Welcome to The Garden’s new website!

We’re about to celebrate The Garden’s tenth birthday in February (watch this space for more news!), and while we’re always evolving, it’s been an especially reflective and transformative time of late. As my children are starting to age out of the learning community, we’ve been thinking about how to protect it from the dreaded founder syndrome, where projects commonly falter as their initiators move on.

While we’ve always made decisions by way of a relatively flat structure, we’re rethinking our governance and planning to move towards more collaborative legal entity, such as a community benefit society, to better fit our values and relationships. Similarly we’re working towards a more collective OFSTED registration, in an effort to further distribute the intertwined facets of power and responsibility.

We’re also considering where our resources go, especially in light of the political context, seeking to move away from US-based, corporate technology entities for both security and ideological reasons. We prefer to work with cooperatively governed, non-profit organisations who employ open source, rather than proprietary, structures. We’ve made the conscious choice to build our new website with WordPress, an open source and non-profit platform, and to host with Web Architects, a Sheffield-based multistakeholder cooperative.

We also realised, with no little joy, that the world has moved on so much from when we began. Over the last decade we’ve been on a journey, along with other learning communities, to co-create new language around our ideas, culture and practice, to find a way to explain to people what we were doing because it hadn’t really been done before. The Garden existed before self-directed learning and self-directed learning communities were the standard terminology, and we were part of the long conversation in the Freedom to Learn movement that led to the adoption of these terms. For posterity, we originally called ourselves a “democratic community for children”, as a nod to our democractic school predecessors and inspiration, like Summerhill and Sands.

This new website is a fresh start in many respects. It’s more ethically aligned but it’s also much streamlined, succinctly explaining what we do and what we offer because, happily, our culture really has been through a huge transformation. We have far less of a need to explain ourselves and justify our existence as we once did, which is a wonderful realisation to have.

With love and in solidarity,

Artemis Bear

Founder and Director of The Garden

“School is the advertising agency that makes you believe that you need the society as it is.”

~ Ivan Illich in Deschooling Society