Our Journey
In the spring of 2001, Leslie Devine-Milbourne, John Devine, and their 8 year-old daughter, Chenaya, moved to a beautiful, secluded 20-acre farm in Morgan County, West Virginia. They called their new home Wind Dance Farm. During that summer they held their first youth, overnight camp for one week. That was the beginning of their summer camp offerings, which, over the years, expanded to five camps, each one week long. In the fall of 2002 Leslie and John began to offer a range of supplemental classes to local homeschool students. Each Thursday a group of 12 students played, danced to John’s fiddle music, participated in environmental education activities, kept journals, and listened to wonderful literature. From this successful start, Leslie and John’s in-depth and rich homeschool programs have expanded to four days a week during the school year.
The educational programs rapidly outgrew the small log cabin where they were held. To support the programs and to plan for future expansion, Leslie and John dedicated much of their time to developing a new, larger education center. In 2007 a non-profit 501(c)3 status was established for Wind Dance, a board of directors was formed, and work began to raise funds to support the existing programs and to grow the organization. Over the next several years a new education center was gradually built, and in fall of 2018, Leslie and John moved programs from their small log cabin to an amazing, spacious timber frame center. The new Wind Dance center was built with many hands; old friends and new volunteered their time, labor, tools, and shared their love of working together as a community to build a center for learning how the earth works and how we can best live with the earth. This past school year, 2018-19, Leslie and John launched their first environmental education programs for public school students.