GRASSROOTS RITE OF PASSAGE
What it is and What it’s Not (And 20+ Reasons Not to Send Your Boy Away to a Program Instead)
“When you have specialization you have a terrible disintegration of the community’s capacity to be a community. You’re entrusting fundamental human function with specialized technical knowledge. You’ve confused these two things. You’re undoing the community’s capacity to be a community.”
Stephen Jenkinson, from Campfire Stories podcast, “On Death and Dying (On Life and Living)”
What is a grassroots rite of passage?
A grassroots rite of passage for your son is a local, collective and creative undertaking to transform your boy into a young man over a period of one year. It aims to end boyhood and decenter the boy, so a young man can emerge with a deep love of life, and a keen sense of obligation to the web of kinship.
what it isn’t
Grassroots rite of passage is not a program, a workshop or therapy. It’s not yet another way to enthrone the child. It doesn’t seek to boost self- development, self-esteem or self anything.
Its aim is not to craft a young man who is all that he can be, who has realized his potential, who is successful in a conventional sense. It’s not keeping him safe from the world. No, your son will face challenges and betrayals too. He will know pain and suffering.
Why hold it in community?
You might wonder, why not send my boy to one of the many programs that offer a rite of passage for teenage boys? It’s less work for everyone, and requires less time. It would be less expensive by every understanding we could summon.
You could send him to such programs, thank goodness they exist at all. They might be thought of more as a training, an intensive camp experience, that offers the thrill and camaraderie of group cohesion. This holds meaningful value as a part of a longer, slower grassroots rite of passage, rather than as the passage in itself.
My deepest longing is to democratize rites of passages for boys, to bring it home to the community again.
There are local people emerging now who are tending to the human life cycle. We have birth doulas, we have death doulas. I’m not advocating for another profession, but for the re-emergence amongst us of the old communal function of life stage midwives, male and female, to support parents and boys nearing adolescence in transforming for the good of all.
So much of what makes culture is now in the hands of institutions, experts and professionals. All the crucial moments of a human life are overseen by strangers whose careers are meant to compensate for tears and rifts in the cultural fabric, rather than be in the care of friends and family whose job it is to craft culture.
We are born in hospitals overseen by nurses and doctors. We are fostered by teachers at school. We are married by priests, rabbis, muftis in church, temple, mosque. We are cared for by nurses and doctors as we die in hospices, hospitals, palliative care units. We are embalmed by experts, cremated behind closed doors, buried in cemeteries.
When every significant transition in our lives and the lives of our family is overseen by specialists and professionals far from home we lose an essential aspect of relational bonding, of kinship.
This includes how we transform and allow ourselves to be transformed by participating wholeheartedly and committedly in ending childhood for good, so that a responsible, life-affirming young man can be born amongst us.
Rites of passages are not possible in a global village. They are emanations of people, place and time. And so initiation is an irreplaceable part of the cultural seed-bed. And bringing initiation home is a revolutionary act of communal parenting that tends to the topsoil of cultural remembrance.
Life stage transitions are sacred moments in a life, and an acknowledgement of how time moves through us. The rituals that make them happen are specific to place, and specific to time. When these rituals are franchised, standardized, quality-controlled, repeatable they morph into theater, a reenactment, liturgy, dogmatism, a spectator sport.
20+ reasons why I advocate for a different approach than sending your boy away to a program.
#1-6: It Has Risk, Danger And, Therefore, Potency.
All transformation must move through the unknown where something dies a little death, so something new can be reborn. Grassroots rite of passage is held locally, by friends entrusted by parents to challenge the boy well, in many ways, over time, so the man can eventually emerge.
Growth by defeat.
A rite of passage demands the boy be defeated decisively by constantly greater beings. These are forces beyond compare that humble the ego. The boy must give up the habits that he treasures. He must accept that he is no longer at the receiving end of everyone’s full attention. No one let’s go of such a privilege willingly. To do so feels like a small death.
