Journeying Launch Event

Why we are journeying and how you can take part, with Fionn, Koan and Oscar

Because, “It is unfair that some humans have to abandon everything they love and flee their home.” Child at Little Forest. We are inviting the whole of the home education and free learning community to join us in our collective challenge to journey 7,500 km or more in solidarity with displaced people and raise money for our partner projects run by and with displaced people. Find out all about the Journeying project and how to get involved.

Fionn, Oscar and Koan are members of Little Forest learning community. They decided they want to journey in solidarity with displaced people and raise money as a gift. They are the project team for the journeying project. Fionn loves foxes, Oscar loves chickens and Koan loves wolves.

What being a refugee means to me with Saleh Abu Shamala

Saleh is the author and curator of Trace of the Tide, a storytelling and art project made by Palestinian writers, artists, and families. It helps people share stories about home, memory, and life when your home is taken away or damaged by genocide.

Many Palestinian stories are at risk of being forgotten, especially stories told by children, families, and artists living through very hard times. This project makes space for these stories to be written, drawn, recorded, and shared with the world. It is necessary because stories help people stay human, remember who they are, and feel less alone.

In this session, Saleh shares a story about what being a refugee means for him.

Saleh AbuShamala is a Palestinian cultivator, Son of the Tide, curator, writer, and cultural agrarian. His work sits at the intersection of culture under siege, unlearning practices, radical pedagogies, and vernacular forms of knowledge rooted in common lived experience rather than institutional abstraction. He is particularly interested in how human cultural expression persists, mutates, and resists under conditions of violence, exile, and systematic dehumanisation.

Stories of refugees from a friend, with Rowan Salim

Join us for a gathering of stories, shared by Rowan from Free We Grow, about refugee friends she’s met along the way from Yemen to Eritrea, Libya to Syria via the Negev desert and Sri Lanka, and across the Mediterranean Sea.

These will be personal stories and we hope you can get to know these beautiful souls and incredible journeys of bravery and hope. We’ll have treats from our countries to share and please feel free but not obliged to contribute to a shared banquet any foods that mean something to you.

Rowan Salim is director and facilitator at Free We grow, a self directed learning community in South London which she helped found in 2017. Before that, she worked within the humanitarian field in countries in South West Asia and North Africa. The stories shared will be from friendships along the way.

Jo's Story: Partnering with others on their journey with Joanna Eames

Joanna Eames is a mum, a teacher and founder of Horsham Refugee Support Group, which has been supporting refugees and asylum seekers in the area for 10 years. HRSG supports around 300 people in the locality and is run entirely by volunteers.

Sound Journey with Ratna Shah

You are warmly welcome to this session, where we will explore how sounds accompany our journeys, and what hopes, dreams, feelings, or questions they may bring. We will begin with a short guided listening journey, and afterward, there will be a chance to discover and gently explore the instruments yourselves. In this listening and noticing, we hold solidarity with all displaced people, past and present.

Ratna Shah is a London-born Indian with roots in East Africa, weaving sound, Reiki energy and seasonal ritual to invite rest, resonance and a remembering of our connection with the web of life. They are drawn to the beauty and quiet magic that unfolds through deep connection and presence with ourselves, each other, and the rest of nature.

The Crafting Table: Print patches and pendants with solidarity symbols, with MaryAnne Nguyen

Creatives, visual thinkers, activists, people who need to fiddle while they listen, join us at the crafting table for printing while you listen to the talks. All are welcome. We will be printing solidarity symbols such as the sun, tents and the refugee heart onto fabric to make patches and wooden pendants to share and wear as a touchstone to remind you of your intentions while you journey.

MaryAnne Nguyen is a Vietnamese American British artist, mother and home educator based in West Sussex. Her parents fled Vietnam and sought refuge in the US where she grew up surrounded by Christian iconography, American Television and Vietnamese Traditions.

She displayed an ability to draw fluently at an early age. But it wasn’t until university that she discovered her love of painting while working on her first landscape, en plein air (outside). The experience of such focused observation within nature was in her words “enlightening”. Nguyen then studied the figure and portraiture and found it a profoundly compelling and intimate practice. Thus establishing her artistic pursuit as a classical fine art painter. Nguyen has for the last 2 decades worked as a muralist, studio painter, scenic painter and art educator.

The Curiosity Table: Co-create symbols, meanings, and questions to journey with - with Jen Nuin Smith

To the explorers, seekers and makers of meaning, this table is the place to contemplate symbols, activate your curiosity and co-create collective enquiry.

What does home mean to you? What is a home? Have you moved home? What if you were forced to leave your home and everything that you own? Where would you go? What if it was too dangerous to journey by day, so you had to journey under the cover of darkness? How would you find and make a new home when you have little or nothing? What gives you hope?

We invite you to reflect on your experience today and enter into a collective sharing of the feelings, symbols, words, questions and meanings that arise for you. What’s important? What questions do you have? Come and draw or write them down and learn from the sharing of others. Collectively, we will create enquiries to guide our learning as we journey in solidarity with displaced people.

Jen Nuin Smith is an independent parent, home educator and Founder of Little Forest, an eco-democratic learning community for children embracing life without school. Jen is a co-creator with Freedom to Learn and volunteers at Human Scale Education. Jen works with transformative learning to create culture and community for peace, justice, balance and beauty. She loves art, nature and wild swimming.