Why Home Education can be an Act of Commoning: co-creating shared spaces for fostering connection, reciprocity and regeneration

We’ve been part of the home-education community for 15 years, since our eldest was 3 years old. In the early days it was still a life choice most people hadn’t come across, let alone considered.

We feel lucky to live on the outskirts of Bristol, a city at the forefront of green and social activism and hugely influential.

This meant that when I got wind of the new Bristol Commons movement declaring community power, land justice and systemic change, I couldn’t help but be drawn in.

The Bristol Commons

The Bristol Commons was birthed out of the dissolution of Hamilton House in Stokes Croft in 2018. A redeveloped office block, (55,000 sq. ft), labelled a “Centre for Excellence in Sustainable community”, and a “thriving cultural and community hub”. We certainly had a lot of fun whenever we visited and left thoroughly inspired.

It was the work of a group called Co-exist, and the wisdom gained over their decade of co-creation is now rich compost for our post-covid needs. Particularly issues of isolation, poverty, marginalization, ecological crisis and potential economic crash.

Put simply; collectively trying to secure ways and places where we can come together as a community to share in meeting our needs.

Un-reliant on the state or private sector. A wholly separate economy. Where power to distribute community owned resources lies with the people who use it, including both physical resources and non-physical assets such as skills, information, and care.

It’s a hearty mission. A mission to Rebuild the Commons!

So, What Is Commoning?

To me commoning involves a shift from a consumerist mindset to a creative mindset.

As a home-educating parent it’s co-organising spaces where we can share skills and support in our home-education journey. As a herbalist, I’m on a quest to re-common our lost herbal knowledge, sharing far and wide what was once common knowledge about home healing with local plants.

At its most basic, it’s sharing a lawn mower, bike or book, exchanging childcare or home-grown and home-baked goods.

Rather than looking for what provisions exist at a price, it’s about coming together, assessing collective needs, generating ideas, and collaborating to co-create projects and spaces and systems that meet those collective needs.

And this requires an awakening.

An awakening to our own agency.

And it is so very necessary.

Rather than continuing in a legacy given to us by the school system holding us as passive receivers. We absolutely can choose to be pro-active, even if we don’t yet know how.

In my experience as a community organiser for home educating families, this has been the most challenging aspect. We live in a state that expects provisions. Whatever we want handed on a plate, (or in a carrier bag), for a price.

Some people find it easy to participate and throw themselves into a community project, often biting off more than they can chew. However, in my experience I’ve discovered that most people need encouragement, and a lot of it. We all have something to offer but it can be hard to see what and hard to step forward.

That’s why I love that the commons movement is centred in healthy systems of interaction. We aim to build up through nourishing relationships and energising projects. That way we can give from a full tank. Who knows where this could take us!

The Bristol Commons definition states:

“The commons is a living social system through which a community organise, manage and share together over time”

As a collaborative endeavour they have just last month come up with a comprehensive working definition that I’ll add below this article once I have permission. One particular element of it that gets me excited is that it’s an “antidote to disconnection”, (the route of all our troubles, I swear!),

“a way of thinking, doing and being that is restorative, enlivening and empowering… with governance systems that prioritises life and healthy living over capital and short-term gain.”

It really speaks my language and I’m feeling 100% alignment, like, hallelujah, finally there is growing understanding of the importance of looking after each other within a genuine culture of compassionate and regenerative systems to ensure we are putting our wellbeing at the forefront. This way we can feel a joyful sense of belonging and giving, knowing it’s reciprocated rather than continuing to foster exhaustion, (as many of us currently do).

The current paradigm of our society has us all mostly living for ourselves as separate individuals, part of the machinery of a growth economy. Stuck on a tread mill wondering if we can ever get off. Did we ever consent to this?

I recognise our interdependence and want to make this explicit by coming together to decide for ourselves how we want to share resources and organise our lives.

This voluntary shake-up and wake-up is out of the ordinary. Apparently, we only reflect on our living choices at transitional points in our lives. When we leave home, get married, have a first child, move house, divorce, experience bereavement or serious illness. Other than that, we stick to the decisions we made at those points in our lives and continue each day on autopilot.

Reflecting on our isolation and loneliness in recent years is leading many of us to long for connection. Commoning builds a sense of community that nurtures connection.

Commoning Requires an Awakening

To wake up is not as easy as it sounds. It involves recognising that we are a cog in the machinery of our growth economy and also to be able to see the power of our own hand in this. School has led us to favour a certain kind of productivity, so ingrained and linear, we hold on to a false security of certainty; if I do this, I will get this.

But life in its very nature is messy, a vast interconnected network that is anything but linear and certain. It is full of possibilities and to my mind squished by the school system that is supposed to enrich us.

