Lisa Reagan, Kindred’s Editor
Read, Listen, Watch, and Download Lisa Reagan’s work on Kindred.
Wisdom is the experience of wholeness. To become a wisdom-based society, we must first become a wellness-informed society.
– Lisa Reagan, Kindred Media, Editor; Kindred World, Co-founder
Introduced as a “force of nature” by Cassandra Vieten, IONS president, at the first Mindful Motherhood Conference in NYC in 2011, Lisa Reagan’s passionate dedication to empower American activists, professionals, and families to envision and create a Wisdom-based, Wellness-informed Society has led to the founding of multiple inspired nonprofit initiatives and collaborations since her transformative motherhood initiation in 1997.
Lisa’s Mother-of-a-Quest began with co-founding a grassroots organization of Wayfinders, Trance-breakers, and New Cycle Makers fiercely intent on protecting American’s children with educational initiatives to counter the country’s freefall to the bottom of all developed nations’ wellness indicators. Today, Kindred World is an award-winning nonprofit whose vision and mission are more relevant and critical than ever. (Read Kindred World’s Great Nonprofits’ reviews here.)
Integrating a quarter century of cultural transformation insights into grounded Wayfinder Wisdom, Lisa currently shepherds Kindred World in carrying out its ongoing nonprofit work through multiple initiatives and partner collaborations, including:
The Evolved Nest, a virtual learning center featuring the award-winning science and research of Darcia Narvaez, PhD. Lisa and Darcia collaborate on the creation of virtual educational outreach projects of the Evolved Nest, including the short film, Breaking the Cycle, Mighty Networks discussion groups, as well as monthly live discussions. Darcia Narvaez is ranked among the top two percent of scientists worldwide. Her research into humanity’s Evolved Nest reveals our “evolutionary pathway to wellbeing”. Darcia currently serves as Kindred World’s president.
Kindred Media is an alternative media platform championing a New Story of the Human Family. Lisa serves as Kindred’s executive editor, working with contributors to create podcasts, interviews, special feature series, and the expansion of Kindred’s New Story Glossary (because a new story needs new language). Kindred’s innovative media platform allows the many Kindred World initiatives and partner collaborations to interact and integrate personal stories, shifting worldviews, and cultural transformation victories. Our challenge, to bring visibility and coherence to cultural transformation, is achieved through Kindred Media’s holistic storytelling strategies.
The Meet the Wayfinders Oral History Series was produced at the request of La Leche League International for their 65th Conference in 2021. This series integrates both Kindred’s many years of tracking unheralded victories of cultural transformation as well as introducing the concept of Kindred Activism, which explores both how the activists were successful in their quests and how their wayfinder advocacy can be duplicated. Kindred Activism is further explored in the Kindred Fellowship Program.
The Kindred Fellowship Program captures insights from Lisa’s 25 years of activism and explores the need for a more sustainable approach to social justice education and cultural transformation advocacy. KFP’s instructors are leaders in their fields of human development and consciousness. This live program integrates Lisa’s decades of allyship with minorities and women to change the lives of children, her Worldview Literacy Facilitator training from IONS, and her professional experience as an educational program director with multiple nonprofits. KFP’s work with college-level fellows and facilitators resulted in the creation of Kindred Activism, a childhood-centered, worldview-based activism that equips and empowers a new generation to create a Wisdom-based, Wellness-informed Society.
Lisa continues to shepherd Kindred World’s original vision of a Wisdom-based, Wellness-informed Society as the award-winning nonprofit serves Wayfinders, Trance-breakers, and New Cycle Makers, expands its collaborations with partners, and welcomes new board members. To see all of Kindred World’s initiatives, visit the site here. To volunteer or partner with Kindred World, please contact Lisa and Kindred World’s board at hello@kindredworld.org. And please support Kindred World’s ongoing nonprofit work with your tax-deductible donation here.
Read Lisa’s work on Kindred Media.
See Lisa’s most recent collaboration with Darcia Narvaez, PhD, though the Evolved Nest, the Breaking the Cycle short film. A film guide and resources, including a Spanish version of the film, can be found at www.BreakingtheCycleFilm.org. Watch the short film below:
Lisa Reagan’s Conscious Parenting Movement Work 1997-2023
On A Mother (of a) Quest…
Lisa Reagan and her son, Collins, on their small farm in Virginia in 2002. Photo by Keith Reagan.
On a Mother (of a) Quest for 24 years as an award-winning journalist, activist, and nonprofit visionary, Lisa Reagan explores the space between our human family’s unsustainable, industrial Old Story and the emerging New Story of a Wisdom-based, Wellness-Informed Society. Lisa is a co-founder of the nonprofit Kindred World and the executive editor of Kindred. Her unrelenting passion for our home planet, Earth, and her belief in the unfolding capacities of our human family drive her vision for Kindred, but it is her beloved community of friends, family, and fellow wayfinders who have made the Mother (of a) Quest, below, possible and joyful.
