New Life Circles support a life practice of self-empowerment. Our community process does not ask you to believe in anything other than your own potential to change, heal, and feel alive and connected; we choose to do it together.
Social – Emotional – Professional
“The courage it takes to share who we are is ultimately courage of the heart and we aim to support each other as we commit to this brave work.”
New Life Circles is a peer-led social and professional community that cultivates belonging and a collaborative supportive growth process. We are a consensus-based decentralized community organization and don’t follow any one teacher or leader. We support each other as partners walking the path of life together. This is not a step program or a fellowship based on dogma or religion, but a path to finding more connection, health, prosperity, and happiness in your life.
Find your Healthy Practices! Your Healthy Practices are the things you do that make you happy to be alive and keep you close to your Life Path.
Community Meetings – Group Meetings – Personal and Community Growth Workshops – Retreats
Our process of growth and healing is a sociologically based practice and focused on community, acceptance, and responsibility. We believe the fundamental nature of humanity is relational and community-centered. This has been true since the birth of humanity. Without friends and community, we can never feel fully connected and happy. At New Life Circles we understand for healthy growth and change – to heal – and feel the freedom to authentically share who we are, we must embrace supporting one another without judgment and shame.
In 1996, a graduate of the DeSisto School in Stockbridge Massachusetts, Chuck Kanner, followed in this tradition and began the journey to create a new model for treating struggling children at Community Schools.
Community Schools were coed residential and day schools that began with The Farm School, and quickly became Kanner Academy and eventually Sarasota Community School.
Community Schools were also focused on the most struggling kids and families who had already tried special schools, psychotherapy, and medications with no relief. They enrolled student from 15 States, 2 native American Tribes, and had built an extensive referral network spanning from foreign governments to the US State Department. These schools were also founded on ideas of a self-governing process and added a consensus-based decision-making system which took place in group meetings held in large circles. Consensus decision making means everyone must eventually come to an agreement. Meetings themselves could not end until there was a consensus to end them. In these groups everything from whether students would go to school to the consequences of behavior would be decided by a consensus of the community. At times these meetings could go on for days, and to arrive at a consensus of every community member took time and patience.
The central therapeutic modality was “Community as Method.” This sociotherapeutic based milieu turned away from anything psychological which included employing the failing efficacy based practices of psychotherapy based on DSM diagnostics, labels, and the mass disordering of struggling children – and adults. It also substantially decreased the use of psychotropic medications.
Sociotherapy is focused on community dynamics and changing the environment to effect change in students’ emotions, thinking, and behavior. In important ways, the process and dynamic, ancillarily, had huge healing forces for parents, faculty, and staff at the schools. This contrasted with psychology and psychotherapy which focuses on the individual as disordered and disabled and treats them through methods of coercion and manipulations. Sociotherapy is based on a relational dialogic partnership of friendship, alliance, responsibility, and compassion.
This history is the fertile ground for New Life Circles. Our community today is grounded in the tradition of a peer-led decentralized self-governed consensus-based process. The primary difference is we are a community of adults and families with the mission to support healthy growth and connection; to create a broader community that follows these important values of connection, self-empowerment, and social, emotional, and professional growth.
New Life Circles is a peer-led decentralized community committed to the growth of its membership through self-empowerment and community consensus-based decision-making. The central mission of New Life Circles (NLC) is to support the social, emotional, and professional growth of its members through community, connection, and compassion. Our community process does not ask you to believe in anything other than your own potential to change, heal, and feel alive and connected; we choose to do it together.
Because the central mission of NLC is to support its members’ growth through self-empowerment and community consensus-based decision-making, it’s important to recognize there is an inherent conflict between group cohesion, consensus, and conformity, and the agency and interests of each individual member. Critical to carrying out our mission is to be aware of this inevitable conflict and vigilant in safeguarding our process and membership. Our theory of change supports a life practice of self-empowerment that does not ask you to believe in anything other than your own potential to change, heal, and feel alive and happy. We choose to do it together, but the goal is not to become what others want us to be, but rather to accept ourselves and become who we are as individuals as well as part of the community.
At New Life Circles, we believe in the power of community, relationships, and self-empowerment. These nine core values are at the heart of our process and shape our actions, interactions, and approach to personal growth, healing, and well-being. We welcome all who share our values and who are committed to supporting and empowering each other on the journey of life.
