Nature Quest

February 8th, Then First Saturdays, March - November 2025

The Nature Quest program provides immersive experiences, designed to connect youth to nature to foster life skills and support human growth and well-being. The program is supported by the Prebys Foundation's "Nature and Healing" grant initiative. We invite youth from Youth Empowerment to join us once a month for gardening and land based encounters.

Stay Updated

Join our mailing list for Nature Quest updates!

“My contention throughout this book is that reconnecting to nature is one key to . . . . our health, our ability to learn, our happiness, our spirit.”

- Richard Louv, The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder, p. 184.

Activities

Plant and Grow: Hands-on seasonal gardening ensures participants’ education and engagement with nature, with enactments that foster resilience and self-confidence.

Meaning Making: Activities locate self in historical, ancestral, geological, biological, and cosmological place through intention-setting, hikes, art, and music.

Council Circle Trust: Processing the day and present moment with mentors and peers will provide a safe and nurturing space for the youth to share, reflect, and digest their experience.

Ceremonial Attentions: Participants will invite friends and family to the retreat center and a farm-to-table end-of-year meal with foods harvested from the gardens they spent the year tending to.

Four Concepts of Outdoor Healing
(Harper, et al, 2019)

Nature as Place: Participants will gain a sense of place, including culture, heritage and current presence.
Nature as Bodily Felt: Youth will physically engage with nature while gardening and participating in creative and expressive activities.
Nature as Metaphor: Participants will connect and realize human nature is nature. We grow from nutrients; we adapt and learn resilience. We are nature.
Nature as Co-Therapist: During the nine months, experiences will “naturally” occur. Participants will reflect, learn, and feel part of nature.

Facilitators
(Guest Facilitators Will Also Participate)

Ute Jamrozy

Co-Founder of SFRC, Ute Jamrozy holds a Ph.D. in Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management, and has over 20 years of academic experience in Sustainable Tourism and Marketing. In San Diego, she added Integrative and Eco Psychology, and organic farming to her fields of interest. With SFRC, she hopes to implement sustainable experience design-- in retreats and workshops that offer lasting transformations to the individual, and positive impacts for human-environment relationships. Ute brings unbridled passion for the mission of the retreat center to our board and all she does.

Talia Morales

Talia Morales, MA, MT-BC, is a board-certified music therapist, expressive arts therapist and lifelong musician. She holds a master’s degree in expressive arts for conflict transformation and peacebuilding, and integrates intermodal art approaches to promote wellness, community building and positive social change. Talia is also a certified permaculture designer, composting ambassador, seed steward and a Registered Yoga Teacher, RYT-200.

Morales is founder of ¡ÁnimoMúsica!, a bilingual music enrichment program for children, and founder of PermaPeru, where she leads retreats to Peru aimed at cultivating harmonious relationships between ourselves and our earthly community of shared ecological systems. Talia’s roots to the country of her birth have remained strong and she regularly returns to Peru to spend time with extended family and reconnect with the land, which she considers to be precious and sacred.

Wes Chester

Wes Chester MA, CAGS, is an Expressive Arts Therapist, outdoorsman, artist and musician whose master's thesis focused on relationship to nature through the arts. Wes has been working as an arts-based and nature-based therapist since 1996 and holds two advanced degrees in Expressive Arts Therapy from the European Graduate School in Saas Fee Switzerland, where he was faculty from 2006-2023.

Chester is the former director of the Expressive Arts Institute in San Diego, California, and experienced curator who operated galleries in San Diego CA from 2001-2021. He has led experiential education courses in eco-psychology. Wes currently works in residential facilities doing art with at-risk youth, as well as private practice.

The grant-writing and Nature Quest team remembers Angelina Sanchez. Angelina was instrumental during the planning phases of this project and will be missed dearly.

About Surprise Farm
Retreat Center

Surprise Farm Retreat Center offers educational programs in the surround of nature, organic farming, and heritage sites. The experience of being in place, with creative intentional community, encourages well-being.

Our Intentions include learning from each other about meaning and purpose, in workshops and around the fire-pit. We seek a caring and sustainable interaction between human nature and Nature, inviting Nature to heal us.

About the Prebys Foundation

Prebys Foundation is the largest independent private foundation in San Diego County, a unique tri-national area encompassing communities from San Diego, Tijuana, and the Kumeyaay Nation. The foundation works to create an inclusive, equitable, and dynamic future for all San Diegans. Prebys advances excellence and shared opportunity through investments in groundbreaking institutions, ideas, and people to ensure more people in the region are financially secure, healthy, empowered, and connected.

About Youth Empowerment

Youth Empowerment is a San Diego-based nonprofit organization dedicated to transforming the lives of youth, families, and adults through innovative programming and holistic support. Our mission is to empower individuals to break cycles of poverty, gang involvement, and incarceration, fostering pathways to success and self-sufficiency.