Care and community
Life's turning points go better in company. ACCOMPANY organises the care that already surrounds a person — and adds what is missing — on four warm convictions:
Strong starts, growth against the odds, a gift worth naming, an opportunity worth pointing out — good news travels through the same channels as concern, so that hearing from the people around you is something to look forward to.
When someone could use company, a person who cares simply reaches out — a friendly hand, freely offered, freely taken. Warm, human, and perfectly timed, because someone was paying attention.
Around every person stand the people who already know them — family, friends, mentor, coach, advisor, professionals when they are needed. Care flows through them, and follows through until someone has actually walked beside you.
Body, heart, mind, relationships, money, meaning — every dimension of a life matters, at every age. Care listens for all of it, and celebrates all of it.
At every crossing
A new stage of life, or a new step on a path, is where people most need company and least often find it. So every crossing, from arriving at university to handing over a life's work, is met in the same three ways:
Each group writes to the group that follows: what they wish someone had told them. Newcomers read three, then one day write their own. And a letter to yourself, sealed today, comes back three years later.
Someone who crossed the same threshold before you, chosen by you from three, walks beside you for your first ninety days: a conversation before, one at a month, one at three months. Then you pass it on.
For the first months of a new stage there is a small room of people crossing at the same time, and of those who crossed before and are glad to help.
People beside you
Accompaniment is done by people, and the people who were accompanied become the ones who accompany.
Senior students who walk beside a small group of first-years from their first week, with head mentors and coordinators behind them.
Someone who crossed the same step before, walking beside you for ninety days at every crossing of a life.
Someone further along who welcomes people into the rooms of a stage or a path.
Accompany Circle Facilitators, Seniors and Circle Trainers, who sat in a circle first and hold the Certificate in Circle Accompaniment.
Certified accompaniment coaches who walk beside adults at any stage, for as long as they want.
People who hold PHECA and teach the courses to their own students and groups.
People in the later stages of life, trained to accompany, who sit with those just starting out.
Accompanied at eighteen, a mentor at twenty, later a sponsor, host, coach or teacher, and in time an elder on the Bench. Watch the film →
Rooms for a whole life
The ACCOMPANY community is made of rooms that follow a person's life. Nobody signs anyone up and nobody is forgotten in an old list: where you are in life opens the rooms that are yours, and when life moves on, the next ones open.
A room for everyone at your stage of life, hosted by someone two stages further on, who has lived its questions.
The class that arrived together keeps its room for life: the first reunion, the news of who went where, and one day, the class that returns to welcome the newcomers.
Running, walking, golf, the arts, sport: rooms open to every age, and the easiest place for a first-year and a grandparent to talk as equals.
Postgraduates, couples, parents and carers each have rooms of their own, and small cohorts that meet every week.
Small hosted circles that practise one skill at a time, for every age, stage and love, and for when life is hard, with a start and an end and care always one step away. Meet the circles →
Mentors, sponsors, elders, coaches and teachers have rooms for their own practice, to grow in the craft of walking beside people.
Young people take part through their school, in rooms their school holds, with a teacher present.
Next: Accompany Circles — small groups practising flourishing together →