Everyone always wants to know how Barefoot University started. It’s actually kind of a crazy story, in a land not so far away….
Ambers Version:
Madeleine and I had actually never met when we decided to hop on this crazy train. I have a pretty big natural living group on Facebook for local families. We weren’t even FB friends, but I knew that she was an expert gardener. I reached out to her to ask if she could do a “how to“ video for local moms to help them start an organic garden. She agreed. That is how we became Facebook friends.
I’m fuzzy with the details but I think I made a post somewhere a few months later asking if anyone wanted to start a forest school. Madeleine (we still hadn’t met yet) was one of the first ones to say yes! I figured she didn’t really expect that I was seriously going to start something with a stranger…. so I messaged her to let her know I was serious.
The rest was history! We started to meet with some other moms and plan our year. We both connected immediately though the desire we both had to raise our kids in a tight-knit community and in nature.
Once we finalized our plans, we posted in one local homeschool group letting people know we would be doing nature activities in the woods and they were welcome to join us. They did. So did their friends. And their friends. By that spring, we decided to create our own nature journals for us to use together. That’s when our group really took off. It was huge. Everyone kept inviting people and it grew so big that it was not the close knit community we had hoped for.
In fact, we didn’t even know all the families or their kids anymore. We decided to register as a Texas nonprofit because we were worried about the liability with all the new families showing up.
That summer, we told people they had to sign up for the following school year by *whatever* date. They did. And all those people added new people. We woke up and had over 100 families sign up in ONE night.
That is when we decided to split the group into two groups. Some friends and veteran forest school moms volunteered to sprout with us and lead their own BU group. We worked out lots of kinks before getting it down but it was all worth it.
The messages kept coming in though. People wanted to join our group, and the other group. But they were both so big that we weren’t taking any new families. Madeleine and I are so passionate about nature and all it’s benefits that we grieved every time we had to turn someone away. Our hearts really want everyone to get out side and experience forest school.
Then we had a former family who lived a little further away reach out and ask if she could start a group. By this time we had about 50 families on the waiting list. So we just kept sprouting. We’ve looked at each other several times over the last year and asked, “how did this happen?!” or “Are we sure were ready?!” – Honestly, we just laugh. There’s no turning back now, and we wouldn’t want to anyway! �� We found that community we were looking for.
– Amber