Dear community, Since the last few weeks we have been getting requests from parents interested in hosting/participating/collaborating with Nooks. We have been fortunate to have your thoughts, guidance, and support all along the way. We are excited to share that Nooks would both be an online and an offline experience starting from now onwards, thus introducing the concept of community collaboration to it.
Would love to quote our editor here: " Parenting in the modern world can be deeply exhausting. Childcare is available for some, but it does little to address the brutal isolation that many parents face. They drop their children off with near-strangers and spend the day apart from them, only to pick them up and go home to an empty house surrounded by neighbors they’ve never met. This sense of parenting in a vacuum has increased drastically over the past year. As our world becomes more digitalized, isolation continues to increase. Children are separated from their peers, expected to learn alone in front of a screen or stack of worksheets. Parents are struggling to balance work and parenting without childcare. Basic human needs -- connection, security, community -- are going unmet. We were never meant to live this way.
And we don’t have to."
How you may participate?
To participate in Nooks, we request you become a member of our community. For now, it's the Facebook community (closed group). That way you may be aware of our values, mission, and the vibe of the community.
Once you are a member, you may want to request a Nook, filling up a form with the required details. There may be different ways while participating in a Nook:
You may want to host a Nook/participate in a Nook/be a play facilitator.
Nooks can happen in a wide variety of locations, including:
- Homes
- Yards
- Coffee Shops
- Parks
- Coworking Spaces
- Libraries
Play Facilitators set out to create curiosity-evoking environments that welcome children. These calm and inviting spaces offer a variety of open-ended materials that give children the opportunity to engage fully -- to enter that state of perfect flow where joy and learning overlap. Keeping the pandemic in mind we would love to give our attention to outdoor spaces/backyards, we would also love to help you design the space to start with and support with play materials.
More info here: https://parents-nook.ghost.io/parents-nook-our-mission-our-philosophy-and-faq/
Online experiences:
Our research all through pandemics and having conversations with a lot of parents made us think we are missing the basic building blocks of community which is connection. Communities become more cohesive when we make visible the opportunities to connect, collaborate, and share resources. A community which we may think of as our very own. Even though there are tons of communities around, the basic building blocks of parenting are remaining untouched still. We are trying to co-create the community together here with the help of technology.
We are also thinking that this would help us Create Nooks that are owned, run, and governed by parents, educators, space owners, play facilitators, and anyone else interested in supporting the ecosystem so that they can potentially make collectively more responsible decisions thus addressing the needs of the parenting community at the grass-root level and enabling them.
We will share more information soon.
We would request you to fill up the below form, once the form is filled, depending on the info provided we will reach out with the next steps.
Parents would be able to create their own Nook circles on a dedicated Parents' Nook platform. They may invite other parents who might be interested in participating in Nooks. Inviting an early childhood educator from the community aligned with the values of the Nooks may be the next step. These circles may cooperate on various pieces of stuff among themselves. It would facilitate in-person Nooks, skill exchange, and interest group-based teach-ins, and many such scenarios thus utilizing the collective intelligence of a shared community. But first thing first we ould start with in-person Nooks and a supportive online community.
We would be able to support only a few Nooks in 2021, mostly in SF Bay Area and Santa Cruz. But if you are someone working closely with us, we would love to set up a Nook for you, even if you are not in Bay Area.
We are on a path to enable the online Nook community to evolve beyond a social network of forums and chat rooms to become a fully operational community-run organization. If you are interested in knowing more about the initiative/want to get involved, please drop us a line. We look forward to hearing back from you.