Why I changed my care strategy to help meet the welfare needs of our home-education community

From circles to celebrations!

As a home-ed co-op we learned that it’s not only natural to want to transfer to a new role, but it’s very healthy for the community as well. I began in welfare and after a year or so moved into events. Here’s why.

Role Attraction

When a group starts to form there are usually roles we each gravitate towards. Those which we feel an affinity for because something in our lived experience has highlighted its importance for us. For me it was being part of a previous HE co-op that struggled with tensions arising and felt clueless at how to deal with it, leaving an impact of lowered enthusiasm and joy.

Roles we are attracted to may be those which we feel naturally adept at carrying out as they call upon existing life or career skills. Alternatively, we may be attracted to something that just feels light and fun to counteract the more mundane or challenging in life. It could even simply be something that needs doing and you want to contribute.

In our home-ed community I was drawn towards the welfare of members. Others were keen to create day to day content, source resources, manage the finances or some form of promotion to entice new members.

My take on building community is that if people are happy then the community will thrive. I let my attention go where we were being held back by existing tensions. It was my priority to hold our emotional and relational needs at the forefront. Both of the individual, and that of the collective. My mantra was, “Let’s nip it in the bud whilst it asks only a little bit of energy to deal with”.

My view is; why wait? It only lets it fester and grow into something more intense we may struggle to handle and would most certainly demand more greater capacity to manage and could even risk tearing us apart.

Conflicting or Complementary?

So, whilst I tried to hold the need for connection, mental and emotional support, communication and building relationships of trust, other members were occupied with their roles.

And here’s the thing; each person holding a role for which they feel a strong sense of purpose, each person feels a sense of urgency for what’s needed. They’re in that role observing, listening, monitoring, and they’re the one’s aware of what could help improve our overall experience.

Especially in the early days, the challenge is in dedicating adequate time and space to raising issues, to collaborate and to find a way forward.

My experience was that each role holder sees their domains as priority and in hearing them it was easy to understand. Like for instance, how can we host a home-ed day without any resources or content? However, when content creation is always prioritised. It’s all interconnected.

My worry was about the impact of being too heavy on the ‘doing’, or the action side, with the need for connection and celebration getting neglected to the point of exhaustion.

Regenerating Capacity

Connection and celebration are re-generative pastimes. They allow us to just be. To be where we are and who we are, and to own the resources to engage with authenticity, (provided the culture is welcoming to it).

What I realised after a year or so of trying to get people to commit to empathy circles to be heard and raise compassion, and restorative circles to work through tension and conflict to build trust, is that people believe they only have a finite capacity to engage in challenging things that demand mental, emotional, and physical resources.

OK, it’s not limitless, but perhaps it’s more accurate to say that our resources are renewable with regular nourishing food, rest, and connection.

It is understandable that as a home-educating parent or overworked mum, the muscles that allow mental and emotional engagement are already overused and under-rested in day-to-day childcare. Some refer to this as ‘compassion fatigue’, and we need a break from the 24/7 attending to others emotional health.

Reconsidered Strategy

My strategy for supporting the members welfare was to offer listening groups, but in many ways, we weren’t ready for that yet. Listening to people’s struggles can be hard and we all receive this differently. To some it weighs too heavily and can incapacitate or repel, whilst others want to hear more and fix it all. Some get angry, resentful, or shut down. It can be such a mixed bag it can be hard to know how to bring it in.

We were yet to become adept at listening with empathy whilst keeping our sense of self-connection. It was all too familiar to take things personally, hang-on to or internalise a feeling or fault.

However, this did change. Eventually our community got to a place where we felt we’d made leaps and bounds in our ability to communicate, listen, and collaborate. It was a shame that our co-op ended when it did at lockdown.

Bringing people together to talk about emotive issues was one strategy towards supporting wellbeing that I was becoming a little tired of, so, I changed my strategy. This also gave my role a fresh new focus.

Including Ourselves

I was still connected to a very strong need to care for the welfare of our members, however, I noticed that we had in all our busyness, omitted a major aspect of regenerative community living.

We were called PACE, (Playful And Collaborative Education), because we understand that centring education within a playful environment allowed for more energy, motivation and positive brain firing for active learning. Yet we were so occupied with organising space, hosting and facilitating, we’d forgotten to extend this wisdom to ourselves.

We’d neglected our own need for play in serving our children and community.

My new strategy brought me into a role I loved. It was still bringing people together; I know that’s my thing, but I shifted to doing this through being an events organiser. Specifically for a new monthly pop-up storytelling and song café, which was open to the public and enjoyed by many for 18 months.

Everyone, including the parents were able to let their hair down and have some fun together! I felt energised and was enjoying receiving yeses from people in contrast to my extended period of no’s.

Different levels of access to vulnerability

Not to say that my efforts hadn’t achieved anything in my previous welfare role; as a community we’d adopted NVC, (nonviolent communication), methods, even taking a 2-day group NVC foundational training. It helped immensely with our ability to express ourselves honestly, hear each other with compassion and collaborate more effectively.

I’d simply just run out of steam for it. Not my passion for it, but the resistance and fear from people in walking towards issues, plus the general desire to prioritise doing over being. I’ve come to see that many people find activity easier than rest, which I think is one reason why modern life is so imbalanced, (in my mind a result of our schooling and mainstream culture).

Too much activity and not enough rest.

It’s a challenge working with resistance, and whilst I was actively seeking to raise my awareness of the barriers and how to navigate them, I guess a lot of it was in relation to it seeming like a demand for vulnerability, rather than an invitation. It’s a lot to ask. Especially of our generation and the type of culture we were raised in.

Especially as everyone has different levels of access to their vulnerability. I know firsthand that truth telling, being witnessed and held in a group is powerfully healing, though this is not everyone’s experience or choice of method to wellbeing. It is regenerative if you have the mental and emotional resources and tools to go there, however, there are other strategies to regeneration.

Hence the move to celebration!

I’m not sure if it was clear in our empathy circles that sharing our day-to-day celebrations is just as welcome as our struggles. Perhaps it was just that our struggles are so plentiful, and the space to share so rare, that a circle can sometimes feel heavy or sad. This is ok and even so, it’s important to realise that it does have an impact to a lesser or greater degree depending on its resonance and lived experience of the listener.

Time and ceremony must be considered in an empathy circle as it’s hard to feel opened up without reaching some sense of transformed feeling, like from despair to creativity, or helplessness to inspiration. This can all come from being heard, but not when cut short.

So much to celebrate!

My gosh, we had so much to celebrate and yet we weren’t doing it. I’m not sure we really knew how. The pop-up café changed everything. I heard Rick Stein comment recently on the power of food to create community and belonging. It was like magic! Once a month we all worked together to create a nourishing café where we could feast together, enjoy treats, sing songs, sink into fireside stories and share play in the wild beauty of our little Somerset bliss.

I felt incredibly heart warmed by all the smiles and energy, the eagerness and creativity, not to mention the willingness to be part of it, to make it happen month after month.

Some people saw it as a fundraising effort, and on busy months it did just that, but it was more than that. It raised our spirits and our social capital by bringing us closer together in a shared celebration. It helped us rise up and rest in. We felt a stronger sense of solidarity and purpose.

We need these spaces of lightness and joy to balance the depth and efforting we experience week on week.

Magically, the replenishing of individual and collective resources in this way even drew people more favourably towards empathy circles and conflict transformation efforts. Nourishing connections had the knock-on effect of increasing our safety and confidence in working together.

A win-win for welfare!

Cakes at the monthly pop-up cafe