Profiles

Christopher Sloane, Class of 2005

The changes and transformation in my life as a result of my time spent studying at Burlington College have been multi-faceted and still continue to reverberate for me long since graduation.

I graduated in the spring of 2005 with my Bachelor of Arts in Transpersonal Psychology. I entered BC as a non-traditional student having spent 25 years in the restaurant industry. Yet in that time I came to recognize my calling to do something other than what I had always known. I was being drawn to the transformative therapies, yet not quite sure as to how to approach it. When I read the course listings for the Transpersonal Psychology major at BC, I immediately knew what my next step in this journey would be. The TP major allowed me to get a solid grounding in traditional psychological theories as well as the ‘transpersonal’ aspects of the field such as metaphysics, archetypes and soulwork. These courses and the skilled professors guiding the way allowed me to push the envelope of my own investigations into self, soul and society.

My work at BC culminated in my senior year Degree Project. At that point in my life I had spent about 15 years involved in the men’s movement and had personally witnessed the transformational and healing power of those circles. I wanted my Degree Project to reflect that healing potential and also to address the crisis in masculine leadership we are currently experiencing in America as reflected to us by the twin societal plagues of the corporate corruption scandals and the string of adolescent boy school shootings. I also integrated a ‘social action’ piece to complement my thesis paper, so as to create some tangible healing process within our immediate community. The Lake Champlain Men’s Resource Center became the fruits of my labor.

I gathered together with other like-minded men and women in monthly steering committee meetings to establish our by-laws, mission statement, core values statement and was rewarded in November ’05 with the designation of our federal 501c3 nonprofit status.

Our work continues to this day, running a community film series to raise social awareness of issues such as systemic male violence and the tools necessary for healing, doing presentations for various schools, as well as developing the infrastructure to run a number of facilitated, drop-in men’s support groups for different demographic groups of men and boys. We are currently working with BC in a joint effort to bring in dynamic speakers into our community to present new and innovative perspectives on these issues.

My time at BC prepared me to enter this work on both an academic and emotional level. The course load at BC also laid the foundations for my post-graduate work in Counseling Psychology at Johnson State College. The combination of essential course work and the progressive delivery of the material by my professors and advisors have proven to be all that I needed to spark my career and interests in ways that I could not have imagined.