Bret Stephenson's Page

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Bret Stephenson M.A. is the author of From Boys to Men: Spiritual Rites of Passage in an Indulgent Age. He has been a counselor of at-risk and high-risk adolescents for twenty-one years. Bret has worked in residential treatment, clinical counseling agencies, group homes, private counseling, foster parent training, Independent Living Program, and managed mentoring and tutoring programs.
He has been a presenter and speaker at numerous national and international conferences and workshops, including the International Transpersonal Association's Youth Conferences in America and Ireland, the United Nations World Peace Festival, and the World Children’s Summit. 


 Presentations at the Association of Transpersonal Psychology's annual conferences have included Transpersonal Approaches to Working with High-Risk Youth, and Western Adolescence: Shadow of the Patriarchy. He has been a presenter at the National Foster Parent Association annual conference and multiple California State Foster Parent Association conferences as well as the Indiana and Iowa Foster Care annual conferences. He is a Global Program Faculty Mentor for the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. As a men's group facilitator, he has also led workshops in the U.S. as well as Switzerland. Bret has worked with teens from more than 100 countries.
Bret was recently Director of Special Projects for Foster/Kinship Care Education and the Independent Living Program at Lake Tahoe Community College. He pioneered the use of Internet based systems intended to deliver distance education classes for rural providers and group home staff, and previously launched a teen web project through the Independent Living Program in which the web content and construction of the web page was completed by ILP teens only.
He designed and taught on-line classes on Understanding Adolescence, Reactive Attachment Disorder, and Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Bret is currently also working with the California Conservation Corps, providing anger management training and case management services. He is currently a case manager for Rite of Passage, Inc. in Nevada where he is the founder and director of the Str8 Up student-business project. Bret is an Advisory Board member for My Journey Home in Reno, a project assisting prison inmates and their families through reintegration back into society. In addition, he is on the Global Passageways Intergenerational Advisory Council project based in Washington DC mentoring youth activists and assisting in trying to create initiation and rites of passage models for modern youth.
In June 2004, Bret once again headed the teen module of the International Transpersonal Association's Youth Conference in Palm Springs. In July 2005 he headed the teen component for the Institute of Noetic Sciences’ first Youth Conference in Washington DC, where his teens participated in an intergenerational WORLD CAFE. Bret is the founder and Executive Director of Labyrinth Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to adolescent services and programs. Bret and Labyrinth Center are currently creating youth employment and youth entrepreneurial models.

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