Artemis Bear
@ArtemisBear

I'm a start up founder, movement builder, community organiser, facilitator, project manager and culture change strategist, with over a decade’s experience working in communities, grassroots networks, and co-operative projects. My work sits at the intersection of education, systemic change, and justice; always centred on relationship, playfulness and care.

Having started my career working in climate / behaviour change policy, I realised how our systems of governance and our wider culture was a barrier to the serious change required to address the era of polyconsequence. The majority of my work in the two decades since has been focussed on metarelational learning for regenerative futures. Practically, this means co-creating the conditions for serious culture change, through deep deschooling and decolonising in community, as well as queering ideas of relationality, as entangled liberatory practice.

I founded The Garden, a self-directed learning community, in 2016, as a metarelational inquiry (from a then relatively colonised perspective) to see if it was possible to create the conditions for a less hierachical and competitive culture, in order to produce new systems of governance. It has also been a much needed community both for families who hold a deep commitment to deschooling and decolonising, as well as for families who have had difficult experiences with the school system.

The cornerstones of this metarelational learning inquiry are:

• Self-directed learning: no compulsory academic learning

• Collaborative decision-making: make decisions using consensus and consent-based techniques

• Intention and reflection cycles: we plan and reflect on how we spend our time

• Power-sharing: young people have an equal say to adults where it is safe and practical to do so

• Unconditional relating: empathy and deepening understanding, rather than judgement

• Relational approach to conflict: high accountability, low blame

• Adaptability: a consistent flexibilty in the approach responding to the needs of the community and external ideas

I now work with and for a wide range of entities to shift from a reductionist, hierarchical, transactional and competitive way of operating to a systems thinking/being, collaborative, reciprocal and relational one. I'm also personally experimenting with ways to decouple work and finance, in order to live more reciprocally than transactionally. This Liberapay page isn’t a contract, a tip jar, or a transaction for goods or services. Money is, for now, still part of survival, so contributions here help me keep tending these experiments in relational depth. If you choose to contribute, you’re not supporting a project, you’re joining an entanglement, keeping questions alive, and helping me stay in the work of weaving-with rather than working-for.

Some of the projects I'm dreaming into (in chronological order of my engagement):

• The Garden - a decade long inquiry into metarelational learning for regenerative futures in community www.thegardenbristol.org

• SCRiTCH - community cabaret http://linktr.ee/scritchcabaret

• Freedom to Learn - a network for anyone exploring social and environmental justice in learning ecosystems http://linktr.ee/freedom2learnuk

• Creatures Like Us - a video game about squatting and community http://linktr.ee/circleastudios

• Bristol Commons - reclaiming everything from corporations and the state www.bristolcommons.org

• The Mulch Room - writing adventures in deschooling and decolonising (in development)

• AEled - a self-directed learning community and SEND exam centre for 14-18 year olds (in development)

• Queerkin - creating space for queer community to heal from violence and create systems of care (in development)

• Kith - physical and temporal spaces for post-capitalist dreaming and practicing (in development)

• Mycelia - a new decentralised social network (in development)