Integrating the Holistic Science of the Evolved Nest: Self, Scholarship, and Teaching

A Nesting Ambassador Presenation

AlloparentingCaregivingCulture
By Jill Brown

In this Nesting Ambassador presentation and discussion, Jill Brown shares her extensive research on child fostering practices in Namibia over 25 years, describing how children are cared for by non-biological family members and the cultural beliefs surrounding this practice, including its role during the AIDS crisis. Jill also presented her experience teaching the Evolve Nest curriculum at Creighton University, sharing student projects and discussing challenges in implementing worldview-shifting content in an academic setting. Three students share their insights after learning about the Evolved Nest and its Kinship Worldview. The Nesting Ambassadors discuss the trauma-informed approach and worldview literacy needs for exploring the Evolved Nest science and its Kinship Worldview.

Become a Nesting Ambassador: www.NestedWorld.org.

WATCH JILL’S PRESENTATION

About Jill Brown

Jill is a Cerfitied Nesting Ambassador. She is a Professor of Psychology at Creighton University in Omaha, NE. Her work has taken her to other parts of the world, including being a Peace Corps volunteer in Namibia, Southern Africa, working on rural development and women’ health care. She received a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Benarus, India, studying the experience of women and sacred text. Her teaching and research focuses on the psychological underpinnings of culture and human development. She has conducted research on gender norm development and masculinity in Namibia. Her current research focuses on kinship and adoption and the socially distributed child care and family life, relative deprivation and psychological health, cognition and thinking across cultures.

Learn More about Kindred World’s Nonprofit Strategic Ecology of Initiatives and Projects

Kindred World (Parent Nonprofit) www.KindredWorld.org

Kindred Magazine (Sharing the New Story) www.KindredMagazine.org

Evolved Nest Initiative (Home of the Science of the Evolved Nest) www.EvolvedNest.org

Nested World (Home of the Nesting Ambassador Program) www.NestedWorld.org

Worldview Literacy Project (Dominant Versus Kinship Worldview) www.WorldviewLiteracy.org

About the Music

The Native Flute introduction, to this video was created and performed by Patricia Herr. “Trust” is the name of her instrumental work. Patricia says: “Trust” comes from the depth of my heart and soul, rooted in a state of being that resonates with “Deep Nestedness” in the Creation and with the foundations of “Indigenous Worldview”.

This is a state of being that I experienced for the first time within the mutually connected field, that was and still is opened by Lindsay Mikolitch, who has Indigenous, American and European roots and who teaches ‘Spirit Energy Medicine’ and Kinship from this background.

This is what I tried to experience and express by creating this song and why it is called “Trust” (Honor Song for a “Medicine Man”). The sacred Native American Flute and playing/creating intuitive music that carries comforting energies has become one of my dearest Nesting and Nesting Ambassador Tools.

Patricia is a Certified Nesting Ambassador and the first ambassador in Germany. You can learn more about her and her work, www.NestedWorld.org.

Related Terms:
Jill Brown

Jill Brown is a Certified Nesting Ambassador. Become a Nesting Ambassador at www.NestedWorld.org.

My name is Jill Brown and I am a scholar, a mother, and a poet. Today, I serve as the Executive Director of the Kalahari Peoples Fund that supports the rights of the indigenous San communities to health, education, livelihood, land and language, in southern Africa. I also work as a Professor of Psychological Science at Creighton University. As a child, I was adopted into a farm family in rural Nebraska, on the traditional lands of the Pawnee. I have lived in this land most of my life but spent some significant years living in Namibia and India. Most of my work over the last 25 years has examined kinship and childcare practices, specifically the gifting of children and alloparental care in and out of times of crisis in communities in southern Africa. I have learned how children are gifted, and shared, how parents refuse and negotiate and how beliefs about suffering and perseverance shape these practices. My current research explores how worldview informs sharing practices cross culturally.
In my early adulthood, I lived with an Owambo speaking family for three years on the Namibia Angola Border, working as a Peace Corps volunteer with youth. I saw a different way of being in northern Namibia, one that was relational, one that was connected. It was not a way of life without hardship, but offered a different logic of living from the worldview of individualism and conquest that I had grown up with. I returned and conducted research for the past 25 years in southern Africa studying alloparenting and how aspects of the evolved nest operate in rural Africa. While I spent most of my life observing, I am an evolved nest ambassador, because the birth of my daughter was accompanied by an awareness and intuition of the evolved nest in my life. I was determined (driven by something beyond my rational self) to provide a nest for her. I was preoccupied to have a peaceful, welcoming natural birth. Through my journey of motherhood, I have had the quiet intuition of the components of the evolved nest–looking for alloparents in my stepdaughters and friends, co-sleeping and carrying my babies, walking outside when my children needed calming, grieving my own unnestedness in community with others. Encountering the evolved nest curriculum has given me a basket to gather these experiences, a language to express what often passed quietly between my children, partners and I, and a framework upon which to build and imagine a new world.
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Geographical Location: Omaha, NE, traditional lands of the Omaha and Ponca peoples
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Field of Interest or Profession: Cultural Psychologist

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