the pattern of 95% of our human history: a healthy, peaceful Cycle of Cooperative Companionship. Breaking the Cycle is based on the multi-award-winning book, Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom, by Darcia Narvaez, PhD. 

Breaking the Cycle contrasts the two basic ways societies can function: the optimal approach, which most human societies through time have followed, is the Cycle of Cooperative Companionship where children’s basic needs are met; they grow into well-functioning, cooperative community members (from neurobiology and on up); and as healthy adults, they maintain the cooperative system.  Currently in the USA the opposite pattern is in place: children’s basic needs are not met, illbeing and dysregulation ensue, creating adults who are detached and distracted and keep this Cycle of Competitive Detachment going. The United Nations ranks the USA as 41st out of 41 developed countries for child and adult wellness.

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Take up the Eco Attachment Dance to expand your own ecological attachment/nature connection through a social media challenge. Each day for 28 days an activity will be posted for you to practice that day. Each activity takes about 5 minutes (though you can go longer). Based on the successful lab experiments by Dr. Narvaez and her students at the University of Notre Dame.

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Meet the Wayfinders is an oral history collection of video interviews with nine professionals, parents, and scientists who found ways around breastfeeding advocacy barriers, or just broke them! The series was created at the invitation of La Leche League International in celebration of their 65th Anniversary Conference held October 15-18, 2021. 

The Meet the Wayfinders Oral History Series includes an overview video, where participants learn the five hallmarks of wayfinder advocacy, aka Kindred Activism, and highlights of the nine interviews. The complete interviews are also available on this website. The Meet the Wayfinders Resource Guide in PDF form lists the many references discussed in the collection by presenter and can be found here.

In Meet the Wayfinders, viewers will discover reasons why cultural change is difficult and how the breastfeeding advocates featured in this oral history collection were successful in breaking, transforming, and maneuvering around barriers in:

• Breaking through the formula company “captured” biomedical field and colonization of populations worldwide: Cecilia Tomori, PhD, Director of Global Health and Community Health, Johns Hopkins University
• Breaking through the siloed-science of academia and research which doesn’t (can’t) support a whole child wellness model: Darcia Narvaez, PhD, Professor of Psychology Emerita, University of Notre Dame; Founder, The Evolved Nest
• Breaking through hospital and medical professional culture’s systemic racism, Kimarie Bugg, DNP, FNP-BC, MPH, FAAN, IBCLC, Founder, Reaching Our Sisters Everywhere
• Breaking through BIPOC colonization created anti-breastfeeding bias, Kimarie Bugg, DNP, Founder, Reaching Our Sisters Everywhere; Wesley Bugg, JD, Reaching Our Brothers Everywhere; and Jasha Lyons Echo-Hawk, Indigenous Milk Medicine Week and Indigenous Milk Medicine Collective, Co-Founder
• Breaking through mainstream media cultural bias, Jamie Grumet, TIME cover breastfeeding mother from May 2012
• Breaking through gender bias to create workplace and gender equity laws, Joan C. Williams, JD, Founder, Center for Worklife Law, University of California at Hastings
• Breaking through gender bias to inclusion of fathers in breastfeeding and birth advocacy, Wesley Bugg, JD, Reaching Our Brothers Everywhere
• Breaking through America's social and public policy policy abandonment of families to creating support networks, Patty Kornwolf, RN-C, Kindred World Founding Director
• Breaking barriers in Theater, Using Performance Arts for internal and external barrier-breaking, Cathleen O’Malley, playwright, MilkDrunk

In this series, the viewer will discover the hallmarks of successful barrier-breaking shared by the wayfinders who answer three questions:

• When were they first exposed to breastfeeding? 
• Were they surprised to discover barriers to breastfeeding, particularly in their field? 
• And how have they overcome, transformed, or moved beyond these barriers?

Through their personal histories, the wayfinders reveal to us a holistic form of breastfeeding advocacy, a strategy that does not wait for external, cultural forces to change and support individual and collective wellness. This new form of activism, that centers childhood and worldview as a sustainable strategy for cultural transformation, is being explored at the Kindred Fellowship Program as Kindred Activism (see more below).

All of our presenters address the opportunities awaiting us in our post-pandemic world and how, with an understanding of the hallmarks of successful barrier-breaking, we too, can answer the call to become a wayfinder, to introduce and integrate a new way forward right where we stand as individuals, and to joyfully gather to build a breastfeeding-friendly culture.

The many resources shared in these oral histories are all captured in the conference PDF here.

Watch the oral history collection.

As Darcia Narvaez’s work shows us, our enculturated left-brain thinking is not capable of “seeing” the wholeness of life, and therefore wellness, or the evidence that we are evolving toward a whole, integrated consciousness. This online e-newspaper tracks our collective shift by curating headlines and research that demonstrate the shift, and the relevance of Kindred World’s work. 

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Sharing a New Story of the Human Family means having access to media platforms and publishing houses that courageously champion the science, inspired insights, and ancient wisdom needed to help ourselves shift into a new state of consciousness. We look forward to sharing with you our new titles and authors beginning in 2022.

Read about our first book, by beloved author, Pam Leo, published in 2021 and awarded a $25,000 grant from the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation, here in our press room. The children's board book, Please Read To Me, is a tool for family literacy and bonding for our Book Fairy Pantry Project initiative.