Commoning is about coming together in diversity and celebrating the richness of difference and the magic that can come out of co-creation. Every individual perspective and unique lived experience is of value, and the more we come together and share ideas, the stronger and healthier our evolution.

We need community hubs to be the melting pots for our shared wisdom, alchemising the beauty, richness and love that exists when we endeavour to work together in meeting our shared needs.

Like why can’t we just hang out somewhere cosy and dry without having to buy or subscribe something?

And why don’t home educators have dedicated communal spaces where we can share each other’s wisdom, skills, knowledge, time and resources?

Together we can address this, and much more.

Speaking as a Home Educating Parent

Speaking as a home educator for well over a decade in the Bristol area, it’s no surprise that we’ve been involved in innovative projects involving the commoning of resources rather than relying on state or market provisions.

Bristol has always been a rich hub for home educators, even before the advent of social media which supports our visibility and accessibility.

This was a significant moment in the home-ed story. Being able to organise home education activities via social media created a boom in home-ed around the time of the birth of my daughter, (now 12). It means that us home-ed ‘elder’s’ have experienced a home-ed scene that evolved in a culture where we had to meet face-to-face to collaborate and co-create.

Don’t get me wrong, one of the reasons I celebrate the age of IT is for the ease of accessing like minds, thought leaders and co-creators. However, with it has come the ease of not having to get out and about to meet people in person, unless we absolutely make a point to.

The home-ed I experienced involved the kind of shared risk that creates community in all its richness. It not only showed us the importance of home educating together to avoid isolation, but it also showed us the unexpected magic that emerges out of a group which is dedicated to collectively meeting the need for our children’s education together.

A magic that met this need beyond expectation, contributing a richness to our lives that we’d not known growing up in a culture which prioritises productivity and economic growth systems.

Pioneers

We were pioneers and met many challenges, particularly due to an incongruence in the culture we came from and the one we were intentionally trying to create; one of care, reciprocity, and trust. Not providing a service but building a community.

As pioneers stepping into the unknown, we often felt like we were in a disorientating dilemma between where we’d been and where we were heading. It involved lots of confronting limiting beliefs and choosing ones that felt more freeing. A messy transition where no-one had the answers, and clarity only came after direct experience and shared reflection.

It was a time of immense personal growth and the invention of gentler systems, bit by messy bit.

There was a tension in moving from a lifelong habit of automatically accessing state or market provisions to efficiently meet our needs, to that of co-creating which was much slower and more involved. Especially challenging when all we’ve known up until now are services controlled and handed to us on a plate and unfairly distributed.

It’s no wonder that our efforts to function as a co-operative community struggled within the constraints of our systems of origin.

The Magic of Nature Connection

Our collaborative home-ed project evolved over 3 days a week for 4 years. It was mostly outdoors and within the constraints of the seasons and nature. It was messy and challenging, and immensely eye-opening.

It’s true we messed up. It is also true that we were dedicated to collaboratively meeting our need to home educate our children. It is further true that the experience showed us a thing or two about the power of community and what it needs to thrive.

First off, things need to slow down, we need to do less and be together more. We need to mirror natures rhythms and rebalance how we spend our time. We need more beauty, stillness, play and awakening. More togetherness, sharing, celebration and reflections.

We discovered this after years of being responsive to our emerging needs with nature guiding us.

We need the rich compost of our elders to spark light into new projects to be birthed. Above all, we need to embrace diversity. It takes courage to step into the unknown and it also takes recognition of our interdependence. When we work together, we benefit from reciprocity and together we are stronger.

Nature shows us to move in cycles; throughout the day, yearly seasons and seasons of our lives. Nature is not heavy on productivity. It awakens from a seed, emerges into the unknown, unfurls timidly and then shines in all its glory. It packages all it needs to know in its seeds and then dies back to give a rich compost that supports new growth.

It’s not all go go go, it flows at a gentle pace involving periods of waking, shining, harvesting, and composting. In our modernity we favour shining 100% and it’s exhausting.

So, how can Home Educating be an Act of Commoning?

The more I learn about the commons movement, the more I realise it’s what home-educators have been doing all along.

Declining the school system meant stepping into the unknown and it feels easier not to do this alone. I tried home-ed in isolation and it was beyond challenging leading to depleted mother syndrome; exhausted, lonely and sad.

That’s why building a home-ed community became so important to me.

I wanted to share the task, share the ups and downs of it all, and the everyday rhythms of life. I longed for a village in which to raise my children, and myself.

Surely, it’s got to be better together.

Key words for me are sharing, connection and reciprocity.

Home educators meet their shared need for fostering a love of learning by first recognising a need or want, (e.g. my child wants to learn more woodworking skills), then finding out if there are others interested, and once a small group has emerged scouting out which parents can offer to share that skill.

In my experience it’s been as simple as hiring a community centre, or meeting in a wood and bringing along whatever makes for a fun and interesting time together. We co-create spaces to enrich our learning and strengthen our connections.

