Hola a todes!

Roots y Ramas is about to start a third year of fun, play, magic, and community love. This second year has been personally hard and challenging: one of us lost her dad, and the other two of us have also been taking care of our parents' health. We were not able to invest all the time and energy that we usually would have, into promoting our beautiful school, even though we ended up raising around $800 for our school fundraiser this past April thanks to our beautiful current families.

That said, we want to reach out to the broader communities: We love what we do and we are committed to make our school grow and spread our values through our mission which is to provide a joyful and loving experience of kinship with one another and all of Nature's creatures, deepening awareness about one’s self, dismantling biases, and instilling a sense of belonging and responsibility for our community and empathy for all communities on Earth.

To give you a little taste of who we are and what we do: our mornings always start under the redwoods with a circle of songs to greet the forest and creatures, with games to deepen our presence, followed by playtime with nature exploration, hands-on projects like making bird feeders or peeling vegetables for friendship soup. Our crew of teachers: Rocio, Amalia, Sara, Darci and Eva cultivate a culture of kindness, acknowledgment, celebration and belonging for all children that manifests into them helping and encouraging one another, caring for the creatures and people (like park rangers, hikers) they encounter in the forest. It’s all quite magical! We also center our curriculum around the families that are part of our school honoring and celebrating who each family is, where they come from and how we can support their values.

We are also organized, communicative, and true to our bi-lingual mission, Spanish is spoken throughout the day and on Wednesdays we offer an immersive afternoon of only Spanish language fun. We make big efforts to build community with seasonal celebrations, full moon walks, weekend playdates, morning tea offerings, parent sharing circles, and even a campout for all the community.

We would love to continue to grow into 2 classes, but aren’t fully enrolled yet, that’s why we want to use this opportunity to spread the word of our school as well as raise some more money to continue to give financial aid to our families (we have already given scholarships to the 25% of the families for next year), but also pay the Shummi Land Tax to the Ohlone people of this land to begin to repair the relationship with them and appreciate all the continuous work they do, and also raise our teacher hourly rate to $35/hour. Our school is run cooperatively and we are hoping to be able to continue to do what we love while meeting our needs for food, housing, and transportation without stress, have regular access to health care benefits, and have some ability to afford an annual vacation, eat out occasionally, buy new or used things and contribute to oppressed communities/causes when we feel called to.

If you have the bandwidth to support us please make a donation, we’ll dedicate the month of June to spread our word and collect some funds. Last year we were able to collect a bit more than $4000, so this year we are hoping to make a little more so anything will be very welcome, AND if you SPREAD the WORD to any families with children between 2 to 5 years old, we would super appreciate it!!

Miles de gracias desde todo el equipo!

Thousands of thank you from all our team! :)