Our mission is to provide no-commitment, low-cost
social events and service opportunities to
homeschooled tween girls in a
nurturing environment that embraces all members for
the richness of our cultural differences.
Our no-commitment policy allows you to attend the events that work for your family and skip the ones that don't.
We try to alternate events with entrance fees with events that don't have entrance fees. We try to keep the entrance fees to $5-15 per participant by requesting group rates.
The social activities revolve around fun activities that tweens like to do: like playing in a park, ice skating, roller skating, playing laser tag, mini golf, and hanging out at the coffee shop.
In the past, we have completed crafts for charity fundraisers and made cards for sick kids in the hospital. We ensure that the events are age-appropriate. We don't want to expose the kids to the worst of the status of the world, but we do want to give the kids a sense of community.
To be supportive of each other, every member takes a pledge to accept, respect, and support each other. We pledge not to discriminate against anyone based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, disability, income, educational privilege, educational philosophy, or any other difference that attempts to divide us.
We believe that being a diversity ally takes more than merely tolerating others. We must actively embrace others.
We also recognize that ignorance of other cultures leads to inadvertent prejudice and discrimination. Thus, we must learn about each others and diverse cultures that we each bring.
To effectuate this pledge, we begin each event with information about a group of people who faces unique challenges. In the past, we have talked about the challenges people face when they have allergies, have down syndrome, have mental health issues, help people with mental health issues, and don't have a home. In the future, we plan to engage in age-appropriate discussions about privilege and implicit bias as well as continue our conversations about the unique challenges different groups face.
Birth of a No Commitment "Coop"
Once upon a time, I had an ideal life. I was an internationally renowned law professor, engaging in my passion: teaching, while fulfilling my life goals: researching food & environmental law to provide better health to humans, improve treatment of other beings, and protect the environment for future generations. I worked 60-90 hours per week, I made my kids' Halloween costumes, baked them elaborate birthday cakes, handmade their quilts, pillows, and made all cleaning and personal products from scratch.
Then, I got Lyme Complex. Lyme Complex has been described as having MS, ALS, athritis, alzheimers, and shin splits all over your body, all at the same time. There were months when I could only get out of the bed to go to the bathroom and then I had to crawl. Most of the treatment is not covered by insurance and medical expenses have ranged from $500 per month early on to as high as $5,000 per month during my IV treatment. After years of working through the disease, in combination with some other factors at work, I took a year off of work to try to regain my health and give my mind, body, and soul a much needed chance at recovery. We kept the kids homeschooled to help care for me.
Unfortunately, unbeknownst to us, the house we rented for my health sabbatical had mold and likely some other toxic fumes. My body, battered and torn from years of Lyme disease, gave up. Unfortunately, my children were both impacted from the mold exposure. Lyme disease, which had been dormant in their systems, took hold. And my treatment had depleted our savings and our credit lines.
Once we found the mold (a year later), we consulted health and mold experts who said we had to get rid of everything we owned. All of the heirlooms, all of the furniture my husband and I custom built to avoid environmental toxins, all of our purchases over 25 years of marriage, and our library of 10,000 books, gone.
We moved into an apartment with a bag of paper plates and two air mattresses to our names, with a 10 and 13 year old that lost everything they owned, their lifestyle, and their neighborhood friends. On top of Lyme Complex, we were all fighting environmental mold exposure, and complications from the heavy medicines used to treat these diseases.
I started a teen meetup in case my eldest daughter was too sick to go to public school for high school, which she really wanted to do. However, we had so much fun planning it, and it was just manageable with my disability while providing me something positive to focus on, so we decided to continue the meetup, but as a tween meetup for my middle schooler.
We are so grateful to be back among the living (at least some days), and then to find so many wonderful families on top of it was just what the doctor ordered (quite literally).
We wanted to format the meetups so that people with busy lives or their own disabilities could participate as much (or as little) as they wanted to. Thus, we started the no-commitment meetup. People come when they can, skip when they want, and do the activities that they will enjoy. I affectionately refer to this meetup as the "catch as catch can coop."
I often get asked why I don't organize groups for boys or for younger kids or for older kids. I do ask everyone to remember that I am a disabled mom who is creating events for my kid and her potential friends. I don't get paid to run these coops, rather, I usually lose money. I have no social contract that requires me to create events for the larger community, especially events that my kid would not be interested in attending.
Birth of an Ally Coop
The other half of this origin story starts with a conversation with a homeschool mom. She mentioned that, as a Native American, she had faced a lot of bigotry. After my initial shock and sadness wore off, I thought, "well, at least she won't face prejudice from me."
Then I realized that I didn't know much about the hundreds of Native American cultures. And so there was a likelihood that I would, out of innocent ignorance, say something that was offensive, and that I probably wouldn't even realize it. I would be mortified to make a bigoted comment, but I probably wouldn't even be aware that I had!
For example, most communities do not know the history that slave "owners" would call grown slave men "boy." It was meant to put the slaves "in their place." The message was, "I am a man, the master, and you are nothing more than a boy. I dominate you." This legacy is well known in many communities of Descendants of Africans Enslaved in the United States (DAEUS). In communities without this history of enslaving, this legacy is not very well known at all, and the term "boy" is used affectionately, as in "my boy," or with acceptance, as in "boys will be boys." For some DAEUS communities, even calling a male child by the term "boy" stirs up this history of racial domination. It is so easy for a white person, who is unaware of this history to innocently (but ignorantly) refer to one or more male children, some of whom are African Amercians, as boys.
Words, in isolation, have no meaning. Society gives words meaning, not just through the dictionary and through usage, but also through historical context. In this example, the history of those enslaved and those not enslaved is so different, and the knowledge, experience, and inter-generational life lessons are so different that a word one culture considers affectionate is demeaning to another culture. by learning about this history, we can choose to make a conscious effort to not demean someone else.
From the experience with my Native American friend and my experience with the law case where we couldn't refer to the male child (who was a victim) as a "boy," I realized that there is a big difference between tolerating other cultures and being an ally. Tolerating other cultures is a passive act. "I won't intentionally offend others." "Live and let live." But "tolerance" allows a lot of room for implicit bias and unintended bigotry.
Being an ally requires me to confront my own ignorance and seek ever to learn more about different people and their cultures and needs. Being an ally moves beyond tolerating others to embracing them for who they are. Being an ally requires me to actively accept, respect, and support others.
Being an ally doesn't mean we are never going to accidentally offend. Rather, it means that when we do accidentally offend, we own it. We don't hide behind "I didn't mean offense." Rather, we learn that what we said or did that caused offense and we learn how to avoid the behavior in the future.
Being an ally also doesn't mean that we have to get along with everyone. Some personalities chafe us the wrong way. However, it does mean that we have to treat everyone we meet with respect and kindness. It does mean that if we don't think that we have anything in common with someone, we have an active duty to dig deeper and try harder. It doesn't mean we have to be that person's best friend. But it does mean that the person must feel welcomed and respected when they are in our presence.
As an ally, we accept, respect, and support other allies, who are imperfect, ignorant, and trying their darnedest to be more accepting and respectful today than we were yesterday.
ORIGIN STORY
MISSION
