Rita Cantu: News

Rita is a conference weaver and event designer, presenting workshops, and giving inspirational keynotes. Her team "Community Catalyst Consultants" offers coaching, consulting and co-created community workshops with supporting materials to assist in healing trauma and restoring community vision and values after unsettling events.

They facilitate the development and implementation of community-focused plans, individual life-plans, and events that celebrate community healing.

Community Consultant offerings include:
• Conference weaving and thematic design for events, meetings, and conferences
• Co-creation and facilitation of community healing ceremonies.
• Design and delivery of community events to honor losses and celebrate resiliency.
• Co-developed community plans for living with risk
• Customized retreats for the development and maintenance of high performance teams.
• Consulting and networking with local businesses, artists, performers, and organizations.

Rita conceptualized this program for the New Century of Service effort for the Forest Service Centennial. The program included partnerships with land management and arts agencies and supported the use of arts in communicating land values. It involved a nation-wide mix of people skilled in storytelling, singing, graphic design, writing, illustrating, and more, able to assist with agency events or projects.

This retreat explores the dying process as a means of informing and directing our living. It includes planning tools such as Advanced Directives and ethical wills, an overview of end-of-life issues and opportunities, tools to assist loved ones during this time, and experiential activities to allow participants to envision their own dying in anticipation of forming new paradigms for living.

Some of Rita's songs are on the extended DVD in the Performers section. They are in the “new songs” section of this website.

The Greatest Good, a two-hour history video of the Forest Service, tells the epic story of the struggle to manage a nation’s resources amid global and societal change. The video invites audiences to challenge their ideas of conservation and the environment and to experience the ongoing pursuit of The Greatest Good. Visionary foresters Gifford Pinchot and Aldo Leopold shaped the debate over land stewardship for a hundred years. Their journey from the “wise use” of resources to the idea of a “land ethic” has defined the evolution of the Forest Service and the management of National Forests and Grasslands. In a breathtaking high definition documentary, The Greatest Good takes the audience on a journey as compelling as it is uniquely American.

Rita represented the Forest Service and conservation field at the 2005 Folklife Festival, performing onstage and on the green daily to huge audiences at the Capital Mall.
Over one million visitors attended the festival, interacting with Forest Service folks from around the country who shared their lifestyles and work - from sawyers to biologists to artists!
She also performed at the Kennedy Center for the Arts ... a real thrill! In addition, Oman was the featured country, and all made wonderful new friends. Rita co-created performances with Rashab, who directs El Madjib, the largest dance and music troup in Oman.
It was an amazing experience of good will and cultural sharing.

Rita's loving, remarkable husband, Al Carr, died of melanoma in 2004 after living 8 years beyond his first diagnosis of “6 weeks to 6 months to live”.

He was well known around the country for his first-person portrayal of America’s great conservationist, Aldo Leopold, developed after he had cancer.

Al’s four-month process of passing was remarkable, empowering, and inspiring. It involved many in the community of Prescott, who came as caregivers, musicians, friends, brought their children and shared their love, as he shared his.

At Al’s invitation, a friend and videographer documented Al’s last month, interviewing him, caregivers, and community members. The resulting inspirational video is complete and available for distribution. If you are interested, please contact lifesongs@ritacantu.com.

Last February brought a most inspirational music event: the International Listening Room Songwriters Retreat, held in Big Sur, California. Professional songwriters from Denmark, Great Britain, and the U.S. worked for an intensive week to co-write songs, forge new friendships and strengthen old ones, and to collaborate musically. The rain, cliffs, and pounding surf, the personal stories mingled with forming songs, forged a bond that participants will continue to nurture at future sessions.