Core Values

INTERSECTIONAL UNSCHOOLING

Our values guide our reflectioN and intention-setting and steer the direction of our programming

We believe and trust that people learn best when they are free to live self-chosen, passion-driven lives. We desire to build a community that sees, affirms, and supports the whole person where they're at today. In doing so, we are committed to owning and disrupting the cultural norms of white supremacy, inequitable income distribution, environmental injustice, sexism, ableism and more.

We believe that in intersectional unschooling, the freedom to choose your learning path is paramount, but if that freedom of self isn’t married with full immersion in community, resource sharing, trust and accountability, then learners are poised toward individualism, a devastating pillar of white supremacy culture. At TDP, we use intersectional unschooling as an antidote to this. As we connect to the natural world and each other in partnership, we are not only unschooling ourselves, we are building a safety net, a network, and a future in place of school.

We believe that by respectfully supporting young people as they grow in their own path naturally creates an opening for young people to develop their agency and autonomy at the earliest stages of development. We can nourish the independent changemaker that lives in every free child instead of using coercive or power-over tactics and behaviors.

Young people are living lives right now and don’t need to spend their entire upbringings disconnected from the present in order to prepare for some unknown, distant future.

How this can look in practice:

To focus on helping young people build the skills to understand what they want to do in their lives, to support them in setting intentions that help them embody those understandings, to center reflection as self-assessment, and solidifying learning through sharing with others
Creating an environment where people can safely reflect on and better understand their own identity while also actively practicing understanding and affirming others
Conflict resolution: how we move towards greater understanding of one another, participate in empathic listening, owning mistakes, apologizing and repairing, making a plan to move forward. Reimagining conflict as a binary right and wrong, and moving towards productive dialogue around safety, needs, responsibility, action, and care
Facilitators being responsible to help individuals hold community agreements, providing active supports for young people to understand and uphold both the agreement making processes and the agreements themselves
Creating space for the entire community to come together to reflect on and share experiences, to set intentions, and to co-create how our intentional community supports itself

collective Liberation

We envision a community that actively deconstructs and resists western colonial whiteness and is welcoming, inclusive, and accessible to all people. We see that education spaces often uphold oppressive systems that are particularly harmful for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). In order to disrupt those systems, we have to disrupt ourselves. We will do the work to be anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-classist, anti-ageist, and more.

How this can look in practice:

Simultaneously building skills and awareness to understand/ affirm/ respect your own identity and the people you are in community with by:
- Growing a deep understanding of yourself, your agency, your needs, the intersections of your identity and what you deserve as the full/perfect person you are.
- Growing a deep understanding of the needs and experiences of your community as an organism, and the individual needs and experiences of others you're in relationship to.
- Building the skills to sustainably respond to your community's collective and individual needs through practices like advocacy, collaboration, disruption, innovation, active listening, safer-space making, access, accountability, play, and loving as a verb.

Disrupting the common ethos of “I get to do whatever I want” in unschooling spaces, and replacing that with understanding that in community, all individual rights and needs are considered and supported. Fairness isn’t everyone getting the same but actually getting what they need.
Addressing the invisible and culturally acceptable ways systems of oppression impact people with different identifies, impact how we think as individuals, and what we can do to define, shape, and live our own values.
Creating space for our entire community to explore systems of oppression together, share experiences, learn from one another, and set community-intentions for actions we can take together.

Environmental Stewardship

Nature education provides endless opportunities for play, discovery, hands-on learning, experimentation, problem solving, cooperation, and creativity. We want to support our young people in deeply connecting with the natural world while empowering them to see and act on their responsibility and agency in shaping it.

How this can look in practice:

Lovingly observing and caring for all living things that cross our paths, including plants, bugs, and animals
Seeking understanding of root causes and systems that create environmental devastation while also seeing ourselves in deep, respectful relationship with the earth and taking actions that demonstrate care
Lending our hands to help care for our environment through litter clean ups, tree planting, and more