Early learning
Our early learning activities are based on nature connection and wellbeing, inspired by our values at CERES: “helping people fall in love with the Earth, again.”
Our early learning activities are based on nature connection and wellbeing, inspired by our values at CERES: “helping people fall in love with the Earth, again.”
Inspire young minds and create the environmental leaders of tomorrow.
CERES is a public park that is free to visit. Enjoy the green spaces, the community, and our enterprises.
Inspire young minds and create the environmental leaders of tomorrow.
CERES is a public park that is free to visit. Enjoy the green spaces, the community, and our enterprises.
Keep learning at CERES. Spend a day learning a new skill in a workshop or take a multi-week course or wellbeing program that might just change the direction of your life.
The CERES School of Nature and Climate Resource Hub is packed with resources to support your learning.
Learn how you and your individual gifts can be of service to the community and the Earth at this time of great change.
We’re partnering with Nature’s Apprentice to offer an immersive program that will create the kind of earth-based leadership and resilience we will need in the coming decades.
Tap back into your own wild wisdom that so many of us have forgotten.
Learn essential survival skills: Shelter, fire making, weaving and more.
Find belonging in nature through your senses: reading landscapes, tracking, bird languages and more.
Learn to create a culture of connection through art, storytelling, peacemaking and more.
Develop mentoring and group facilitation skills and experience.
Explore your ‘ecological niche’ and unique purpose.
Humans make meaning through story. Explore the narratives that shape our world.
Begin the program with a nature immersion retreat outside Melbourne.
Claire Skye Claire Skye (Dunn) is a writer, speaker, mother, barefoot explorer, rewilding facilitator and founder of Nature’s Apprentice. Claire is passionate about human rewilding and believes that a reclaiming of our ecological selves and belonging is key to regenerating wildness on the planet.
For the last 15 years, Claire has been facilitating individuals to dive deeply into the mysteries of nature and psyche through the pathways of deep nature connection, ancestral earth skills, deep ecology, ecopsychology, soulcentric nature-based practice, village building, dance, ceremony and contemporary wilderness rites-of-passage.
Claire is the author of memoirs My Year Without Matches, which tells the story of her year living wild, and Rewilding the Urban Soul which explores how we might embody wild consciousness within a modern city context. Claire lives beside the Birrarung on the outskirts of Melbourne where she lovingly tends her family, her garden and her own wild heart.
Sieta Beckwith is the Narrative Director at CERES in Melbourne. Her role is to connect all the many stories of CERES across regenerative farming programs, environmental education, social enterprises and community participation, into an impactful, unified narrative. Together, these stories aim to change the systems that no longer serve our world, and help people fall in love with the earth again.
Sieta has worked for 15 years in strategic communications roles, assisting purpose-led organisations to discover, share and live their deeper values. Through her work, Sieta aims to respond to the question, “What are we longing for?” and contribute to building a new story of humanity that is regenerative and hopeful. She finds joy in bringing together small groups of humans from all ages and backgrounds to explore heart-centred practice, and to learn how to live well together through times of great change. Sieta was born on Noongar country but has made her home on Wurundjeri land and loves to rock climb, dance, weave baskets and have conversations with trees.
Daniel Skye is a carpenter and father of three living in Warrandyte. Dan’s introduction to earth based ceremony was at age 16, and since then ceremony, sweat lodge and Vision Quest has been a powerfully consistent thread and guiding principle in his life, both as participant and more recently as a trained Vision Quest guide. Since he was a child, Dan has nurtured a deep love and curiosity for the wild world. Conversations with the “wild other” are part of his everyday vernacular, and tracking a way of life.
Dan is currently apprenticing to the arts of storytelling, song, deep authentic relating, wandering, and the mythic in wild landscapes. You will often find him tending his garden, catching stories from friends, baking bread, running the trails of his mountain home, and spending sweet time with his children, and partner Claire.
The course takes a hybrid approach to curriculum, including nature-based experiential activities in the outdoors, classroom discussions, online readings and commentary, and personalised projects.
Beginning with a nature immersion retreat outside Melbourne, the program will cover six core modules that seek to explore both the philosophy and practice of nature-based leadership.
While each module will turn our lens to a different facet of Nature Based Leadership, our experiential face-to-face time will have a consistent thread of core routines of nature connection and earth skills throughout the program
Each module will involve a set of recommended texts and readings, experiential processes and exploration of a broader context that embeds it into work for the world. The modules will be woven together into the retreat, and studied in more detail during the weekly workshops, webinars and through the online learning platform.
In 2025, we are offering shorter options for the training program. This is a 3-month program starting in February 2025. The year-long program will resume in 2026.
See a detailed breakdown of course content and the schedule for the 2025 session.
Tuition includes in-person workshops, online seminars, camping and catering on retreats, program supplies and mentoring. A limited number of partial scholarships are available on application.
Hear from our NBLT alumni as to how they’ve gone on to put their new leadership skills to use.
We’re currently working on collecting these stories, if you are a past alumni – we’d love to hear from you.
CERES reserves the right to cancel workshops due to insufficient numbers.
If we cancel the workshop you will be entitled to a 100% refund, or you may choose to transfer to another date, subject to availability.
If you decide to withdraw 7 or more days prior to the workshop date CERES will retain a 10% administration fee.
If you decide to withdraw less than 7 days prior to the workshop date CERES will retain 100% of your workshop fee.
Should CERES have to cancel the course due to Government changes relating to the COVD-19 response, we will let you know as soon as possible. Affected participants will be sent a notification that includes details on how to re-book another date or workshop. While cancellations on our part remain refundable within the specified time period, we do hope you will consider bearing with us in these precarious and trying times, and consider the rescheduled date where possible.
Photography by Max Roux.