Learn & Grow
About
As an educator, I hold space for participants’ wisdom to shine and cross-pollinate. My teaching methods are rooted in empowerment, exploration and connection. I am a pedagogy nerd deeply invested in the ways people learn and become invested in radical practices and activated into change-making. When sharing my experiences with herbal medicine and land stewardship I focus on building foundational skills, critical thinking and confidence through observation and application.
My educational work has most often been rooted in the connections between human health and environmental health. I have worked leading healthy relationships and consent education with teens and young adults, queer and trans youth, people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and school staff. I have trained dozens of advocates and organizers in skills to catalyze social change and have worked with children age 4 up holding space for them to explore nature through curiosity and play.
Contact me at kaleigh@forthelonghaul.ca to book programming or collaborate.
Workshop Offerings
These are ready-to-go workshops that I love giving, but I’m always happy to collaborate on developing a custom workshop that suits your group.
Gardening & Land Stewardship
Getting started on your native & medicinal herb garden
Do you want to grow your own herbal medicine garden? Want to introduce native pollinator species into your garden? What about plants that do both? This hands-on workshop will walk you through designing a flourishing garden that can stock your home apothecary and nourish native butterflies, bees and birds.
Working with Invasive Plant Medicines
The current landscape favours conditions for many invasive plants to flourish and often spread aggressively. In this workshop we will discuss Periwinkle, Barberry, Knotweed, Multiflora Rose, and Purple Loosestrife including the identification, harvest, preparation, and use of these persistent and overabundant medicinal plants. We will discuss what remediation actions can be taken and what native plants can be planted in their place after you harvest. We will also explore our responsibility to the land around us, and how we might heal our relationship with our bodies and the land through stewardship and action.
Botany & Plant Skills
Beginner Botany
In a world full of plant ID apps why do botany skills matter?!?! Let me convince you! If we want to connect with the natural world around us, it starts with noticing. Botany encourages us to look closely at a plant, identify its unique characteristics and understand how it compares and contrasts with other plant relatives. This noticing and understanding is slow, joyful, sometimes frustrating and important, whether you are a herbalist, gardener, or nature-lover.
Intermediate Botany: Beyond basic plant keys
In this workshop we will hone our plant ID skills, diving deeper into plant families, plant parts and more technical terminology to help you on your plant ID journey. This is a good workshop for you if you understand basic plant-family differentiation, basic plant parts and have had a try at using Newcomb’s at least a couple times.
Branches, Buds, & Bark: Winter Tree ID
Learn the foundations of winter tree ID together on an engaging walk and workshop. We will learn concepts and ID tips and tricks, identifying features and go over terminology then we’ll head out into the field and start applying everything we’ve learned to the plants outside.
Medicine Making
Topical herbal preparations
In this workshop we will learn how to make potent and soothing herbal oils, salves and creams for skin care and wound care.
Tea Blending
In this workshop participants will build a foundation in plant actions and plant tastes to support blending delicious and effective medicinal teas. Students will get to experiment with making and tasting tea blends.
Syrups & Elixirs
In this workshop participants will make herbal preparations that are soothing to the throat and medicinal to the respiratory and immune systems. Sleep Support. A lot of sleep-aids people turn to, whether pharmaceutical or herbal, are sedatives. While sedatives play a role, this class will expand our understanding of how to promote good quality sleep through various herbal and lifestyle interventions. We will use a trauma-informed lens to understand barriers to good sleep and methods of body and spirit support to facilitate unwinding and resting.
Wellness & Self Care
Digestive Care Class
Digestive issues are common and uncomfortable. This class will give you a deeper understanding of the physiology of digestion, common digestive conditions, and the use of herbal medicine and other strategies to address these issues. We will talk about some strategies involving food, but this class is anti-diet and non-dogmatic about food choices. Instead, we’ll focus on understanding what might be going on physiologically and how to create some simple changes that can have a big impact on digestion.
Herbal and Self-Care Strategies for Stress
This workshop will explore the ways stress shows up and how the body responds. We’ll learn the main categories of herbs which can be used for both physical and emotional support and discuss how to incorporate them in your self-care strategy.
Sleep Support Class
A lot of sleep-aids people turn to, whether pharmaceutical or herbal, are sedatives. While sedatives play a role, this class will expand our understanding of how to promote good quality sleep through various herbal and lifestyle interventions.
Therapeutics
Blood Sugar Regulation & Type 2 Diabetes
In this workshop we come to better understand what is happening in the body that is leading to pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes. We discuss the body systems that need support and therapeutic strategies for managing blood sugar. This workshop is for you if you want to talk about managing diabetes (or pre-diabetes / metabolic syndrome) and not once have weight loss mentioned as there is no evidence to support it as a best-practice yet it remains widely recommended causing frustration and medical trauma.
Kaleigh is a clinical herbalist, a restoration ecologist and an educator.
My practice is based on the territory of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, Mississauga,
Neutral, Erie and Huron-Wendat in Hamilton, ON.
I believe that our personal wellbeing, community health and health of the ecosystem are dependent on abolishing
the racist colonial Canadian state and the violent systems that uphold it.