About Dave:
My childhood was divided between growing up in the foothills of Mt. Kenya in East Africa as a missionary kid, and high school years spent in Little Rock, Arkansas. More recently, I came from Indiana with my partner, Lizz Schallert. Our three years in Indiana were spent in intentional community with friends as we learned to homestead from our mentors at Joyfield Farm, a group of Anabaptist activists who have been homesteading, market gardening, and peacemaking for 30 years. We are thankful for our time in Indiana but were glad to leave the flat cornfields for the Cascadian mountains. Since our move in March of 2014, we have been glad to call Wilderness Way community our spiritual home as well as our deep kin here in Portland.
During our experience homesteading, permaculture, a design science of integrating humans into their landscape in resilient and regenerative ways, captured my imagination. Permaculture has given me tools for thinking in a holistic way how to create communities that live in their particular ecosystem as a part of it, rather than by pretending to be separate from it. With the tools provided by permaculture design, my twin academic pursuits of medicine and theology find common ground in helping faith communities heal our scarred landscapes and reify our disembodied theologies.
I was grateful to get connected early this year with EcoFaith Recovery and amazed at how it so naturally fits with my own concerns. As a Physician Assistant working in Addiction Medicine, I take seriously the call for recovery from consumerism that is destroying both the environment and our sense of self. As a permaculturalist and theologian, I believe deeply that our faith must heal us as well as our polluted watersheds.
More on the Intern Coordinator Position:
The primary purpose of the Intern Coordinator is to promote the leadership development of EcoFaith Recovery interns, support them in inviting and organizing the forms of support and learning opportunities they most need, help represent EcoFaith Recovery to the interns and the interns to the whole of EcoFaith Recovery, help EcoFaith Recovery leaders imagine new ways they could learn from and engage the leadership gifts of interns, convene the EcoFaith interns so they can deepen their relationships and offer support to one another, connect EcoFaith Interns with others who could help advance their leadership development goals in specific ways, and recommend strategies for enhancing the internship program over time.
Dave Pritchett was the third Intern Coordinator with EcoFaith Recovery and a former intern with EcoFaith Recovery. For information on his project as an intern go here.