About
The dream circled for over ten years. In different iterations and forms, relentlessly returning to my psyche. I filled notebooks with drawings of a homestead where people come to learn and rest in nature. The kind of place I would want to stumble upon. Made lists of topics and classes.
A map of how to live in these times.
Not overly intellectual. Not stale, like my high school experience sitting in class almost falling asleep while the teacher urged us to memorize a white man's history.
Earth Unschool is about what's emerging now. Allowing knowledge to wash over you like water. Not memorizing facts. But integrating and becoming.
Unschool is a philosophy of learning that trusts curiosity over curriculum. Learning by living, doing, and experiencing rather than being told what to think. Earth grounds us in the source of wisdom: the living world we are part of and responsible to.
Together, Earth Unschool is an invitation to unlearn the stories that have disconnected us and to learn what we actually need to know as earth citizens.
The Journey
Earth Unschool grew from over twenty years of exploration. Working on organic farms. Learning permaculture and natural building at Quail Springs Oasis. Sitting in council at the Ojai Foundation. Protesting. Engaging with activist groups. Fifteen years of relational work as a therapist. Reading many, many books. Dabbling in worlds of regeneration and expanding spiritual consciousness. Feeling into the edges of what's possible.
But most importantly, meeting people. Weaving connections in my heart - in California, New York, and Vermont. Until I learned a name for what I was finding everywhere:
islands of coherence.
Places amidst the chaos of a collapsing system that nourish, enliven, and inspire. More than anything, I wanted to create one of these spaces myself. Since I couldn’t wait any longer, I decided to start it in my living room.
The Vision
Rather than push from fear or guilt, Earth Unschool pulls. Toward creative solutions that already exist. Toward love. Toward each other in pro-social, relational ways.
The deepest I learned was with Warren Brush at Quail Springs. He introduced us to the land by walking us through the desert to the source of the spring. We cupped our hands under the water trickle and shared gratitude. Sat in an earthen room as he taught us principles of a living ecosystem: earth care, people care, and fair share. We slept in tents in a canyon and took turns cooking. We lived what he was teaching.
Earth Unschool moves beyond talking about it. To becoming the people who inhabit a regenerative earth. Learning skills required without flooding our brains with more information.
Simplifying and distilling. Unlearning.
We do this as a collective. We don't have to know everything. Just the aspects that bring us into our unique dharmic song in the larger alignment of an earth and society that works for all.
Earth Unschool is not here to preach to the choir. It's here to pull in those who feel disconnected, hopeless, or unsure where to begin. It is a response to the loneliness epidemic. A hub that does not reinvent the wheel but amplifies solutions, uplifts people already doing good work, and brings the movement forward.
The Place
Earth Unschool is a non-commercial, grassroots, and local space. That deepens our belonging to place - here in the city. Strengthening our web in the northeast bioregion.
A place to engage our agency as earth citizens. To unlearn neoliberal extractive philosophy and shift into interdependence and toward an ecocivlization. Embodying social and ecological thriving. Maintaining our vibrant selves as we do so.
Our power is exponentially magnified when we are nourished, supported, and inspired. When we take action together. When we take the movement out of Zoom rooms or online communities and into our neighborhood.
I believe it happens right here, right now, in our home: Brooklyn. And eventually reaching up through the Hudson Valley and Vermont. A living thread through the northeast bioregion.
Founded by Maia Kiley
Maia has been committed since childhood to oneness with nature, to dancing, and to ecological care. These threads took her on a journey of over twenty years through farms and forests, therapy rooms and protest lines, permaculture courses and council circles - until they wove themselves into Earth Unschool.
She is a therapist, a generalist, a researcher, and dreamer. She believes the skills we need most right now aren't taught in classrooms. They're learned in community, in nature, and in our bodies.
Earth Unschool is what she would have wanted to stumble upon. She's building it now so you don't have to wait as long.