Register for the 2025 Quaker Youth Retreat today and join us at Scattergood Friends School in West Branch, IA for a weekend of fellowship and learning. All youth are welcome, Quaker affiliation is not required. The workshop topic is Staying Whole: Resistance through Resilience Resilience through Resistance. We are thrilled to welcome Aydin Yildiz and August Kalinosky as our facilitators for this year’s workshop. Attendees will also have an opportunity to work with a local non-profit on a service project, enjoy games and activities, song circles, bonfires, and more. 

About the Retreat:

Staying Whole: Resistance through Resilience, Resilience through Resistance

How do we take care of ourselves when our government is hostile to us and the people we love? How do we face scary realities without becoming immobilized by fear? How do we find joy, peace, and connection in dark times? Aydin Yildiz and August Kalinosky will invite students to explore these questions together, reflect on their inner and community resources, and share strategies for staying whole and keeping our dreams alive when the world feels hostile, overwhelming, and scary.

Meet the Facilitators:

Aydin Yildiz is a community organizer and media worker based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They focus on mutual aid and care work locally in their neighborhood, in addition to their work as a producer and editor for an international media collective working to build solidarity and shared analysis across marginalized, grassroots, anti-authoritarian movements for the liberation of oppressed peoples globally. Aydın has journeyed through a variety of mystical and contemplative spiritual traditions, including Quakerism, and their spirituality is deeply influential in their approach to their organizing and liberation work.

August Kalinosky is a spiritual caregiver living in Saint Paul, MN and working as a hospice chaplain. They are a member of Bear Creek Monthly Meeting. They care about gardening, spiritual care for queer life stages, building reciprocal relationships of care with their family, friends, and neighbors, and cooking. They see themself as part of and indebted to the queer liberation, disability justice, mad pride, autistic self advocacy, fat liberation, environmental justice, and mutual aid movements and a supporter of or ally to many more. They live with their beloved partner, 2 dogs, cat, and foster cat.