Niam Gaia is rooted in the idea of an ever-evolving and whole-listic approach to learning, with family at its center. We believe in a family-centered learning environment that prioritizes individual growth and development. Our design puts forth a framework for families to engage with their peers, teachers, and the world around them to develop meaningful relationships and cultivate strong academic skills.

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The Niam Gaia “school” design, borne from the isolations Covid made real for parents across our nation and around the world, has become the multifaceted multicultural design of a learning organization that serves all, includes all, ennobles all.

Its vision is for every community with school age children, elders, and those whose differences require special care to engage learning together.  Whether through shared inquiry models of learning in the outdoors and “real world” settings.  (see High Tech High, Edutopia, XQ Project, Reggio Emilia, Buck Institute Project Based Learning…).  Or in a more traditional apprenticeship learning environment.  Everyone participating understands and knows how to participate and contribute to the whole community.  

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Together, adult and child, expert and novice, literate and illiterate, design, test, and grow toward new systems and structures of health care; education; governance; sustainable living and equitable economies.  This model includes mental health care, stages of life health care, reproduction, birth, baby, and parent care. A fluid model for transformational learning. What one of our members calls “Ivy League education at the public school price”. 

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Shared inquiry is a design that engages real world projects. Every Participant steers their learning through curiosity and wonder.  It’s a model that infuses STREAM integration (Science, Technology, Recreation, Arts, and Mathematics.) 

Niam Gaia fosters the creation of true social governance. One where all people are equal in self-creation and actualization.  Free of judgement and the crimes that judgement creates. In community, revisioning the past to envision a legendary future. Adults and children learn together.

There is no hierarchy of knowledge in meeting the hierarchy of needs. We all need to learn how to be in relationship with our innate nature, ancestors, all cultures, and all life because we are alive and thriving in this now moment. We are building the resilience to know how to take care of ourselves and our planet through proactive learning opportunities.

We hold our focus on what is already aligned. We collaborate to transform what isn’t – for the good of the many.  Niam Gaia is model that challenges this precious American constitutional ideal.  To live up to its ideal. To honor its dream of lasting peace. Conscious that we have yet to achieve it, but no longer allowing our lives to enrich only a few at the expense of others. 
 

The building of the community complex is done with the whole “family”. Each contributing what they already can and apprenticing together to explore how to design, construct, communicate, collaborate, plant, tend, harvest, and prosper in harmony with the laws of nature and this precious planet. 

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A learning organization of real people living real lives. Devoted to clean air, clean water, clean soil, everywhere. Aware and responsible of the impact of everyday life while growing in wonder and relating to our lives, our past, and our future, in gratitude. 
 

The Niam Gaia community “school” creates the safe spaces to engage, explore, experience, and experiment what the past has taught us while respecting the innocent brain frame of the child.  Modeling, playing, experiencing with the child.  Leading them to consciously assert, on their own terms, how life truly works. Not using force, punishment, or retraumatizing to gain control, or force someone out of a way of being.  Allowing them to experience and evolve more naturally with strong connections to the best of what our American multicultural, multidimensional, free will strives to become. A nation, a republic of the people, by the people, for the people, and the sacred land upon which life is made possible.
 

Immigrant school age children have too long been forced to become the spokespeople for their parents. Responsible parents who all too often are without the common language of their new home. Children are not meant to share the burden of responsibility for the state of their society.  Niam Gaia aims to soothe our transition into a better kind of America.  One that truly protects the weak if it is strong and delivers on the promise of liberty and justice for all. 
 

Learning to respect, honor, and allow those present before 1492 and in true community with those who have come after.  Thus, building a country of compassion, equanimity, and deep transformational learning.  Through a real school system, rather than the factory model of trickle-down economics binding too many in experiences that retraumatize and provoke violent behaviors.  As America knows peace, the world will know peace, because America symbolizes a free humanity.
 

Niam Gaia is comprised of fully credentialed teachers, administrators, researchers, and “common” folk.  The leadership team is currently three, with plans to expand to a formal board of seven, made confident by a string of award-winning accomplished schools from 2009 to date between them.