Commercial rites, strictly beholden to liability waivers, safety concerns, and retention, are likely to avoid such clamour. They ultimately safeguard the boy’s essential comforts and evade an encounter with mythical descent and death.
Unpredictability before efficiency.
We pay for something because it would take us more time than we’re willing or able to spend creating it ourselves. We buy a knife because finding ore and turning it into a serviceable blade is more than we can afford or know how to do. So we send our boy to someone with a proven track record who can deliver a result faster and with less risk and uncertainty than we can manage in our busy everyday lives.
It’s understandable and common, we do it with births, we do it with deaths, we do it with weddings, but we all lose so much of our relationship with life that way.
Time, learning by mistakes, facing risk and uncertainty, walking alongside friends and family into the unknown, failing and being undone by the failure, are all at the heart of a rite of passage. Without them, we are guaranteeing an outcome we want to see. We set an intention and focus on the signs that verify its appearance among us. Efficiency and predictability stifles and domesticates the indigenous soul of our boy, rather than help it blossom in all its fragrant, wild and unfamiliar beauty.
Initiation before ingratiation.
Stephen Jenkinson has suggested that there are sham rites of passage that offer self‑congratulation dressed up as ceremony. There’s an experience of sudden transformation, but there is nothing in its wake to craft a lasting redistribution of responsibility and obligation in the community. It’s ingratiation rather than initiation, meaning it pleases the boy and his parents, but doesn’t serve the whole in meaningful, lasting ways.
responsibility, not empowerment.
Many traditional rites of passage seek to transform boys into men by having them learn to take on meaningful and vital responsibilities that sustain the web of life. Traditional rites in many cultures culminate in new duties to family, community, and land. A grassroots initiation can acknowledge this by linking the ceremony to specific local responsibilities—helping younger kids, supporting elders, engaging in community projects—so that the new status is lived, not just declared. Many short-term programs are set up to offer safe challenges that empower the boy outside of the context of family or community.
Decentering rather than centering.
A rite of passage at adolescence aims to end boyhood for good, so the man can appear. But even the most well-meaning commercial rites of passage have a transactional obligation to deliver on their take. So what is the exchange, what’s the deal, the quid pro quo, and how is it measured?
One possible response is that a program can turn a sacred communal rupture into a psychologized, self-serving transaction that fails to birth the man. As parents we might pay for such a transformation, but get empowerment instead. And we might judge whether or not the program was a success by our boy’s subjective satisfaction or our own parental reassurance, not by the irrevocable death of boyhood, and the rebirth of the young man into a life of service.
Community before consumerism.
Grassroots rite of passage is a slow, local approach, that is well suited to include the long‑term needs of land, ancestors, and neighbors. A purchased program risks serving mainly to still the parent’s anxiety and boost the boy’s self‑image, rather than support the community and its needs.
#7-17: It Has Real Community
A young man learns that he is no longer the center of the world. Grassroots rite of passage aims to shift his primary belonging from family alone to a wider community of peers, adults, ancestors and nature. The willingness to guide him in this way, is one fundamental way that community is made.
Healthy separation from parents.
Your teenager needs both a separation from parents and a simultaneous connection to a wider circle. Too much fusion or too much detachment both create problems. Community initiation creates a defined, ritualized moment where parents step back and mentors step forward. This allows your son to experience necessary distance from you, without the fear that he is on his own, which may fuel exaggerated risk-taking, resignation or nihilism.
Led By friends, not Strangers.
A grassroots rite of passage is home-grown, led by men and women whom your boy knows and trusts. They know your family, your struggles and joys, and they are familiar with some of your son’s gifts, and his wounds too.
At a paid program, your boy will likely know few if any of the adults there, and you will have little real participation in the proceedings. The ritual experts, bless them, likely will not be around in a year, a month or even the next week to help your son integrate what he went through, into his daily life. The only ones who witnessed his journey will, almost certainly, not be a part of his life moving forward. A rather stark rephrasing might be: initiation by experts may turn out to be an initiation into the safety of workshop excitations, not the aliveness and complexity of culture.
