About Kai Siedenburg
Kai Siedenburg is a nature connection guide, Ecotherapist, and poet who is a pioneer in integrating nature awareness and mindfulness as a path to mind-body wellness. She is passionate about helping people connect with nature as a path to greater peace, joy, and balance in their lives and in the world.
Kai loves to empower people to find simple ways to connect with the Earth in daily life, to cultivate deeper bonds with wild places, and to access nature-based healing. As the founder of Our Nature Connection, she offers group programs, individual sessions, and consulting services based on a unique approach she calls NatureWise. She also teaches Ecotherapy through The Earthbody Institute and nature-based mindfulness and nature-based writing through the Mountain Parks Foundation.
She is the author of three acclaimed collections of nature-based poetry and practices: Poems of Earth and Spirit, Space Between the Stones, and Love Poems from the Earth. All three volumes were selected as finalists for Next Generation Indie Book Awards.
Kai’s work is informed by 30-plus years of professional experience developing innovative educational programs and by extensive training and practice in mindfulness, holistic healing, and creative expression. Prior to founding Our Nature Connection, she spent 25 years leading non-profit campaigns and programs to advance sustainable and socially just food systems.
Read on to learn more about her professional and personal stories.
Professional Background
Kai Siedenburg is committed to ‘being the change she wants to see in the world,’ and has dedicated her life to advancing sustainability, health, and social justice. Since 1986, she has designed and led innovative programs to educate people about sustainable agriculture, food systems, and the living world.
Kai is a natural teacher, organizer, and bridge-builder, known for her inclusive and collaborative leadership style, commitment to the greater good, and talent for organizing creative and participatory events. From an early age, she has brought people together to make good things happen.
In her 25-year career working with non-profits on food and agriculture issues, Kai made important contributions to developing and promoting innovative food system models, increasing policy support and funding for sustainable agriculture, building consensus and collaboration among diverse leaders, and integrating social justice with sustainability concerns.
Along the way, she helped organize five groundbreaking coalitions, provided direct support to hundreds of groups, wrote and edited dozens of publications, organized hundreds of meetings and events, and played a lead role in raising millions of dollars in grant funds.
Kai left her last full-time position to follow a calling to help people connect with the healing power of nature for the benefit of all beings. She has created an extensive body of nature connection programs, practices, and writings that are now shared through Our Nature Connection and its many partners.
For more information, see Kai’s LinkedIn profile.
Personal Story
Kai Siedenburg is the product of a somewhat unlikely union between a deeply intuitive artist and healer mother and an eminently practical engineer father. She likes to think she combines the best elements of both parents, and sometimes she is right.
Kai’s life is woven around four golden threads: love for people, love for the Earth, a strong call to contribute, and a yearning for deep connection. She believes that we all have unique gifts to give, and that our life journey is about discovering and expressing those gifts.
Her tendency toward over-thinking and over-doing led Kai on a long-term quest for ways to calm and center herself and connect with deeper wisdom. She is immensely grateful for her foundational practices of nature connection, meditation and mindfulness, yoga, Qi Gong, and conscious dance. These practices have helped her connect with her authentic self and with something much greater than herself, and have made her life much happier, healthier, and more balanced.
Kai is a lifelong student and friend of the natural world. Some of her best friends are human, and some are not. Her great loves include trees, plants, flowers, mountains, and water. In the last 12 years, this long-term love affair reached new heights and depths, and she has experienced profound levels of intimacy and co-creation with the natural world. (Read a personal story by Kai about finding true love in the natural world.)
Kai lives on the unceded territory of the Awaswas-speaking Uypi people (now represented by the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band) in Santa Cruz, California. She loves to find herself out on the Earth, in her garden, in water, or on the dance floor, and aspires to touch the Earth with her hands or bare feet every day.
