Register for the 2026 Friends Youth Retreat (FYR) today and join us at Scattergood Friends School in West Branch, IA for a weekend of fellowship and learning. This event is FREE including all meals and on-campus housing (yay). All youth are welcome, Quaker affiliation is not required.

Build community through embodied art! Let’s disconnect from technology, doom-scrolling and the 24-hour news cycle to make space for reconnection with our intrinsic creative selves and each other. Through art making, storytelling, music and community, we’ll explore what it is to experience life through connection and embodiment. Attendees will also have plenty of downtime to enjoy games, bonfires, and more.

 

Workshop facilitators:

Lyndsey Scott, co-leader of Earthkeeper Wisdom School

Lyndsey Scott is an artist, songleader, and ritualist committed to exploring community singing as a technology of belonging. As the co-leader of Earthkeeper Wisdom School, she serves the revitalization of soul-nourishing culture. As a songcatcher, she records singalong earworms that spark collective liberation. Over/Under, her collaboration with incarcerated musician Tony Rhodd, transmits the path of grief-as-activism to dream a world beyond prison. Her love song for the unknown, The Way Knows, is sung by thousands of people around the world from campfires to conference rooms. Lyndsey weaves village and tends her garden in Iowa City, USA. Find her music & more at lyndseyscott.earth

Michal Eynon-Lynch, co-founder of RSFIC

Michal Eynon-Lynch is a co-founder and president of Resilient Sustainable Future for Iowa City (RSFIC), a foundation focused on building systemic community resilience in Iowa City. She is a former high school teacher with a BA in Asian Languages, a masters in Contemplative Education, and a concentration in intentional communities who co-founded and sold two education technology companies. Throughout her teaching and high-growth tech careers, Michal has remained most interested in how to work together through differences and disagreement, how to hear each other and find alignment and keep stepping toward a more healthy, balanced, sustainable community. In addition to her work at RSFIC, Michal chairs the board of Village Capital, sits on the boards of Foundations in Learning, and Public Space One, works in an advisory role with Scattergood Friends School, and is a founding member of Iowa City Transition Town, a community group building into a post carbon future by starting projects such as IC Repair.