 Siri - (California, 29) Youth Leader, Educator, Global Citizen and Community Member Siri was born into a path of travel and began to spread her wings at a young age. At University of California San Diego Siri studied Human Development, rounding out her academics with philosophy, religious studies, fine arts and linguistics. While in University Siri studied abroad twice, in India and Ghana. Called to explore the developing world she is particularly interested in the impact of globalization on endangered local wisdom.
In 2003 she joined a newly formed worker-owned
collective and participated in the democratic process of establishing
a new way of running a business. A leader in the Little Grill
Collective for three years, she developed a commitment to co-creative
process and clear communication. She oversaw the opening of a small
health food store and developed a regional Work Place Democracy Conference. “I
resonate strongly with the idea of listening deeply to communities and
participating in their work in such a way that organic offering can
take form. I am called to work with people, in community.
Facilitating and participating in experiences where growth and learning
are the purpose makes me come alive. Working with others helps me to
work with myself. I am excited to work within a group of peers with
strength and intention. The concept of 'process before product'
resonates strongly with me. I
am interested in exploring the work of the world. My intention is to
integrate my passions and skills in a way that I can contribute to the
healing of our world, a sustainable future, and a way to grow more
conscious, healthy and peaceful. I am inspired by the organizations BB
will work with, the weaving together of sustainable practices and
holistic living impresses me. In collaborating with these
communities I am interested in learning what practices work, and what
challenges remain. I am interested in empowering others to do the work. Our societies feel disempowered, there is a great separation between the way we live and the nature of the world. I am inspired to learn about avenues for change and education. I am interested in learning how to awaken a desire for health on a global level.”
"Food nourishes our bodies, and provides extremely powerful universal tools for change and justice through the many ways we cultivate and consume it. Through food, we honor history, partake in ritual, nurture our bodies and minds, celebrate each other, protest the gross consumption of oil and poisons, invest in local economies, and enrich our communities. The culture and cultivation of food will be a focus in all the places we visit. Songs and stories feed our hearts through an age-old tradition that witnesses universal truths and archetypes that span cultures, the sexes, generations, and socio-economic lines. For the past eight years, I've dedicated my life to the ancient tradition of storytelling through the more contemporary mediums of songwriting and photography. Beyond Boundaries would allow me to fulfill my role of storyteller, giving song to people and stories without a voice. During they journey, I wish to document the stories, people, and places that we visit, visually and sonically, as a means to deliver the stories and ideas we will encounter to a broader audience. I believe it impossible to create peace, ingenuity, and strength in the world without also cultivating those things within myself. Through authentic experiences in different cultures countries, and people I hope to challenge my own beliefs and traditions so that I may expand my intrapersonal and interpersonal understanding."  Aaron Frederick, former Executive Director and Co-Founder of Rippleffect, Inc, was raised in South Portland and graduated from the University of Southern Maine with a B.F.A. in Sculpture. He has focused on unifying his diverse experiences under the Rippleffect (http://www.rippleffect.net) umbrella, impacting the Maine coast and Greater Portland community by transforming a 1907 island military outpost into a living classroom. For his collaborative work on this project, he received the 2002 Gulf of Maine Visionary Award from the Gulf of Maine Council on the Marine Environment. Aaron has led adventure and environmental education expeditions from the Eastern U.S. Mountains to the heights of the Rockies and from the California Pacific to the jungles of Mexico, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Peru. As an artist, he has focused on producing public work with a theatrical component, often peppered with humor. His creative goal is to push viewers into a new paradigm for viewing and experiencing their day-to-day lives, with a special focus on engaging the viewer as participant in the creative moment. He is devoted to promoting ecological global health and vitality through community organizing, art, music, and theatre; through design with the goal of harmonizing the technosphere with the rhythms of the biosphere. "It is highly feasible to take care of all humanity at a higher standard
of living, without anyone taking advantage of one another, so we can enjoy the
whole earth." -Buckminster Fuller
"My goal is to apply my passion and imagination to understanding new and ancient ways of meeting basic human needs through innovative commerce, food production, care of children and elderly, agriculture, play, waste management, engagement with non-human landscape and spirituality. I seek to offer a humble and service-oriented U.S. presence in international communities, gaining increased awareness of diverse needs and conflicts between and among human societies. I strive to build cross-cultural connections through the art of play."  Sam - (Colorado, 20) Student Leader, Carrier of Council, Anthropologist, Family Man, Environmentalist Sam is a third year student at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. A graduate of Denver’s East High School in 2007, Sam lettered in drama, served on student council, and received an award for outstanding achievement in Social Studies. At Hampshire, Sam is concentrating on a hybrid of Anthropology and Environmental Studies to look at the interaction and intersection of people and places on this planet. Sam is an active student leader on campus through his work leading meditation groups, initiating Council, playing on the basketball team, and recently working as a Field Manager with Grassroots Inc., canvassing for the 2008 presidential election. Outside of school, Sam has done extensive work with the School of Lost Borders, acting as a participant and apprentice with their Youth Rites of Passage Program. “This is a chance to learn more about life, death, the earth, and other people than I could in any classroom or by reading any book... I plan on using this experience to sharpen, expand, and explore my abilities in leadership, community building, self-sustaining agriculture, and spirituality. We need to make a change and I will take everything I can from this trip in order to prepare me to help lead us to a new way of living on this planet. Realizing that we are all one people, not individuals torn apart by borders, class, color, and beliefs, is critical in my quest as a leader... Most of all I will contribute my prayer to this group. My prayer of love will lead me through this journey, and I will spread this prayer throughout the world. In a time so full of hate, love has never been so important.… I truly believe that this is exactly where I am supposed to be and exactly what I am supposed to be doing. I am ready to accept any challenges that arise and am willing to make huge sacrifices for the success of this trip. I look forward to the ups and downs, the dark and light, and being with whatever experiences come up.… I am ready for this. I want to learn how to lead, love, and live globally.”  Shay worked as a leader in community
organizing, youth empowerment, project management and group facilitation for
the past 13 years, including UN projects in Canada, the International Sea
Turtle Society in Mexico, and in Victoria, BC on youth-driven urban agriculture
initiatives. She is also a wilderness guide, counselor, and event producer. She gained her BA in Community Studies
from UC Santa Cruz and has additional training in Non-Violent Communication,
Wilderness First Aid, and Trauma and Grief counseling; she is trilingual in
Spanish, English and Portuguese.
