Community
The first of the five most essential values guiding the creative parenting center is fostering a thriving sense of community. This is the primary human “environment” I am creating and it is realized through parent-child circles, community-making and community-building circles that will allow the members of the circle to define their values that will guide them in community; where parents, teachers/mentors and children co-create their dreams for the learning spaces and what will be in them.
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Creativity
The second value for the creative parenting center is based on the premise that everyone is an artist: a dancer, a poet, a painter, a sculptor, a singer. Creative expression is uniquely human and everyone is born with an ability to express themselves in all mediums. In fact, the creative act, is at the heart of all learning, all growth, all healing, all life energies. The Creative Parenting Center is a “preschool for parents” where adults can reignite their playful child-like wonder and remember the vulnerability and exhilaration of free play. This is realized through painting days where children and parents paint side by side, “creative night out” for parents, to recharge themselves and painting classes for children and adults separately.
Nature
The third value of the creative parenting center is honoring nature. The center is located on the edge of the Laguna de Santa Rosa, a wild open land that was once the meeting and celebration place of many Native American tribes. By honoring the land we are on, we can introduce the larger community context of our ancestral origins of each family, our unique identities and gifts that we bring into the present day context, while honoring the stolen lands of the Pomo, Miwok and other local tribes. We can emulate some of the ways that these elders cared for and lived off the land.
Beauty
The fourth essential value is beauty in the form of architecture and aesthetics that invoke calm, inspiration and deeper values of interdependence and wholesomeness. For this reason, the heart of the creative parenting center is a round house or 12-sided wooden yurt where the community will be held literally in a circle which represents that we are each a point on the edge of the circle, and we make the circle space in the center where we put our intentions, our healing, our dreams.
Freedom
And the fifth and final value underneath every exploration, every social-emotional interaction, every imaginative endeavor, is to allow for as much freedom as possible. Freedom to explore iteratively; freedom to learn from one’s own conflicts without others solving everything for you; freedom to think your thoughts and share them without correction or commentary; freedom to dream big and build big, and freedom to climb and run and dance and move.
After its all said and done, the fundamental environment holding it all will be the human heart. Human hearts coming together to care for each other, to help raise up children with big wide brave open hearts. All children are our children. In the words of Barbara Kingsolver, in an article titled Somebody’s Baby:
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“But unlike many other species we are social, insightful, and capable of anticipating our future. We can see, if we care to look, that the way we treat children – all of them, not just our own, and especially those in great need – defines the shape of the world we’ll wake up in tomorrow. The most remarkable feature of human culture is its capacity to reach beyond the self and encompass the collective good.”
Sun Magazine, Issue: October 2022