Culture work, not a workshop.
A grassroots rite of passage is not an event, or an intense weekend workshop. It’s a cultural function. It doesn’t belong to a calendar slot or a professional setting. It belongs to a people, a place, and a way of life. In fact, it might be what gives people a chance to know themselves, and to live well.
kinship, not a gathering.
At adolescence a boy’s task is to shift his primary belonging from family alone to a wider community of peers and adults. When initiation is rooted in local relationships, the adult circle your son is being welcomed into is the same one that he sees at the dinner table, the classroom, in the neighborhood, and at community events. This stabilizes his sense of self, and reduces the sense of isolation many young men feel. A rite of passage program is often a momentary gathering of people from different backgrounds and different places that disperses when the program ends.
Seeing who Returns.
A grassroot rite of passage you walk alongside your boy and are a part of the changes. When he returns, you are able to see him for who he has become.
Sending your boy away to a brief and intense experience in which you participate but peripherally, assures that on his return, he will find no one who truly recognizes or acknowledges the transformation that he was convinced he underwent.
Stepping back into the household, he finds all is as it was. A pat on the back, a celebration of sorts, then back to business as usual. The habits, and the patterns that hold them in place, are there waiting. It’s as if it didn’t happen, or worse, as if it wasn’t real. That’s a heartbreaking experience.
It’s one reason why people who are knowledgeable about rites of passages and rituals say, it’s better not to hold a ritual, than to hold it poorly. The consequences can be devastating. A return to the way it was dispels the understanding that a communally recognized and integrated transformation is a part of the human condition, and instead lays a life-long foundation for resignation and defeat.
Public rather than private.
Grassroots rite of passage embeds witnesses into your boy’s actual life so that his new standing and promises are remembered, expected, and sometimes enforced. His transformation happens in the presence of people who know him and love him.
Much like therapy, the paid-for rite and what it meant to your son remains private, confessional, socially fragile and difficult for others to understand. When the professionals disappear or grow remote after the program ends, there is no one significant in the young man’s daily life who knows what he experienced and what commitments he made to whom or how to hold him accountable. It’s private, and can strengthen his sense of separation and alienation.
Community engaged vs uninvolved.
Much of the work I’ve done with community building has aimed at tending to the social ecology of a specific place. This includes life stage transitions. These cannot be franchised or outsourced to organisations or experts without losing their hard-earned blessings for everyone involved.
When you initiate a boy, it’s understandable that the focus is on the individual becoming a young man. What’s easily missed is that in any ecology, when a member transforms, the whole ecology transforms. Or put differently, every initiation is an occasion for the community to appear and know itself.
If a young man is to be truly welcomed into the community, the entire community, parents, relatives, friends, must know to accommodate the young man upon his return, by accepting that his presence necessarily transforms everyone in ways unknown. Such an acceptance, awareness, vulnerability and willingness is crucial, or the rite of passage has little life-serving consequence to speak of. It uses the passion and vitality of the man to be, as a means of revitalising the social ecology and all its members.
Transforms community, not just the boy.
Initiation is never just about the individual. It renews the entire community’s agreements and responsibilities. When parents ask their own community to initiate their son, they invite neighbors, elders, and peers to remember their shared duty to the next generation. Everyone is implicated. Such a rite doesn’t only grow a boy into a man. It grows the adults around him into a more conscious, cohesive group, which in turn creates the healthiest possible environment for his ongoing development.
Programs are more likely to atomize transformation, centering the boy’s personal “journey” while exempting parents and neighbors from change.
Participant not audience.
You can’t effectuate meaningful change without everyone present being altered. That’s why a rite of passage is not a set piece. It’s not scripted. It’s not quality controlled. There is no audience. A grassroots rite of passage strives to erase the distinction between participant and leaders, so that everyone present is implicated, changed, and responsible upon the return.
