land-based programs, consent-centered pedagogy, and community care for children and their families in Greater New Haven
ABOUT US
Most of us grew up in systems that taught kids to obey and adults to control. Undoing that takes courage, from kids and adults alike. We believe kids are full members of their communities, with a real say in how they learn and spend their days, and we meet harm with care, not punishment.
We’re inspired by the Land Back movement, Paulo Freire, the Raising Free People Network, conscious parenting and emergent learning movements and our local communities activists and partners who stand with children every day.
We began gathering at Edgerton Park in 2023 as a micro-school. In 2026, we became a collaborative and a nonprofit. We’re still learning and growing, together.
Most of us grew up in systems that taught kids to obey and adults to control. Undoing that takes courage. We believe kids are full members of their communities, with a real say in how they learn and spend their days, and we meet harm with care, not punishment.
We’re inspired by the Land Back movement, Paulo Freire's conscientização (critical consciousness), the Raising Free People Network, conscious parenting and emergent learning movements and our local communities activists and partners who stand with children every day.
We began gathering at Edgerton Park in 2023, planning to become a micro-school. Along the way, we realized that moving school outside wouldn’t change how school treats kids. So in 2026, we became a collaborative and a nonprofit: a learning commons for all ages.
We’re still learning and growing, together.
We are called to be brave
Nature is a teacher.
Cultures around the world believe that nature already holds the answer to its own resilience. We ask: what does it look like to let nature teach? To pay attention. To share space with other lifeforms. To learn what living well together actually means.
Learning is relational.
At BNC, learning isn't something adults deliver to children. It emerges from trust—between children and caregivers, between generations, between people and the land they're on. When those relationships are authentic and stoke belonging, learning is inevitable.
Liberation in practice.
We dream of a world where children are free from systems that control, rank, and diminish. We believe that world is built now, in the small daily choices of how we treat children, how we treat each other, and how we tend the land we share.
Our adult circles and the children's circles are part of the same project: a community practicing liberation, together, across generations.
Knowledge is created together
Knowledge isn't given or received. It's actively exchanged as playworkers, families, and our living environment come together. Children are protagonists in their own learning journeys. No two circles are ever alike because every cohort, every season, every child is distinct.
Our Philosophy
Children are rights-holders with the right to be heard, make independent choices, and to their bodily autonomy. We take that seriously in a world that often doesn't.
At BNC, children aren't managed into compliance. They move freely, follow their curiosities, and learn to trust themselves.
Consent-Based Learning
Committed to
anti-bias
Every child belongs at BNC.
We actively work to identify and oppose bias rooted in racism, homophobia, ableism, and other forms of harm.
We know from ecology that diverse communities generate more resources (not fewer). Everyone's presence here makes our community richer.
Year-Round, All Weather
We gather in every season, in almost all weather. Some of the coldest, wettest days turn out to be the most joyful. Research shows regular time outdoors reduces stress and supports children's social-emotional development.
We'll walk you through everything you need before your first day.
Our Community Agreement
Brave Nature Collaborative · New Haven, CT
Relational consent over compliance. Self-trust over performance. We honor and grow according to our many traditions, unlearn our biases, trust children to lead, and each other to listen.
Rooted in relationship with one another and the land.
Relational consent over compliance. Self-trust over performance. We honor and grow according to our many traditions, unlearn our biases, trust children to lead, and each other to listen.
Rooted in relationship with one another and the land.
THEY/them · Lead NESTS PLAYWORKER
Bee is a playworker and early childhood educator with a passion for literature and storytelling that began young—outside collecting rocks or nose-deep in a book.
That early love led them to wonder about storytellers and which stories have a place in formal education.
Children's literature, songs and poems in particular have a unique ability to tell complex stories with few to no words. This interest inspired Bee to study early childhood education at Westfield State University and research children's literature—learning about stories that hold a child's interest and the stories most represented in schools.
Those questions, among others, led them to divert from their path of becoming a public school teacher and look for a place where more diverse stories are honored.
Since the start of the pandemic, Bee has devoted much of their heart to promoting community health both physical and mental, through reading stories to children and listening to peoples' stories about their struggles through our ever-changing world.
At BNC, Bee tends to the Nests cohorts, designing seasonal invitations and relational rhythms where community is nurtured in nature and diverse stories take root and grow.
Bee was born and raised on unceded Agawam and Nipmuc Land (Middlesex County, Massachusetts). They now live on unceded Mohegan Land in Central Connecticut.
Bee
SHE/THEY · Founder & Director
Kimberly
Kimberly Birch Gill is a practitioner of critical environmental education, a facilitator, consultant, social engagement artist, and mama.
She brings over 20 years guiding children and their communities to co-create participatory research and liberatory learning commons, including with the United Nations, Sustainability Education Policy Network, and various grassroots organizations.
Rooted in the relational practice of old growth forests, where knowledge moves through mycorrhizal networks, symbiotic exchange, and the slow intelligence of place, Kimberly specializes in weaving knowledge systems to support collaboration between humans and the more-than-human world towards children's and planetary liberation.
Kimberly received her BS in Economics and BA in Sociology from Westmont College, BFA from Pratt Institute and MEd under a First Nations faculty at University of Saskatchewan.
With ancestral roots tying to the Baltic Sea and Galicja (present day Poland), they were born and raised on unceded Poquonooks, Wangunks, and Tunxis Land also known as Hartford County, CT.
she/her · Nests Playworker
Ciana-Lei Bence is a Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) from Olaʻa, Hawaiʻi, currently studying at Yale University.
As a child, Ciana was always drawn to the stars—as teachers, Kūpuna (ancestors), and storytellers—inspiring her to spend her life learning from them. She now studies astronomy and the history of science, where her research sits at the intersection of science and technology studies, Indigenous epistemology, and decolonial thought.
Grounded in values of aloha ʻāina (a deep love for the land) and ʻike kūpuna (ancestral wisdom), she is intent on centering land, story, and relational knowledge as both method and theory in all that she does. She is passionate about building curricula and educational spaces that honor the knowledge children carry with them through their diverse stories and backgrounds, their relationships to land, and their intuitive ways of making meaning.
She is currently working toward a degree in the history of science with a focus on Indigenous and educational studies, with the long-term goal of returning home to Hawaiʻi to work as an educator, joining efforts to create spaces that honor diverse ways of knowing through land-based and relational approaches to pedagogy.
Ciana
SHE/THEY · storytelling
Dempsey is an anthropologist, multi-media storyteller, harpist, and mamá of two.
With over 10 years of embedded community research about early childhood, including work with the Centers for Research on Creativity (CROC), and UCSD Institute for Neural Computation, Dempsey specializes in making sense of how children, adults, and the living systems we are part of actually learn together; then building the narrative and visual infrastructure that lets those practices take root and thrive.
Dempsey is from Chula Vista, California, where their family moved in migrational rhythms between California and Baja Sur for generations prior to border enforcement. Chula Vista is nourished, healed, and protected by the Kumeyaay people to the present day.
Dempsey
Meet our Team
Our Board of Directors
Join our team
Interested in playwork at Brave Nature Collaborative
We're building a team of people who believe children already know how to lead
and want to practice listening, following seasonal rhythms, and learning alongside families in all weather.
Current open roles