Vision

Our mission is to provide a space where younger and older come together in service to the wisdom that each holds as a member of a greater community. We support young people as they connect with the vision they hold for their lives, with "vision" meaning the particular and unique combination of gifts, talents, and dreams, that each person carries. Utilizing modern and traditional approaches we help people find healing as they develop the skills and capacities needed to carry forth their visions.

Crows Calling operates as a collective of individuals dedicated to supporting youth. We draw upon the the diversity of education, experience, talent, and heart amongst our community collaborators to provide experiences appropriate to the needs of the youth we are serving. Youth we have mentored in the past will often return to help create and lead experiences for other young people. 

Staff and Collaborators

As a young person Rob Steffke found that spending time in wild places provided a sanctuary. Through quietude and adventure and with the mentorship of the right people at the right times, Rob discovered the ability to move into and through challenge in a purposeful way. Rob is passionate about creating cultural spaces where people connect to what matters most to them as they steward the future that we want to inhabit.

Rob has worked with young people for the past 20 years as a teacher, guide, mentor, and therapist. Rob co-founded the San Luis Sober School, an alternative high school program that supports young people struggling with substance abuse. He has helped design and implement youth mentoring programs in several California locations. As a Marriage and Family Therapist Rob provides individual therapy and mentoring to youth, adults, and families.

Rob is a speaker and consultant in the areas of adolescent addiction, youth mentoring, and alternative treatment modalities. He holds a B.S. and Secondary Teaching Credential from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and a Master's in Counseling Psychology from Meridian University. He is a father of two beautiful sons and is inspired by woodworking, adventure, and solitude.

I believe that the most effective way to address the concurrent needs of our culture/civilization and our youth is to create means through which our youth can explore and refine the visions they carry, while at the same time helping them develop the skills and capacities needed to offer their dreams in a real way. We must shift from asking our youth to limit their visions to asking culture to grow to be able to encompass the possibilities that are emerging through them.

Whether making felt or ceramics, practicing ancestral skills, riding horses, milking goats, seeing clients, or working with young adults, Daniela DiPeiro is passionate about this beautiful wild earth we humans get to call home. Beginning with farm stays in upstate New York and a solo backpacking trip to New Zealand in her mid-teens, Daniela has been a staunch advocate of alternative education and the healing power of wilderness and wildness. She founded and runs a nonprofit for young people called Movimiento and is a Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, with a private practice in Nevada City specializing in EMDR, postpartum, and couples counseling. She is also an artisanal crafter, working with clay, print making, fiber arts, and basketry.

Born and raised in farm country in Rural northeastern Iowa, Lucas Miller has spent most of his life learning to work with the Earth, where he feels most inspired. From harvesting and gathering wild foods with his mother, to learning the medicinal aspects of plants from his father, Lucas realized that learning how to work with and mutually benefit nature was not only a childhood hobby, but a lifelong vocation.

After working at youth camps and teaching outdoor education in the Denver school system as a young adult, Lucas began guiding all over the western United States, eventually leading wilderness therapy programs with the well-known Anasazi foundation in Mesa, Arizona. 

 Lucas has spent the last 15 years learning skills and natural medicines from indigenous men and women across the globe. While always considering himself a student first, Lucas is knowledgeable and experienced in facilitating many skill sets, including shelter construction, edged tools, identifying and utilizing food/medicine plants, bow making, primitive traps, pottery making, tracking, hide tanning, wilderness first aid, yoga, meditation, and the general awareness skills needed to work with the Earth. 

His joy in the outdoors led Lucas to work in television, where he participated in season one of History Channel’s survival show “Alone”, has appeared on NBC’s “Today Show” twice, and most recently was a producer for a survival show on ABC titled “Castaways.”

There is a way that the Natural World can teach us that no other teacher can because we are literally OF nature: this is where we come from and where we return to. As a young person who grew up in a culture that lacked initiation or any kind of container for her transition from youth to adult, it was within the Natural World that Emily Kistner discovered her own capacity and began to learn her own nature.  This occurred as part of her participation in an eight week wilderness program in Utah during which the daily comforts of life are replaced with the possibility of connecting with one's own ingenuity and the spirit of the land. 

As a way to steward her gratitude for these formative experiences and to support others in fostering this connection, Emily has worked as a therapeutic mentor and wilderness guide for many years in a variety of environments and settings.  

With a background in counseling, Emily is skilled at facilitating group dynamics focused on communication, mediation, and encouraging self-awareness.  She has led and co-facilitated walkabouts in Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon that centered around ancestral arts like hide tanning and wild food foraging. Emily actively cultivates a relationship with not only building and sharing specific skills but the greater stories, cultures, and mythologies of where the skills come from and the land and people from which they originally descend.

She is a long time board member and former president of the High Desert Wild Tending Network, and educational 501c3 non-profit focused in the Great Basin, Columbia Plateau and adjacent bioregions of North America. Their focus is on communal migratory wild food tending practices and life-ways.  

Deeply rooted in a path of service, Emily brings a feeling of warmth, deep heart, and grounded connection in her offerings.