This space represents a river to walk toward, to sit in, listen to, and move through self-inquiry, unlearning, and reparenting.

People are usually drawn here by curiosity around unschooling, and stay because they/we eventually recognize this is liberation work that fuels learning, life design, and relationships.

Radical Recovery Summit. Innovation in Healing Trauma and Addiction
Watch this video
The Freedom of Unschooling: Raising Liberated Black Children Without The Restrictions of School
Read this essay
From Schoolish to Self-directed. Transitioning away from colonized life skills
Listen to this popular episode
Raising Free People Network is a media and collaboration hub for inquiries, efforts, and community organizing at the intersection of privilege, parenting, and power.

About this work.

This work examines the ways that we have accepted coercive, emotionally and physically damaging habits as a normal part of adult-child relationships. We focus on self-inquiry, deschooling, and most importantly, decolonization. Our intention is to expose the world to people who, like us, are working to migrate from the coercion and fear shrapnel of colonization. Akilah is called to be among the many who contribute to the collective walk toward ways of  living with children that center community, address civil rights issues, and believe in trusting and respecting children.

Flowing with a team of dope and diligent co-liberators, Akilah gets to focus Raising Free People Network on personal narratives and critical analysis to open communication among families and intentional learning spaces that practice Self-Directed Education (no matter what words they use to describe it). Through storytelling, honest dialogue, and madd-question-askin, we share the vast and varied ways culture, race, and abilities are celebrated through liberation-minded living.

Black families exploring Self-Directed Education and Unschooling
Communities learning to integrate self-directed practices in all adult-child relationships
People seeking leadership and facilitation support to re-frame concepts like Value, Equity, Liberation, and Trust
Youth Rights & Advocacy Organizations
Business and charitable organizations looking to disrupt colonizer-culture in their works environments and their approach to management and training

Who Raising Free People serves

Learning Is Innate: Ancestral Childhood, Unschooling, and Healing
with Amber Magnolia Hill
How is an "average" unschooling day structured?
with Leslie W. Bray
3 Radical Reasons I Won’t Apologize For
My Black-Girl Hair
with Black-Girl Hair
1
Deschooling + Re-humanizing Group Culture
2
RFP Structure + Flow
3
RFP Tools + Toys
4
Decolonizing Adult-Child Interactions
5
Decolonizing Funding Models
6
Plant Wisdom
7
God-Self Embodiment
8
Self-discovery Experiences
9
Sisterhood of 10

My Circles

Click each description for details

What we mean when we say…

Sovereignty.

Sovereignty is about understanding and making choices outside of the misaligned information that you’ve been taught to see, believe, and follow. A true sincere peace, understanding and wisdom of how you came to your choices and decisions, with no decision-altering guilt or fear-based regard to possibilities of boat-rocking and upheaval of what used to be one’s “norm”. Essentially, sovereignty is a consistent act of self-ownership and healthy self-governance, often carried out in spite of external factors like family and friend’s contrary opinions about one’s lifestyle choices.

Self-Awareness.

The ability to assess your own thoughts and feelings, and to recognize what feels truest for you. Self-awareness also includes the ability to see how your particular needs and way of being/thinking can fit into the world around you.

Self-awareness has two main parts: an internal aspect (examining your own thoughts and needs), and an external aspect (seeing how you, and those unique thoughts and needs, can function and feel well in the world around you).

Deschooling.

Shedding the programming and habits that resulted from other people’s agency over your time, body, thoughts, or actions. Designing and practicing beliefs that align with your desire to thrive, be happy, and succeed.

Unschooling.

A child-trusting, anti-oppression, liberatory, love-centered approach to parenting and caregiving. It is also creating and expanding communities of confident, capable people who understand how they learn best, and how to work collaboratively to learn and solve things.

Schoolishness.

Conventional practices that are rooted in binaries, and generally accepted by adults, but rejected by children and teenagers, either overtly or covertly. A living out someone else’s goals or narrative of how and what we should be. Schoolishness models an authoritarian approach to adult-child interaction as well as respectability ideas rooted in adults’ innate superiority in knowledge.

Self-Directed Education (SDE).

Self-Directed Education (SDE) is an umbrella term that basically means that the education is learner chosen and learner driven, even though it’s not always learner led. So in SDE, you can still have a teacher that’s telling you exactly what to do, exactly when to do it. But you chose it for yourself, meaning it wasn’t forced upon you, then it’s a self-directed process. What a lot of us i SDE like to say this is that there are two main questions you can ask to gauge whether something fits under the SDE umbrella (unschooling is one type of SDE): 1) Did the learner choose to do this activity? 2) Can the learner quit the activity without recourse or pushback from an adult (if the learner in question is a child)? If both answers are yes, then it’s SDE.

Reparenting.

The practice of going back to your own inner child to inquire, to comfort, to listen and to love. It is about being there for yourself as a means of nurturing the little version of you by saying, I’m sorry that happened to you/us, here’s what I needed/need now, and then walking towards those needs with the support of your adult self and your adult resources.