Jumping Mouse
Outdoor School

2013 - 2017

Jumping Mouse is an ecology, arts, and traditional skills outdoor school for children, youth, and occasionally adults. During my time with Jumping Mouse as founder and director, we had endless fun, profoundly connective, hilarious, muddy, challenging, exhilarating, empowering days outside making, building, transplanting, catching, sneaking, imagining, singing, tracking, listening, observing, learning, and playing. I never felt like I got enough photos because it was so hard to step out of the action long enough to capture it.

The work I did with Jumping Mouse was all about developing an instinct for the meaning people of all ages imbue in the landscape, and then leveraging that knowledge to produce imactful programming that deepens connection to that landscape. Working in this field for nearly a decade afforded me intimate knowledge of how young people understand, use, and relate to place and space: which are fun, which are exciting, which ones feel like home, which provoke reverence, and which ones leave us feeling flat.