Photo by Cat Cutillo / Seven Days
Matt Schlein
Q: Where are your roots deepest? What is your story? How did you get involved with your work?
A: I would say the mountains. To sit on a mountaintop and get the perspective it gives is instant context and realignment. I particularly love the mountains of the Northeast—the Adirondacks, the Greens, and the Whites. They all communicate something different, but all of these places feed me. The Green Mountains embrace you and feel warm and gentle. I feel Mother Earth’s energy a lot when I am in the Greens.
I am the founder of the Willowell Foundation, so I have been working on this for 23-plus years. This grew out of a vision of having grown up in a relatively disconnected suburban metropolitan environment. Getting some time in the mountains, I was very aware of the difference between the chi, the life force, of how life feels in rural versus urban contexts. As my relationship with nature started to heal, I became aware of the disconnect that we as humans have created between the environments we live in and our relationship with nature.
The original vision for Willowell grew out of a recognition of the environmental challenges we are facing as a species and centered on finding real ways to revision the relationship between people themselves, each other, and the natural world. It is this generation that unfortunately has to own this problem that was created systematically, so we want nature not to be an abstraction but to be something that lives in the bones of the students. If we’re studying the wetlands, for example, we aren’t just reading about it. We are going out on a cold day and feeling the plants and getting the dirt beneath our nails and making it a very holistic and embodying experience.
I have a master’s degree in education and a master’s degree in social work, and I’d originally been working in the juvenile justice system. I saw that most of the kids being there was a function of the system, and not them being wrong. I liked working as a traditional classroom teacher for a long time, teaching English, drama, and psychology, but I still felt the systemic and institutional pressures that felt antithetical to what it means to be human. It was important to me to create an organization that would allow people to have a hopeful and positive look forward that celebrates community and relationships.
Q: How do you see perenniality in your organization?
I see it in everything we do in terms of visioning how we engage with this landscape in comparison with the corporate mindset that focuses on annual profits, rates of return, and dividends. We’re thinking about the education that the next generations need, and we want to be thinking about the footprint of what we are doing on this land that ideally has a long-term positive impact.
The perennial forest pathway is an example of that. A lot of these trees will probably fruit after I die.
I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that we are at a crisis point as a species. The only way we are going to find our way through it is if lots of people push against the short-term vision in different ways. It follows the indigenous saying: “What would seven generations preceding me have to say about what I am doing, and what will seven generations after me have to say?” It is beyond the human context and how what we are doing is sustainable for all of life.
Q: Which sphere(s) do you identify with?
A: I identify with all of them. Education seems to be the logical one because we have a preschool, elementary school, middle school, and now, a high school. The expertise has really been with youth and education. We service hundreds of kids in Addison County.
Part of the founding vision for Willowell and the intersection with New Perennials is through looking at the ways with which things intersect. Looking at the edible forest path, is that about food systems? Is that about ecology? Education? It’s really about all of them. What I’m most interested in is not thinking about education as something that is cut off from the rest of living. John Dewey has this great quote: “Education is not preparation for life, education is life.” One of the ideas embedded in that is that schools are places where these big ideas actually happen in real time. The solution comes from interdependence and the ways we can bring it all together.
Q: What is one way you go about seeking joy that nobody would know about?
A: I write poetry, walk in the woods, and do Tai Chi. That’s my formula for finding balance.
Matt Schlein, MA, MSW, a former actor, writer, and storyteller, has spent the last 23 years as the founder and director of both the Walden Project and the Willowell Foundation. The Walden Project takes students in grades 10–12 out of the traditional classroom and provides them with an interdisciplinary writing and environmental studies immersion in the woods of Vermont. The Willowell Foundation is a nonprofit devoted to the consilience of arts, education, and the environment. In addition to artist residencies, summer camps, and forest preschools, Willowell advocates for holistic solutions that connect people with the environment, themselves, and each other. The above-mentioned work has been documented internationally in a range of newspapers, magazines, films, and radio stories, including NPR, Edutopia, and the Huffington Post.