A purchased rites of passage program that runs once a year or several times a year, often has staff who orchestrate and oversee the ritual, and the boys are on the receiving end of it all. The program has certain elements that are repeated from one time to the next. Drumming circles, rope challenges, long hikes. It’s quality control of what might be more of a product than a rite, more program than ceremony.
Community care in a hard time.
Adolescence is a period of heightened dangers, a time of experimenting with substances, risky behavior, and susceptibility to peer pressure. A rites of passage is in part a protective container, with elders supervising, challenging, and supporting your boy through that danger zone. A grassroots rite of passage transforms your son in community. It does not involve other children his age, nor does it aim to be a ceremony for anyone but your son.
A neighborhood or community that has consciously initiated a boy they know well, over some time, is more likely to watch over him, intervene when he’s drifting toward harm, and recognize his struggles as part of a known life stage rather than as “a problem kid.”
Understanding limits, or realising potential.
We learn best by doing, trying, attempting and coming up against the limits of our capacities. When the uncles and aunts are called upon to initiate your boy, they will have to grapple with the most fundamental questions we face. What is a man? How do we suffer? What is resilience? What is an ancestor? How do we transform? How does a young man learn about death? What limits are we bound by? Their answers is how initiation acquaints the young man with limit, loss, and grief as conditions for adulthood.
Few if any of these questions get a seat in the communal long house, when we send our boy away to a program. It may be too short a program to truly touch on any of them. And so sending him away from those closest to him deprives everyone of a chance to learn how to wrestle these questions in a way that conveys to the initiate the foundations of our shared humanity, and his place in it.
When a rite is packaged as empowering, safe, and inspirational, it has already capitulated to the culture of comfort. A community‑held rite has more permission to be sobering, humbling, and costly for everyone involved.
#18-19: It Allows for Enough Time
Lasting transformation at adolescence follows an arc that requires considerable preparation, and slow reintegration. This takes time. Grassroots rite of passage, not being a paid-for program, is rooted in local rhythms, with local people who know the boy, and welcome the man in a timely way.
Maturation, not catharsis.
So much of a ceremony is preparation, an approach that is respectful of that which is being approached. Initiation at adolescence takes seasons, not days. It requires patience and care and attention. The boy must be separated, challenged, witnessed, and then held accountable over time.
A weekend simply can’t carry that whole arc. At best it can mark or intensify one moment within it. A week-long or shorter program is pre-packaged and comparatively brief. It asks less of everyone, and has fewer consequences, than a year long crucible working its magic on your family and community.
Soul work is slow work. The initiation itself isn’t catharsis, a spectacular transformation. It’s the beginning of something that has been a long time in the making, and that takes a long time to be made real, folded into the fabric of the everyday. A week or weekend compresses this initiatory arc into catharsis without maturation.
Long-term mentoring, not a short-term high.
Community-based initiation explicitly names local men and women as ongoing mentors, which supports the adolescent need for consistent, trustworthy adults outside the nuclear family and reduces the risk of boys, and their families, slipping back into old patterns once the weekend is over.
Shorter, more intense programs often create a temporary peak experience. They rarely guarantee sustained adult guidance after the inevitable descent from such heights.
#20-21: It’s Rooted In Place
When we grow food at home, the soil grows richer. Grassroots rite of passage is a cultural and local undertaking, that is both fed by land, and feeds the land. It plants the young man and his obligations in local soil. This erases distinctions between biological and cultural diversity.
here vs anywhere.
Much of what ails us, and our children, these days is a sense of alienation from place and the culture that grows from our continued presence there. Rendering a place irrelevant while glorifying mobility is at the heart of the modern belief that home is where the heart is. It abstracts location, and situates belonging in the core of the individual. Wherever I go, there I am.
Unless a rite of passage is well rooted in place, it risks becoming theatre, a whisp of smoke, a fading memory, hardly of any consequence to people or place. A grassroots rite of passage recognizes that place, and all its beings, are a part of the community that guides the young man into an embodied understanding of kinship, and to whom he is beholden for life.