About the Mother (of a) Quest
Kindred World began as a grassroots conscious parenting movement in Virginia in 1996. (See a 2006 newsletter for fun here.) Kindred World’s founders and members, including Lisa, were heavily influenced by Virginia resident and human development scholar, Joseph Chilton Pearce, whose seminal works guided the organization in its infancy. Pearce’s work helped define the core issue for the Conscious Parenting Movement: the Bio-Cultural Conflict. Pearce demonstrated in his lifetime works that our biological imperatives were at odds with cultural imperatives, placing humanity at risk for maldeveloped brains, culture and an unsustainable future. Read more about Joe’s work here.
Today, Kindred World is an award-winning nonprofit and Gold Ranked Guidestar member with multiple and growing initiatives to serve Cultual Creative families, professionals and the public.
While earnestly investigating the gauntlet of new motherhood, Lisa shared her personal stories like Soul Nourishing Gifts of an Accidental Tribe, the Darkside of the Natural Parenting Movement, and Spiritual Composting. Her move toward human consciousness research to help her understand the lack of family wellness resources, public policy support and community connection in American culture is represented in her work following the discovery of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, IONS.
In 2011, her exploration of the obstacles to conscious living led her to become a trained facilitator of the Worldview Literacy Project through the Institute of Noetic Sciences, IONS. In 2012, she served as the Writer-in-Residence for the first Residency Project, Omnibus One at the Earthrise Retreat Center, IONS’ campus in Petaluma, California. During her retreat, she was interviewed about her Mother (of a) Quest for the documentary film, The Love Bomb.
The Shift Reports by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, IONS, in 2007, first alerted Lisa to the Old Story and New Story “shifting” taking place in Western culture. It was the discovery of family wellness advocates as Cultural Creatives through sociologists’, Paul Ray, PhD, and Sherry Anderson, PhD, book of the same name (also sponsored by IONS) that helped her feel encouraged and excited by the grassroots and growing Conscious Parenting Movement. Cultural Creatives were shifting the culture toward sustainability and wholeness through their value-reflected purchasing power, and they were a growing and powerful group, over a quarter of the population in most developed countries.
Parenting As A Hero’s Journey
In seeking a creative and empowering format to present the Old Story/New Story to parents and practitioners, Lisa turned to Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey for guidance on self-transformation as a path to transforming our unsustainable culture. The original Parenting As A Hero’s Journey Virtual Retreats (now a forthcoming book) encouraged parents to “Answer the Hero’s Call” to question our culture’s Cycle of Competitive Detachment and follow their heart wisdom’s call to author a New Story, one based on humanity’s Cycle of Connected Companionship supporting a Wellness-Informed Society. This New Story of Childhood, Parenthood and the Human Family, as well as Lisa’s Mother (of a) Quest has been presented at conferences, small groups and to professionals and practitioners for over a decade.
Gathering Thought Leaders
An alternative media and nonprofit initiative, Kindred’s mission is to seek out and present the under-funded and under-reported thought leaders, scientists, and advocates of the New Story and Conscious Parenting Movement. You can find her podcasts in Kindred Fireside Chats. These interviews with conscious living leaders continue to explore the New Story of holistic family wellness at a time when the United States ranks last among all developed nations for infant, child and maternal wellness (See the United Nations report). Kindred’s New Story video series, produced by Lisa and her husband of 30 years, Keith, are featured on Kindred’s Vimeo and You Tube Channels.
In December 2013, Kindred sponsored Australian psychotherapist, Robin Grille, on a Parenting for a Peaceful World USA Tour. Grille’s work is a formidable account of the psycho-social-history of parenthood. You can view videos from the tour here and read his work on Kindred here. Watch Lisa and Robin talk about the Conscious Parenting Movement as the flip side of the Children’s Liberation Movement in a video from this tour here.
Kindred’s Pioneering Partners
In December 2015, Lisa received an Award of Appreciation from the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health, APPPAH, at their 19th International Congress in Berkeley, California. Kindred continues to work with APPPAH as a Pioneering Partner to bring forward the New Story of birth psychology. A new documentary, In Utero, now explores the origins of human consciousness, and study groups can utilize Kindred’s In Utero Film and Discussion Guide. Lisa collaborated with Stephen and Kathleen Gyllenhaal, In Utero’s filmmakers, to bring Kindred’s Film and Discussion Guide to an international audience. See Kindred’s birth psychology videos here.
