Professional Carefarm Training Program

Ecological wellness through restorative spaces

Are you a mental health provider, social worker, psychologist, nurse, physician, spiritual leader/counselor, school counselor, or other licensed professional who wishes to learn how to truly help those suffering from the traumatic death of a loved one? Do you work with bereaved parents or grieving family members after suicide, homicide, accidents, or other losses? Are you a trained peer counselor who has a heart for helping others? 

An intensive course on restorative communities and spaces

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the effects of urbanization on social, emotional, and physical health. A report issued by the United Nations Center for Human Settlements found that approximately 75% of the population in developed countries live in densely populated urban areas. Contact with nature promotes restoration from stress and mental and emotional fatigue and has positive health benefits. Even sitting in a room with a view of trees promoted a more rapid decline in diastolic blood pressure than sitting in a viewless room.

Relationships with animals, too, improve emotional and mental wellness and increase longevity in humans. Gorman (2016) suggests that animal interaction creates shared relations and a commonality of knowledge and experiences between people, regardless of their background and abilities, helping build a community and create a sense of acceptance. Human-animal interaction has been shown to have a range of positive influences on varying groups of humans: reduced autistic symptoms, improved self-esteem, reduced loneliness and increased interaction in social situations to more physiological changes such as improved motor skills, reduced anxiety and reduced blood pressure (Barker & Dawson, 1998; Odendaal, 2000; Urbanik, 2012).

In the book Human Spaces: Life-Enhancing Designs for Healing, Working, and Living, architect Barbara Crisp presents the concept of a holistic wellness focused, or restorative, environment based on the work of the late modernist architect Louis I. Kahn. Crisp includes a diverse selection of projects, including hospitals, corporations, medical, residential, educational, and retreats, public spaces, to illustrate this concept, A life-enhancing environment is defined as “a place built or created to support and sustain the well-being of a particular occupant of time, place, and culture, where the body as a whole, both inner and outer, is regarded as essential to how the space is experienced” (p.6). These principles inspire design that both honors the earth, and all its beings, and can be translated into all aspects of daily life.

One restorative space, the Selah Carefarm, has had tremendous success helping grieving people, including leading them toward more sustainable and healthier lifestyles (Gorman & Cacciatore, in press; Cacciatore & Gorman, 2020; Gorman & Cacciatore, 2016). The potential mental health and healthcare savings, both short and long term, is substantial. For example, from a strictly economic standpoint, the price tag for unresolved grief amounts to billions of dollars each year in lost productivity, lower job performance, and health implications of destructive coping (Ayers et al., 2004). The “hidden annual cost of grief in the workplace” related to grief after a loved one’s death is estimated at $37.4 billion (National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization). Fox, Cacciatore, and Lacasse (2014) found the cost of child death to cost a conservative $3 billion dollars annually, and with little or no community support grievers falling into a “downward spiral of destructive coping behaviors” (Kissane, 2000, p. 46) including substance use (Cacciatore et al, 2014). And just the cost of substance abuse treatment alone in 2021 was $740 billion (National Institute for Drug Abuse, 2022), or about $37,000 per person just for direct treatment, with about a 50% relapse rate.

This course crosses various disciplines to construct a unique program for those interested in building spatial, community-based, and infrastructural changes in the way humans, animals, and the natural world meet and gather to interact sustainably and compassionately. Teachings can be applied in schools and hospitals, churches and parks, mental health facilities and treatment centers, carefarms and ranches, in urban and rural areas, and within parks and trail systems.

This intensive, hands-on course will help prepare community members and professionals to assess, plan, and implement both therapeutic landscapes and communities within the fields of community mental health, sustainability and environmental stewardship, substance abuse prevention and treatment, mental/emotional health and psychiatry, criminal justice, mortuary sciences, medicine, nursing, retirement centers and nursing homes, faith communities, animal welfare, public health, K-12 education, nonprofit sector, and more.

URGENT:  This course will require you to be outdoors and may not be appropriate for those with movement limitations or sensitive to heat, cold, animal dander or saliva, bugs, and generally the subjectively unpleasant experiences of the natural world.