Programs
We curate programs on 300 acres near the foothills of the Adirondacks in upstate New York. The Adirondack Mountains boast more than 2,000 miles of hiking trails, over 3,000 lakes and ponds and 1,200 miles of rivers. Restore Forward also invites participants to journeys on five continents. The programs take people and communities on the seven pathways towards reconciliation: gender and culture, spirit and practice, art and resistance, earth healing, racial healing, trauma and recovery, accountability and forgiveness.
Register For Upcoming Programs
Register for carefully designed curated programs offering an immersive experience for you to holistically land. All programs are pre-programmed throughout the months of May through October. Come and bear witness to the power of how immersing yourself on this land can facilitate your transformation.
Ecological Sustainability
Program Description
Ecological sustainability programs provide immersive experiences in Earth healing. These programs invite children, youth and adults to work in mutuality with trees, soil, streams, fauna, flora and animals on almost 300 acres of land, to co-create strategies for humans to safely co-exist on Earth. With a unique curriculum these programs explore a variety of worldviews and cultural heritages (eco spirituality, ecofeminism, ecojustice and indigenous practices), to help us understand and address ecological trauma and examine what roles spirituality, philosophy, and environmental factors have in generating and responding to ecological challenges. These programs explore how we integrate justice and reverence for the Earth into our spiritual and political practices, in the sustainability of the planet and the self and the right to be free from ecological destruction.
Trauma and Recovery
Program Description
Trauma and Recovery programs build on seminal works by leaders in the field of liberatory trauma healing, emotional justice, somatic experiencing, ecopsychology, neuroscience and cognitive therapy in both short-term or long-term settings, to address the effects of catastrophic human experiences on individuals, families and groups. Trauma and Recovery programs also combine traditional approaches with non-traditional approaches including dream work, talk, interpretation, art, spirituality, cultural preservation, reflection, and experiential explorations. Whether it is individual PTSD from private terrors, or public traumas such as political terror and natural disasters, programs offer spaces to begin the powerful work of recovery from harm that is intended to continue, to help us claim the cultural need for recovery from trauma, and claim the need for reconciling in ourselves what has been severed. Our programs are a space for alignment and symmetry, for all that we have wrought in ourselves, our families, our communities, and our Earth.
Gender and Culture
Program Description
Gender and Culture programs create the transcendent spaces to navigate multiple crossroads of female identities and experiences, including those identifying as trans and queer. These programs are where we can examine and critique gender and culture as constructs of history, while unearthing and celebrating women’s cultural, spiritual and artistic productions, including art, photography, music, theater and performances, as well as women’s presses and periodicals, their sciences, cosmonologies and medicines. Our work is to retrieve and reconstitute the testament of women’s survival stories where it languishes as a relic of time, to map the global constellations of women’s historical rites of passage, recover women’s ceremonies, their rituals and the conjurings of ancestral matrilineal villages and ancestral matriarchs. Gender and Culture programs lay the foundation for people to sit in tension with the transformative power of disruptive gender politics, and the revolutionary potential of the proliferation of women’s culture of resistance around the world.
Racial Healing
Program Description
Unhealed historical harms and racial trauma embedded in the founding of this nation continue to splinter communities across the United States. Racial Healing programs offer both affinity and multiracial spaces that invite people to access and embody cultural strategies while helping to recognize, acknowledge and tell the truth about past wrongs and present day consequences of individual and systemic racism. Racial Healing programs create space for reckoning and accountability processes that lead to mutual respect and the protection of those targeted by hate in all our communities. Leveraging circles, these programs offer community strengthening strategies, spaces of safety, and help guide key questions that place people on the journey to mending fractures. Racial healing programs promote listening and reflect back what is heard while creating a container for relationships where people can connect beyond circles and deepen community belonging after they have left the program space. Programs help us claim our own and each other’s humanity and freedom from legacies of enslavement and violence. Racial Healing creates pathways for healing justice that are rooted in uncovering history (truth-telling), making connections across racial lines, working together to heal, and taking action for justice that restores.
Spirit & Practice
Program Description
Spirit and Practice are multi-faith spaces that explore how consciousness reaches the heart and promotes healing on the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual levels. Designed for all types of faith leaders and spiritualists concerned with restoring the future of ourselves and the generations to follow. These programs create the space to develop new technologies for our consciousness to scale, and map the articulations of liberatory futures as they have sprung up across the world to affirm that we can create something after the catastrophe and remain connected with what is sacred. We can harness miracles, dream, heal ourselves and we can metamorphosize. These programs can be co-created or independently curated. Through these programs, we call forth people of faith, the sowers and the kinship networks because a new world is waiting to be born through spirit and practice.
Accountability & Forgiveness
Program Description
Accountability and Forgiveness programs open the pathways toward transformation, peace and reconciliation. We are meant to live in harmony and interconnectedness, not as broken human beings who then proceed to break other human beings. These programs create the space for each of us to connect with our own vision for taking back our lives, owning our rage, moving through it and beginning to heal from it. These programs provide space in dyads, triads, groups and communities to do the work of love and accountability. These programs can also create space for harm-doers to fully understand, connect with and internally acknowledge the humanity not only within themselves, but in those they harm, while engaging in repair that can impact individuals, communities and future generations.
Art & Resistance
Program Description
Art and Resistance programs offer curated spaces that help us become open to the possibilities that kept our ancestors alive. Restore Forward curates crosscultural, cross regional and intercontinental cultural programs that continue to give meaning, and help make sense of our human existence. These programs connect us to one another, honoring ancestry as evolving beings in an ever-changing world. Through learning, deep practice opportunities and immersive experiences, these programs propel our sacred humanity forward.
Private Programs
Program Description
Immerse yourself in a secluded environment and ease into a relaxed state of mind. Explore your calling at a Restore Forward Retreat Center in the Adirondack Mountains and the land in Ava, New York. As you continue to deepen your wellbeing journey with intention, our exclusive programs help you strengthen your connections to the natural world, uplifted by innovative technology and supported by highly trained professionals. Enrich your wellbeing as you define your personal goals – be it overall wellness enhancement or a targeted fitness regimen. Restore Forward wellness practitioners help to align your daily practices with your intentions. Evidence-led programming bolsters the interconnected paths of the Restore Forward philosophy – Rest, Reflect, Restore – with complimentary classes, one-on-one sessions, rejuvenating spa experiences and other wellness activities.