Integrates soul and land
Adolescents process change not only cognitively but through their bodies and their relationship to place. A rite of passage roots personal transformation in relation to a specific landscape, season, and larger living systems. Holding such a rite locally–by rivers, in forests or parks that your son already knows—helps root his transformation in the actual world he inhabits, which supports psychological grounding and reduces dissociation.
#22-27: It Invites Clear Teachings & Wisdom
When people outside of the family are asked to guide a boy towards adulthood, they must ask themselves, initiate into what? Grassroots rite of passage offers everyone involved a chance to deepen their queries and conversations to grapple with what they’ve learned, and decide what they wish to pass on to the growing man.
Initiation into what?
Grassroots rite of passage attempts to engage men and women willing to testify and bear witness to each other’s deepest considerations. Out of such discussions, often heated and revealing of differences as well as commonalities, we attempt to re‑grow a shared something that the young man can belong to, and serve.
When we send our boys away to a program, what are we expecting them to be initiated into? What are the shared agreements, stories, taboos, and duties the program will emphasise? How does that agree, or not, with our values, and the values of the people we trust? A weekend is more likely to be generic, and more likely to initiate the boy into his own psychology.
tempering not abandonment.
A rite of passage is a time for the growing boy to learn something about human tempering, about limits, duties, grief, praise, beauty, wonder and reciprocity with land and kin.
Most programs, however, are beholden to customer satisfaction across religions , ethnicities and values. They cannot afford to risk offense. They often market themselves as neutral, all inclusive and are therefore careful not to cause offense to its participants or their parents. Rather than provide direction, mandates, proclamations, instructions, they provide unassailable universals and ask the boy generic, open-ended questions to which he must find his own, personal, individual answers, and there is no such thing as a wrong answer.
These Socratic prompts feign depth, and dodges the adult role of declaring what the boys must know to serve people and place. It’s an introduction to solipsism, at a time when the boy is asked to give up his centrality and lean more heavily on his gifts to community and ancestry. Much like parents giving a child free reign to do and say what he likes, the programmatic unwillingness to stand for values and traditions is an abandonment of the adult role to instruct the boy in the ways of the young man’s function and responsibilities. It leaves him bewildered and betrayed at the threshold.
shared view of manhood.
A grassroots rites of passage attempts to emphasize the values, virtues, and responsibilities of adult men within that culture or circle of trusted, intergenerational adults. It allows a community to articulate its own shared view of manhood, so your son isn’t left to piece together his identity from peers, social media and stereotypes.
Vague or contradictory expectations about masculinity lead to confusion, shame, or posturing in the young man. And programs that ask the boy to come up with own understanding, may do him a disservice, undermining his ability and willingness to embrace what is seen as dignified and beautiful about being a man.
Elders not experts
When we take on a grassroots rite of passage we seek elders among our friends and family, people we know to be recognized for their reputation, spiritual tempering and wisdom. We craft these people by asking them to take on a function.
Weekend programs tend to be staffed by certified professionals credentialed by trainings. Sending our boys away, we never have to sit down and wonder, “Who are the elders, aunties, uncles here, in this soil, in this language, in our circles?” That question is central to making do with who we have in our circles, and seeking a path across the arch of initiation that does the best it can with what is available.
cultural continuity.
Each human life stage transformation (and there are many) is a renewal of the relationship between ancestors, living community (including land), and future generations. A grassroots approach allows parents to contribute their own spiritual or cultural traditions—songs, languages, prayers, family stories, myths—so the rite doesn’t erase your lineage but maintains it, giving your son a felt sense of standing in a line of men rather than feeling like he’s inventing manhood from scratch with people he barely knows in a place he might never see again.
A coherent story
Your teenage boy seeks to weave many different roles into a single narrative of himself. “Who am I, and where do I come from, and why am I here?” A grassroots rite of passage invites elders, mentors, and family members to share stories, blessings, and expectations that are specific to his family line, your land, and your community, giving your son a story of which he is a part, rather than a generic program script wherein he is an actor served by a crew.