Named after the belted kingfisher, an attentive neighbor and 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 rite of passage into our community, a homecoming.
The Kingfisher Way
The heart and hands exist in a mutually-influential cycle. In an effort to cultivate both, the Kingfisher Fellows spend six hours a week in solitude and prayer and are mentored weekly both by the Guides and by other like-minded neighbors who are cultivating similar endeavors in our community. To work in love with their hands, Kingfisher Fellows are also placed among these neighbors and endeavors based on each Fellow’s needs and giftings, and they undertake the work both for pay and simply as a volunteer neighbor.
Students’ time with the Guides is structured around a weekly Vigil, as well as around two Roundtable Discussions, where the conversation focuses on the confluence of a student’s life with a challenging hoard of literature to be entered into over the course of the year. This literature and conversation are meant to strengthen a student’s imagination, to aid students in thinking through how to live out resurrection life in the world, and to make more resilient a student’s one love of God, neighbor, and the created world.
Kingfisher Fellows are also offered seeds and a garden of their own to cultivate and to eat from during the year, as well as, when available, housing.
The Week of a Kingfisher Fellow
Six Hours of Solitude & Prayer (Three at the Week’s Beginning. Three at the Week’s End)
Ten+ Hours of Loving Work (both payed and unpaid, depending on the season)
One-Hour Vigil
Two One-Hour Roundtable Discussions