Help Candace Earn Waldorf Education Certification

***Update***

Thanks to your prayers and generous donations I have paid my tuition in full and I am scheduled to graduate on March 15, 2024.

I have set up another Gofund me to help me get out of debt and hopefully set me free on the path of learning and teaching.

Greetings of Peace, As salaam alaikum!

My name is Candace LeBlanc. I am a divorced mother of four amazing and delightful children, three of whom attend the Waldorf school here in Ottawa, where we currently live.

I am a self-employed birth and postpartum doula and breastfeeding coach and I volunteer regularly with La Leche League, a nonprofit organization that organizes advocacy, education, and training related to breastfeeding.

All of the work I do is centered around my passion to fulfill a need to establish higher standards of care to help women, who (like myself) have experienced suffering due to our materialistic society’s version of what they think “successful” pregnancy and motherhood should look like.

When I was pregnant with my first child I expected to give birth in a hospital with an epidural, formula-feed her, and continue my degree in Public Administration at Unitversity of Ottawa, while my daughter went to a daycare—fitting into the image of what I perceived at that time as the first-world motherhood experience. "Surely, here in Canada they had it all figured out", I thought. On my first trip to the obstetrician, I had a few questions about pregnancy and I was stunned that she simply did not have time to answer them. “There must be something more,” I said to myself, leaving the doctor's office, bewildered at her curt dismissal of my questions. I decided to seek alternative care, and I asked around, and eventually ended up at a birthing conference where I learned about midwifery. A local midwife agreed to take me on as her client as a result of my incessant questioning during the Q&A session. “I loved your spunk” she later told me when I asked her why she took me on when she was not accepting clients at the time. As I experienced the stark difference of an informed-consent approach and learned more deeply about the spiritual changes taking place as my belly grew, my curiosity could not be quenched. My midwife patiently answered my hundreds of questions and I devoured all the books she recommended. “Why don’t you have your baby at home?” she asked me one day. The thought had never occurred to me, no one I knew in a first-world country had babies at home, but as I learned about the cascading effects of birthing interventions, I knew it was meant to be.

I soon gave birth to my daughter, at home with her father present to catch her and nothing was ever the same. I tried to continue my undergraduate degree, and I found myself crying in the university bathroom trying to pump breast milk as my daughter screamed outside in the car where her father tried, in vain, to console her. “There must be something more!” I thought—more supportive of my relationship with my baby, more supportive of me growing into my motherhood.

My empowering birth experience led me to question my attitude toward breastfeeding. I soon found myself in La Leche League meetings, meeting other mothers, and as I gained confidence and skill in my breastfeeding journey my confidence in motherhood blossomed. I decided to postpone my studies and stay home with my daughter. I read many books on alternative views on child development and soon found myself leaning towards homeschooling. “There must be something more,” I thought again, more than regular kindergarten, more than a public school experience, and I soon discovered Waldorf education.

The challenges I've faced have made me more passionate about honoring motherhood and protecting the sacredness of childhood. This passion has led me to intentionally seek ways to work closely with mothers and their children, exploring ways to connect more deeply through breastfeeding, birth, and cultivating resilience to meet the many challenges of the early childhood years.

I work with mothers to approach mothering through a lens of consciousness and freedom, to do the work of motherhood by tapping into what feels right inside them, rather than from a place of fear or martyrdom. I evaluate the social, economic, and cultural environment they are in, question their influences and popular understandings, and coach them to draw from the strengths and wisdom of their own cultures and experiences to craft creative solutions to modern problems. Children are children across time and space, and what they need, essentially, does not change, it is our job to “come home” to consciousness and empowerment and raise the next generation from that place.

Now that I stand at the threshold of being a Waldorf Early Childhood Educator, I look forward to delving deeply into the world of pedagogy through in-person experience in the classroom and acquiring theoretical knowledge. I believe that Waldorf education embodies the principles of freedom of the individual child by providing the tools by which the adults in the child's life can support and protect him or her while providing what she or he needs to grow up to be a healthy, balanced, moral person.

Once I complete my certification I hope to continue to work closely with children, parents, and caregivers to enable them to engage more deeply with children and themselves, to preserve and awaken a child’s full range of faculties whether at home or in school/daycare.

I want to use the tools of Waldorf education, combined with my knowledge of various cultural and religious backgrounds to better understand how to best support the child’s three-fold development and to make this knowledge accessible for parents and caregivers from within the child’s environment. In essence, to spread the gifts of Waldorf Education beyond the classroom and the school.

I further intend to facilitate workshops about the importance of play and experiencing things actively using those living experiences to develop the feelings of the child and finally the intellect. I bring my whole dynamic self to the service of children and it is an honor to serve them.

This campaign will help pay my remaining fee for this school year as well as cover the cost for the next school year as shown below. The amounts shown are in Canadian dollars.

YEAR 1 - 2022-23:

YEAR 2 - 2023-24: 9000

Thank you in advance for your support. May God Almighty reward you tremendously.