Alliance of Generations

Alliance of Generations is a mentoring network offering support to boys, girls, and young adults on their journey to adulthood. This support extends to their families and the community at large. Our program experienced quite a hit during the pandemic and has yet to recover fully. We are looking for volunteers to take over for program volunteers who, after 25 years of this work, are aging out of the required tasks.

There are many ways to volunteer that fit your skills and time. Our vision is expanding, and you can have a rewarding place in that for yourself while enhancing others' lives. We support a culture of restorative justice rather than an approach that punishes or blames someone.

We currently only offer two programs: a high school restorative justice “youth-elder” circle in Grants Pass Glendale Highschool and the Raven Adventure through a Madrone Trails School 7th grade rites of passage event. The positive impacts of our work have rippled across the community since 2002. We've had over 60 experiential weekend events around the country, mostly in Southern Oregon, with over a 1000 participants and over 100,000 volunteer hours. We are a tax-deductible non profit corporation with a local Board of Directors.

Our mentors are trained to offer a high quality of presence - the skill of “listening to connect” with genuine curiosity, and a sense of wonder and adventure. We ask open-ended questions in a way that deepens an understanding of self. We encourage youth to speak their truth and we teach adults to respectfully receive that truth, looking beyond behaviors, suspending critical judgments that arise, looking instead to the youth’s underlying unmet needs that are at the root of the behaviors.

 Mentors seek to empower, to lift up youth, to dream big in their lives, to envision a path of hope, to see themselves on that path and actually succeeding on that path. We find it is often helpful to imagine youth succeeding beyond their own ability to imagine themselves succeeding. In fact, we believe it is the responsibility of the elders in the community to remind youth of these gifts. Mentors are trained to support the youth in overcoming their challenges by normalizing speaking about challenges as they emerge in their lives rather than allowing them to fester and remain unchallenged.

We deeply appreciate the giants in the field of human relationships who have come before us and integrate their collective wisdom, including: Trauma Informed, Restorative Justice and non-punitive approaches; Natural Learning Relationships (NLR), Conversational Intelligence, and Non-violent Communication (NVC) principles.

In our daily relationships we practice our core values:

• Mutual Respect

• Power-with instead of power-over

• Kindness

• Active Listening

• Inquiry and curiosity

• Empathy

• Compassion

• Collaboration

• Unconditional love