West Marin County is a rural, unincorporated community whose youth population is primarily composed of undocumented Latino youth and the children of ranch owners, two groups with equity challenges that have resulted in tension and conflict. It was in this population that Eden Trenor s99 saw an opportunity to implement a talking circles program, modeled after one she was already facilitating for 50 men serving life sentences in San Quentin Prison.

While the idea and the work were based on her past experience, Eden credits the Garden Hill Fund as the catalyst that launched the Teen Talking Circles program. "The concrete offering of this funding for this specific set of people (TMS alumni) helped me to see that this was the time to do it," she says.

For ten weeks, Eden and her co-facilitator met with the same group of 16 and 17 year-old girls. She notes, "teen talking circles allow young people to be seen as authority figures in their own lives. This is a way of cultivating leadership."

The program was so successful that West Marin County is looking at ways to implement talking circles system-wide, for both boys and girls. Eden explains, "There is recognition that there is more support needed to take on challenges that youth are facing today, such as the broad exposure to self-harm, the way that gender identities are shifting, the way that families are shifting, and the way that there are more and more cultures represented in each school. And that comes out in many sideways expressions, such as bullying, or people who aren't able to engage in the academic experience because they just have too many other things that they are processing. So there is recognition on the county level that Teen Talking Circles serve a lot of these purposes simultaneously; it's outside school, it's not a teacher, it's not a family member. It's peers."   

In addition to her direct work with the county, Eden has started a new organization called Shakti Rising, which provides year-round talking circle facilitation and community service programming to both youth and adults. "I learned that ideally that for this work to stick and spread, there needs to be a lot of buy-in from the whole family," Eden says. "To create an experience like this in a vacuum is very challenging for the youth to process. Also, there is a long period in this process when nobody knows why we are doing this. And then something shifts. So we need a program that goes way beyond when that shift happens."