Named after the belted kingfisher, a watchful and attentive neighbor—a river companion— nestled among our hills and along the banks of our rivers, The Kingfisher Way is the Local Academy’s Gap-Year fellowship. This year-long fellowship cultivates a local, embodied love of God, neighbor, and the created world in the hearts and hands of one to three graduated seniors in ways most powerful to the next stage along the journey. The Kingfisher Way is an initiation, a right of passage into our community, a homecoming.
The Heart and the Hands
The heart and hands exist in a mutually-influential cycle. In an effort to cultivate both, those along The Kingfisher Way are mentored weekly by the Guides, as well as by other neighbors of our community, who act as further mentors and among whom students are placed to work.
Students’ time with the Guides is structured around a weekly, roundtable discussion, where the conversation focuses on the confluence of a student’s life with an intentionally-chosen hoard of literature to be read and entered into over the course of the year. This literature and conversation is meant to strengthen a student’s imagination and to make more resilient a student’s one love of God, neighbor, and the created world.
The week of those along the Kingfisher Way is also structured around intentional hours of solitude and prayer and loving, neighborly work out in our community, as students are placed to work on various homesteads and farms, as well as with other like-minded initiatives in our community. Those neighbors who take on a student for work act as mentors, as well, focusing on a wholistic cultivation of neighborliness in our place.
Students are also offered seeds and a garden of their own to cultivate and to eat from during the year, as well as a stipend and, when available, housing.