When we home educate, we can choose to meet our needs together by sharing and co-creating spaces that nurture us. Where each member, or commoner, can offer or request resources from the within the community to meet its needs.

Like a parent that loves science experiments can offer those, or one who loves drawing can share that, or one who is into bushcraft can inspire natural handcrafts. In our community we called it “Skill Sharing” and worked on the belief that anyone of any age can share a skill, no matter how proficient they are, as long as they are passionate. Because who wants to be subjected to someone trying to ‘teach’ something they don’t feel any joy for?

For me, it’s really about being open to what’s alive in the community, and being responsive to the emerging needs in co-creative ways. It’s a dynamic way of moving through life that feels richly alive, (especially when I think of the monotony and repetitiveness of the school experience, year after year after year).

Agency, Co-creation and A Commons Economy

So, the task is moving from passive receivers in the state or market economy to co-creating a reciprocal regenerative economy; a commons economy!

OK, the period of adjustment can be messy, after all we’re not taught much on how to traverse differences and collaborate, more on how to compete, lead and follow. We’re taught to value compliance and not agency.

However, over the years I’ve seen the desire for a new culture to emerge and the movement is growing strong enough to start creating healthier systems of working together. One’s that value all voices, all lived experiences as gifts that only make us stronger.

We have to slow down to listen and accommodate, to share and empathize. But in the end slowing down is the antidote. Our capitalist growth model is failing us, we’re more isolated, lonely and tired than ever. Pre-revolution folk rested all winter. Today it’s all go go go. We’re tired.

I don’t want my children to follow that model.

I love that as home educators we ‘have to’ come together to co-create. I love that this risk creates community where we can reciprocally meet our needs for learning, belonging, value, celebration, mourning, love, health, rest, regeneration, personal growth, systemic change and much more.

I love that if we want something to happen, together we can make it happen. We share, and in that sharing comes our strength and solidarity.

Can a Commons Economy exist in a Market Economy?

I heard this question asked yesterday at a Commons workshop at Bridge Farm’s Beltane celebration. The response got me thinking; “it’s hard because the very nature of a growth economy sucks everything into it”.

I wonder if this is what’s been happening with home-ed since Lockdown? The boom in HE that occurred post-covid has changed the home-ed culture as we knew it. It’s become diluted by full-time working parents who know school isn’t a good enough option for their children, but they’re locked into their financial commitments and would struggle to downgrade.

On top of this, the government does not support the sole occupation of being ‘just a mum’. Apparently, it’s not good enough. Not acceptable any more to want to dedicate our life to raising strong, healthy children, (unless of course one parent earns a substantial amount: a privilege and freedom of the rich).

Home-ed is a full-time occupation and needs the richness of community to flourish. Full-time working parents don’t have the time or capacity for building community. They probably don’t even know they need it.

They want provision.

Because as newcomers they haven’t yet experienced anything different. They just need somewhere better than school for their children to go so that they can continue working. This new wave of home-educators is sensing a “gap in the market”, and these gaps are starting to be filled.

Don’t get me wrong, the 3-day a week projects that are emerging are awesome offerings, innovative, caring and exciting for the longevity of home-ed as a viable option.

But they are elitist.

You either need the money to pay for it, or an Ofsted registered business that can accept childcare vouchers.

This is still a hugely beneficial situation for a child to be raised within, especially if they get 4-days per week with their family, (compared to a school child’s 2 at the weekend), and of course for the parents to get some spaciousness and freedom.

However, to me this is at the price of building rich community and raising our children within this model of reciprocity. It feels like a loss of our recommoning endeavours that hold power with the people. The freedom and flexibility to co-create and evolve as needs emerge. It takes away parents supporting parents, and our lifeline of genuine authentic and aligned relationships.

It’s a step back for home-education, back into embracing the capitalist market economies in which we were raised. That sucking back in to the prevailing system. Draining the life from us.

It preserves the outsourcing of education for our children by dropping them off for others to meet. It misses the magic of co-creative ways of coming together to meet our needs collaboratively.

We Need a Rich Community Experience

After all, we are social animals, and our mental and emotional wellbeing thrives when embedded in rich community.

Where we share food, skills, enthusiasm, knowledge, learning, joy, celebration, grief and growth together.

This is commoning.

I love that the home-ed I knew was not separatist, or ageist. We got together and learned together, all ages, whole families, a community, a village.

I really hope that the commons movement inspires more home educators to co-create using their own economies, their own systems, and towards a more compassionate reciprocal culture.

sunshine and circling

Work With Me: As a herbal health coach, I love working most with other home-educators. If you would like my support as you make changes in your home-ed life, perhaps setting up a group or working through challenges in your home or community, get it touch, I would love to help!