She is a founding member of the Bioneers Youth Advisory Council and is
currently the Native Oceans Project Manager for Ocean Revolution. She thrives working at the intersection of languages and cultures and
is dedicated to the processes of reconciliation and conflict resolution
necessary to support reframing the dominant cultural view of the Human-Nature
Relationship. “…The larger questions of our times
are calling me out of my known roles and calling me to work for a larger good,
to think and work “glocally” in a way previously unknown to me…At this time, it
seems we are called to shift in many ways, to shift from being simply national
citizens to global citizens, called to re-integrate our development plans to
care for the Seven Generations to come, called to re-think our relationship
with the natural world, called to find innovative solutions to complex situations. Beyond Boundaries is an opportunity to
live into these calls and questions while centering our daily activities on
cross-cultural exchanges, service, learning and connection with international
research and community centers and gifting the gift of Council…. Over the past several years, I have
been looking for the right graduate program and have not yet found one that
fully embraces the concepts of bioculturalism, or the complex set of
relationships between people, place and the Human-Nature relationship and the
reconciliation and conflict resolution processes that accompany this work. I now understand that I will not simply
find the program that I have been looking for but that I will have an active
role in creating it, not only for myself, but for those to come. Beyond Boundaries is the closest
opportunity I have found to embracing these principles and theories, and it is
my intention to support a reframe of our Human-Nature relationship, which
includes the difficult work of reconciliation and conflict resolution."  Will's life lies at the edges and intersections of sustainability, social justice, equality and stewardship. For 10 years Will has been a guide both domestically and internationally with adventure programs, college-level field courses, and wilderness rites of passage trips. Will graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2002, where he studied ecopsychology and social change, and went on to co-found The Wilderness Within, an organization offering experiences focused on restoring people's relationship with the natural world. Will trained in council and rites of passage work with the School of Lost Borders in 2005 and was invited to join The School as a guide in 2007. Will became a student of Permaculture design, nature awareness, and cultural mentoring at the Regenerative Design Institute in Northern California, and continues teaching and learning there now. A student of ecopsychology, regenerative living, community, and ecology, Will seeks to bring together some "best practices" for creating a diverse, robust, and timely response to this complex chapter in the human story. “I see Beyond Boundaries as a chance to embody some of the qualities that seem so urgently missing in the world. I see it as an opportunity to give something back, to be in service, and to simultaneously receive more than I can imagine. And, I see this journey as a chance to move forward with a long-held inquiry into some of the broad-scoped questions of our times: What does it mean to be awake in a dying world? What is our responsibility as human citizens and citizens of the earth to act in the name of the greater good? What does being a citizen of the earth mean? How would this world look if the human race were to become global-centric? How does the bigger story of our history and evolution inform our species’ current situation? What does a species-wide rite of passage look like? What does it mean to be a warrior of our times? I carry these questions with me to Beyond Boundaries. I carry them to the group who will make the pilgrimage, as well as to the places and people we will visit. I believe there are people out there who are asking and answering these same questions, and I hope that this journey can help to begin tying some of those answers together. Being an “edge-walker”, I am not surprised that it takes a journey such as this to ignite my passion for participation."  Recently, she was called to make pilgrimage again, to connect many of the people and places that both remember and pioneer thoughts, practices and ways of being that contribute to a global community we might all truly want to live in. Based on her years of accumulated experience and relationships around the globe, and with support from her husband Win, Gigi carries the vision of Beyond Boundaries that first emerged in 1980. She has called together a small inter-generational group to join her on this pilgrimage of listening, learning and service. “I want to giveaway the best of what I have learned to date and step both back and forward as a mentor and guide, an elder in training. I had the opportunity when younger to see the bigger picture whether one calls that Gaia, spirit or global community. It is now my intention with Beyond Boundaries, to offer such a time of listening and service to and with others who would not have the resources to do such on their own. I want to encourage Americans, metis, mutts, my people, to bare witness first hand to some of what is happening in different parts of the world. I want to offer a global experience and perspective with those I know will grow to become even more amazing stewards of this planet, those who will go far but remain rooted in a local commitment to and understanding of place. These pilgrims, these communities, the next generation, I want to support in whatever ways I can to be part of the healing, the great turning, the reconciliation, the revitalization of ancient wisdom and embodiment of a modern life of prayer and action. And, I want this journey for myself and for my partner to be fully, once again, a student of those who have signed on and the ones we meet along the way. “  Win is a
