Heidi Schreiber-Pan, PhD, LCPC (Founder): The Center for Nature Informed Therapy started in 2020. Our goal is to equip people to integrate the natural world into their profession. We work mostly with therapists and social workers, bringing nature into their clinical practice. ZoeJack, LCSW (Instructor): We handle everything education, training, and accreditation related to the intersection of nature and mental health. Our programs help people understand how nature impacts mental health, and how we can use a relationship with nature to enhance it. The first introductory level is our Level One Nature Informed Therapy training and certification program. It starts with a three-day intensive, held in person at a natural location, so people from around the country and around the globe can gather together. During the three days, we move indoors and outdoors, between a lecture format where we learn the evidence base behind the connection between nature and mental health, and hands-on activities during the experiential portions. You will engage with skills that explore how nature informed therapy is also a somatic experience. Heidi: We might touch the soil. We might ask our senses what information is coming to us from the natural world. The feedback we receive is that the training has so many practical, experiential elements. On day three of the live training, clinicians pair up with a partner and run a mock nature informed counseling session, while participants who are not therapists team up to brainstorm ways to bring this work into projects at their own workplaces. Zoe: At the end of those three days, participants receive a certificate of completion and CEU continuing education units for the intensive. After that comes the three-month online component. You can learn the foundations of nature and mental health in three days, but then you go home and practice it. So we gather once a month for three months as a group for consultation, and you also have the option to meet individually with someone experienced in nature informed therapy. This is where you refine your skills and build the confidence to take people, especially your clients, outside and make the most of that relationship. At the end of the three months, participants who are mental health professionals are certified as Nature Informed Therapists, and participants who are not mental health professionals are trained in nature informed therapy. Everyone is then listed in our directory, so anyone can go online and find a nature informed therapist near them. Heidi: Our goal is to assess a person's current relationship with the natural world, so that when they finish the program they are several levels deeper into that relationship, which often turns into caring more deeply for the natural world. When you attend the training, it is the relationship with others and with the natural world that creates the change, and that change is what you bring back to your clinical work and hope to create for your clients. Voices from training participants: Dr. Sarah Hall, PsyD: Whether you are a trauma informed therapist, in individual practice, or working in community mental health, I really like that it is structured to translate well into your work. Mary Tobon, LCSW: It has been incredibly fun. We all bonded over the last three days. We have cried together, laughed together, and cried and laughed at the same time. We have really connected in a special way. Breon Gaines, MA: It has added a knowledge base I did not have before, around making connections and building relationships. Tim Ayd, LGPC: Being here this week has made me feel challenged, but it has also made me feel hopeful for the future, experiencing the hope that we can bring some good to this world. Mary Sue McCarthy, LCPC: I am leaving here invigorated. I was approaching a mild burnout stage in my work, and I am excited to go forth as an ambassador of nature therapy. Clare Rupp, LCSW: It has re-centered me in my own relationship with nature. Focusing on that relationship has been the most impactful part, along with learning how to empower other people to partner with nature and build a deeper connection with it. Zoe: When you come to our training, you join a community of like-minded people who all believe nature is important, that it matters for us, and that we can give back to it. Heidi: We want to push the boundaries of what mental health can look like. Mental health treatment must include the natural world, and that is a reciprocal interaction. You care for me, I care for you. Nature is everywhere, and it is for everyone. Every human being needs a deeper connection with nature. It can be found in all spaces, and we all need more of it.