"All Flourishing is mutual" - Robin Wall Kimmerer

Help Me Grow My Own Family!

I have watched squishy three-month-olds become sassy college students. I have been there for first words, first steps, first friendships, the spectacular falls, and the getting back up. For years before I ever set foot in a graduate classroom, I was already deep in the work: nannying, leading outdoor adventures through the parks and green spaces of New York City, learning the particular magic of what happens when you give a child a patch of dirt and enough time to really be in it. That work lit something in me that I needed to understand more fully, so I went back to school. My Master's in Early Childhood Education gave language and research to what I had already been living. It confirmed what the mud had always told me: that children grow best outside, in wonder, in real relationship with the world around them.

So I built a school around that truth. The Nature School Cooperative is a Worker-Owned nature-based preschool I founded and continue to grow, rooted in equitable access, grounded in research, and run by the educators who teach in it. It is the professional expression of everything I have believed since I first watched a two-year-old discover a worm and treat it like the most astonishing thing on earth. It is, in its way, a love letter to children and to the outdoors, and to the idea that neither should be a luxury.

And also, since before I began taking care of other people's children, I have wanted my own child. That want has been patient, and it has waited through graduate school, through building a business, through years of working in a profession I love, that does not pay what it should. I earn $65,000 a year, and I have always lived close to the edge of what that covers. The financial stability I kept waiting for before starting a family never quite arrived, not because I wasn't working toward it, but because care work in this country is chronically undervalued, and I kept choosing it anyway.

I am now in the East Bay of San Francisco, finding new communities of queer parents, and beginning a fertility journey that perimenopause is making urgent. As a solo, queer, non-binary person, I am navigating this without a partner's income and with little to no insurance coverage. Fertility treatment typically costs $30,000 to $100k or more, covering consultations, medications, IUI or IVF procedures, sperm donor costs, and labs. My savings are already gone, spent on the first steps of this process.

I cannot do this alone, and I am asking for help.

This is not separate from the work I have always done. Every child I have watched grow, every outdoor classroom I have built, every family I have shown up for, it has all been pointing here. The care has always been the through line. Becoming a parent is the most natural extension of who I already am and what I already know how to do. I am ready, I have been ready, I just need help getting through the doors of financial barriers.

If you believe that care workers deserve care, that queer solo parents deserve community, that someone who has spent a career giving should be able to receive, this is a place to put that belief.

Every dollar goes directly toward the fertility process. Sharing this with someone who might connect with it helps just as much.

Thank you for being part of this!

— Kat