namer and a finder, a cultural translator, a deep listener, a savage witness,
a poet and philosopher, a Taoist, lover, father, son and husband, a long-time
student of Sri Aurobindo, a wilderness rites-of-passage guide and trainer. He
has been (among other things) an award-winning film & TV director, a
private eye, a transformational coach, a Chinese Mandarin translator for Army
Intelligence, and a truck driver. “With all my heart I want us to succeed at finding a way to inhabit the earth together peacefully, regeneratively, as one human race, in a sacred manner. For much of my life, in my personal philosophy I have been moving from belief in the ownership society towards share-and-share-alike, from the sanctity of individual rights towards the spiritual communism that my sacred traditions and my conscience have suggested to me, and also towards finding oneness and the sacred in nature--in the Tao. On a planetary scale, I feel some such turn can't happen quickly enough--and that it might be a long time coming, if not too late. As a Beyond Boundaries pilgrim, I want to visit those places where people are living these questions, where the idealistic meets the practical in many kinds of intentional communities. And I want to seek reconciliation and understanding where others are struggling to keep ancient communal answers alive in their traditions." Extended Base Camp -- Supporters and Participants Sierra - (California, 53) Food-grower,
Manager, Biospherian Sierra was for 11 years the Project Director for Las Casas de la Selva, a 1,200 acre rainforest enrichment demonstration project in Puerto Rico, and the President of Tropic Ventures Education and Research Foundation, a Puerto Rican non-profit corporation that supports the educational and research effort at Las Casas. After graduating with honours from Sheffield Hallam University in England, Sierra traveled widely, including working in the field in East Africa and then to India where she spent several years working on food and agricultural projects with local populations. From 1987 - 1991 she was responsible for the management and coordination of the architectural division operations, financial administration and cost control for Space Biospheres Ventures, the company that built and operated Biosphere 2. In 1991 she joined the first team of eight researchers as Co-Captain and Food Systems Manager for the historic two-year Biosphere 2 experiment. During this time she was responsible for the overall management and co-ordination of the eight-person crew and for management of the half-acre agriculture system that fed the crew during the two year closed mission. Sierra is the author of a popular cookbook, Eating In: From the Field to the Kitchen in Biosphere 2, and a co-author of Life Under Glass a personal account of her experiences inside Biosphere 2. She has published numerous papers on the agricultural systems of Biosphere 2 and subsequent experiments carried out with the Biosphere Foundation in their Laboratory Biosphere facility. She has made many conference presentations including the 2nd Annual meeting of the Mars Society and the 4th International Meeting on Closed Ecological Systems at the Linnean Society of London.  Krystyna is fueled through her own curiosity and questions. As a child she learned from a broad diversity of landscapes and languages, spending her early years in the wilds of Brazil, followed by cement jungles in Europe and the USA. Passion, ignorance and destiny have been the contexts into which Krystyna experiments with and applies her inquiry into living laboratories for learning – through artistic and entrepreneurial forms. As a co-founder of Fossil Rim Wildlife Center (www.fossilrim.org), she learned how little she really knew about the visible and invisible principles guiding the relationship between land, people and animals. It is here she began to meet the cultural myths and beliefs that have driven human behavior’s attempt to act “with dominion” over and above all other forms of life. She continues to listen for ways to live an inter-dependent equanimity and cooperation with the currency of nature. She divides her time among social change organizations and systemic exchange efforts that create opportunities for people to build engaged relationships of service between the known and unknown. She has been led to make available places for retreat and sanctuary to those who seek to be with nature, for guidance and reflection. Through learning directly with the natural world, indigenous elders and many lifelong teachers , she now guides people into the wilderness, into community , into themselves and their work in the world . She continues to explore the nature of money as a context for healing the relations between people through complementary forms of exchange that transform currently held beliefs about forms of transaction. She collaborates with many to delve into the nature of nature, the nature of our collective “story”, the nature of mutually reciprocal living systems and the philanthropy of spirit. Krystyna seeks to inspire and catalyze a balancing between ever-present, simultaneous paradoxes, such as the need for conscious transformational exchange and a continuing surrender into the Divine perfection in all things. Krystyna joined the Beyond Boundaries vision as supporter, friend and co-traveler participating for the launch and pilgrimage of service to Tamera in Portugal. |
