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12/20/2023 08:30 AMKathleen Lowe loved being outdoors as a child. Now, as an adult, the Essex resident has founded a group, Friends of the Forest CT to share that love with others.
“Anytime you get outside is good,” she says.
Kathleen hopes Friends of the Forest will introduce women to the joys of connecting in a more powerful way with nature, providing benefits that range from stress reduction to a wider range of creative efforts.
“Nature has always been my place of refuge since I was a little girl playing fairies outside to gardening with my father. My hands and feet have always been tied to the earth,” she explains.
Friends of the Forest conducts a number of programs focusing on the natural world. Among the current offerings are a Winter Solstice Labyrinth Walk, Honoring the Winged Ones: Sacred Feather Wand Making Workshop, and Meet Your Animal Spirit Guide. According to Kathleen, people learn about the programs through the group’s website and social media.
All three of the programs are already full. Attendees come from throughout the state and from New York as well.
“The women who come are professionals; they are not crazy. All the programs sell out. The women are looking for community and looking to find out more about nature,” she says.
Kathleen is excited about Rebloom, a new nature-based program for women who have completed cancer treatment. Rebloom offers wellness workshops, retreats, and the opportunity to form meaningful connections with others in similar situations.
“Finding a new normal is incredibly difficult,” Kathleen says.
Growing up in Cromwell, Kathleen remembers an annual nature walk she used to take with her father along the Connecticut River. He would ask her what she saw that was different from the last walk, what had changed, what was growing.
“He taught me without teaching,” she says.
Kathleen graduated from Mercy High School and Brown University with a degree in an area far from what she does now: art history with a concentration on 17th-century Dutch painting. She went to Amsterdam, doing an internship at the famous Rijksmuseum and considering an advanced degree in art history. Then, one day, she found herself at an advertising meeting. It interested her. After the meeting, she chased down an advertising representative in the parking lot.
“It snowballed from there,” she explains.
She worked for over 20 years in marketing and business development at advertising, marketing, and public relations agencies such as Ogilvy, Mktshr, and Leo Burnett Worldwide before transitioning to the nonprofit sector. In 2018, she became the marketing director of AIM at Melanoma, a global foundation based in San Francisco, dedicated to finding more effective treatments and, ultimately, the cure for melanoma.
“I love it, I love it, I love it; I love the team, six fabulous women. I am honored to be a part of it,” she says.
Working remotely for AIM at Melanoma allowed her the opportunity to move back to Connecticut from Newport, Rhode Island, where she was living, in 2019.
Still, returning to the state of her birth was something she had once promised herself she would never do.
“I had grown up in a small town. I wanted a big city,” she recalls. “I left vowing I would never come back to New England. Now I am eating crow.”
Kathleen visited Essex and was taken by the charm of the community. She promised herself if she could find something available to rent for a year, that would be a sign she should move. In a month, she found a house.
At the same time, she wanted to start her own nature-based non-profit.
“I knew I had to do something with nature, but I didn’t know what,” she says. A forest walk she learned about through social media gave her direction. “It just clicked,” she said.
She attended, electronically, a six-month mindful leadership program at Kripalu, a Massachusetts organization centered on yoga, wellness, and spiritual awareness.
“I loved it. It was exactly what I wanted to share,” she says.
Now, her challenge is to oversee the growth of Friends of the Forest.
“I’d like it to get big, but in order to do that, I would really have to do it full-time,” she says.
She is aware of the push-and-pull of the demands that a full-time job and a growing non-profit make.
“I am a living contradiction,” she says. “I am torn between slowing down and getting things done.”
In addition to Friends of the Forest and her job with AIM, Kathleen has also been involved in Connecticut Draft Horse Rescue, though the horse that she worked with, Luna, recently had to be put down after developing colic. Animal rescue, in fact, has been a continuing interest she learned about from her father.
Kathleen does not have family demands on her time. She decided when she was small child she would not marry. “It drove my mother nuts; my father was proud,” she says.
She does, however, love Barbie, but not for all the pinkness. She played with Barbie dolls as a child because the pink princess was also a career woman.
“She had a career, she went to work, she had a boat,” Kathleen remembers.
So far, Friends of the Forest has been an organization for women. No men have asked about the programs.
“But if someone did,” Kathleen says, “I wouldn’t say no.”`
For more information, visit www.friendsoftheforestct.org