From 2007 to 20013, Lisa’s vision of serving Cultural Creative families was carried forward through Kindred’s Pioneering Partners Project with the International Chiropractic Pediatric Association, ICPA, and over 400 international Pathways Connect Gathering Groups sponsored by the ICPA’s Pathways to Family Wellness trade magazine. The Pathways Connect educational program was based on a decade of Lisa’s work with Kindred World’s (formerly FCL) community building. (Listen to the FCL origin story.) Lisa served as Pathways associate editor during this time. Read her stories here, videos here, and interviews here.
Endorsements for her work include Bruce Lipton, PhD, who states in this interview, that “Conscious parenting is the rule of the day. To help us evolve from the mess that we’re in now into the future civilization, we have to help children get off the ground with beliefs that encourage and support them to be creative and manifest heaven on earth.” Lipton is a stem cell biologist, bestselling author of The Biology of Belief and recipient of the 2009 Goi Peace Award.
Her work is also endorsed by Ervin Laszlo, PhD, author of Quantum Shift in the Global Brain, who said, “Wellness is the key to a peaceful and sustainable world. And wellness on the level of the family is the way to achieve it. Pathways and Pathways Connect is a precious guide for achieving this paramount objective.” Laszlo received the Goi Award, the Japan Peace Prize in 2001, the Assisi Mandir of Peace Prize in 2006, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 and 2005.
In 2013, Pathways magazine received three Hermes awards for the issue featuring Lisa’s interview with Jamie Grumet on her experience as TIME magazine’s now iconic breastfeeding cover mom. Read the original interview, and download the audio, The Cover Shot Heard ‘Round The World: An Interview With Conscious Parenting Revolutionary, Jamie Grumet.
In 2015, Lisa was interviewed about her passion for and long history of advocating for families in the October 2015 issue of The Attached Family.
Nonprofit and Public Service
Lisa is honored to serve on the advisory board for the first-of-its-kind, Museum of Motherhood, MOM, in New York City, where she helped to coordinate the first Mindful Motherhood Conference in November 2011. Watch Robin Grille talk with Martha Joy Rose, MOM curator and founder, about the history of motherhood here.
She serves on the venerable Touch the Future’s board of directors as of 2012, and is very proud of TTF’s new adult learning center, The Academy, featuring 30 years of video interviews with thought leaders and research scientists who connect the dots between child development and sustainable living. In 2015, TTF launched the Joseph Chilton Pearce Library.
She also serves on the Resource Advisory Council for Attachment Parenting International and their Journal of Attachment Parenting International.
In her home state, she served on the board of directors for the Virginia Breastfeeding Task Force from 2012 to 2019 and represented Attachment Parenting International on the state’s Virginia Breastfeeding Advisory Committee. In 2019, she created the state’s first Virginia Breastfeeding-Friendly Workplace Awards. She was also elected by the state coalition’s members to represent the coalition at the National Breastfeeding Conference and Convening in Bethesda, MD, in June 2019, as well as the University of California at Hasting’s Worklife Law Center’s invitation-only summit in San Francisco in August 2019. You can read her article, Nursing Narratives, about these two conferences in 2019.
As a certified master naturalist, Lisa served on the board of the Virginia Master Naturalist’s Historic Rivers Chapter from 2018 – 2021. She currently still serves on the board of the Coastal Virginia Wildlife Observatory.
Professional Background
Lisa’s professional journalism background includes serving as the East Coast Editor-at-Large for the groundbreaking, natural parenting magazine Mothering in the early 2000s. In 2003, she simultaneously became the US Contributing Editor to the first global magazine on sustainable family living, byronchild, originally out of Byron Bay, Australia and founded by Kelly Wendorf. In 2009, byronchild, now named Kindred, moved to the US and became a nonprofit initiative of Kindred World.
Lisa still serves as an expert on conscious parenting for Mothering Magazine in their Ask The Expert series. You can listen to her interview with Peggy O’Mara about Mothering’s history here.
From 2007 to 2013, Kindred World partnered with the International Chiropractic Pediatric Association, ICPA, to produce the award-winning magazine, Pathways to Family Wellness as a nonprofit collaboration with Lisa serving as the publication’s associate editor and creator of the community building and parent education program, Pathways Connect.
From 2007 and 2012 – 2019, she served as a judge for the Society of Professional Journalists’ Mark of Excellence college journalism awards. In the very beginning of her career, she worked at the Virginia newspaper, The Daily Press, where she earned two Virginia Press Association awards for Gulf War Special Editions of the paper, Coming Home Proud.
Along the way, in exploring paths to sustainability and wellness, Lisa became a Reiki Master Teacher, an organic and biodynamic Community Supported Agriculture, CSA, farmer (read about her farming adventures in Beyond Sustainability; The Regenerative Promise of Biodynamics), and formally studied shamanism as an extension of her self-directed indigenous worldview studies.
She currently lives with her family on their small farm in Toano, Virginia, where she is writing what is now many books about her Mother (of a) Quest in the Conscious Parenting Movement.