About Us
Nature-based programs, consent-centered pedagogy, and community care for children and their families in Greater New Haven
Explore our circles
How to join
We are called to be brave
WELCOME
BNC is an outdoor learning commons in New Haven, CT, rooted in consent, care, and interdependence.
We've been gathering at Edgerton Park since 2023 with families who believe children already know how to lead.
We're practicing that belief together, outside, year-round.
BNC is an outdoor learning commons in New Haven, CT, rooted in consent, care, and interdependence. We've been gathering at Edgerton Park since 2023 with families who believe children already know how to lead.
We're practicing that belief together, outside, year-round.
Nature is a teacher.
Cultures around the world believe that nature already holds the answer to its own resilience. We ask: what does it look like to let nature teach? To pay attention. To share space with other lifeforms. To learn what living well together actually means.
Learning is relational.
At BNC, learning isn't something adults deliver to children. It emerges from trust—between children and caregivers, between generations, between people and the land they're on. When those relationships are authentic and stoke belonging, learning is inevitable.
Liberation in practice.
We dream of a world where children are free from systems that control, rank, and diminish. We believe that world is built now, in the small daily choices of how we treat children, how we treat each other, and how we tend the land we share.
Our adult circles and the children's circles are part of the same project: a community practicing liberation, together, across generations.
Knowledge is co-created.
Knowledge isn't given or received. It's actively exchanged as playworkers, families, and our living environment come together. Children are protagonists in their own learning journeys. No two circles are ever alike because every cohort, every season, every child is distinct.
Our Philosophy
Children are rights-holders with the right to be heard, make independent choices, and to their bodily autonomy. We take that seriously in a world that often doesn't.
At BNS, children aren't managed into compliance. They move freely, follow their curiosities, and learn to trust themselves.
Consent-Based Learning
Anti-Bias Community
Every child belongs here.
We actively work to identify and oppose bias rooted in racism, homophobia, ableism, and other forms of harm.
We know from ecology that diverse communities generate more resources (not fewer). Everyone's presence here makes our community richer.
Year-Round, All Weather
We gather in every season, in almost all weather. Some of the coldest, wettest days turn out to be the most joyful. Research shows regular time outdoors reduces stress and supports children's social-emotional development.
We'll walk you through everything you need before your first day.
- Relational consent over compliance
- Self-trust over performance
- Unlearning our biases
- Honoring our many traditions
and cultural backgrounds - Trusting children to lead
Rooted in relationship with
one another and the land.
Our Community Agreement
Brave Nature Collaborative · New Haven, CT
Relational consent over compliance. Self-trust over performance. We unlearn our biases, honor our many traditions, trust children to lead, and each other to listen.
Rooted in relationship with one another and the land.
Meet our Team
The People
THEY/them · Lead NESTS PLAYWORKER
Bee is a playworker and early childhood educator with a passion for literature and storytelling that began young—outside collecting rocks or nose-deep in a book.
That early love led them to wonder about storytellers and which stories have a place in formal education.
Children's literature, songs and poems in particular have a unique ability to tell complex stories with few to no words. This interest inspired Bee to study early childhood education at Westfield State University and research children's literature—learning about stories that hold a child's interest and the stories most represented in schools.
Those questions, among others, led them to divert from their path of becoming a public school teacher and look for a place where more diverse stories are honored.
Since the start of the pandemic, Bee has devoted much of their heart to promoting community health both physical and mental, through reading stories to children and listening to peoples' stories about their struggles through our ever-changing world.
At BNC, Bee tends to the Nests cohorts, designing seasonal invitations and relational rhythms where community is nurtured in nature and diverse stories take root and grow.
Bee was born and raised on unceded Agawam and Nipmuc Land (Middlesex County, Massachusetts). They now live on unceded Mohegan Land in Central Connecticut.
Bee
SHE/THEY · lead storyteller
Dempsey is an anthropologist, multi-media storyteller, harpist, and mamá of two. At BNC, Dempsey authors the BNC's reflective communications—including our Substack, which functions as a relational field journal for caregivers and educators, that attunes to place, sensory attention, and ways of being-with.
Dempsey received her BS in Anthropology & Geography from California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo and her MA in Applied Anthropology from San Diego State University where she led courses in documentation and field methods.
With over 10 years of embedded community research about early childhood, including work with the Centers for Research on Creativity (CROC), and UCSD Institute for Neural Computation, Dempsey specializes in making sense of how children, adults, and the living systems we are part of actually learn together; then building the narrative and visual infrastructure that lets those practices take root and thrive.
Dempsey is from Chula Vista, California, where their family moved in migrational rhythms between California and Baja Sur for generations prior to border enforcement. Chula Vista is nourished, healed, and protected by the Kumeyaay people to the present day.
Dempsey
SHE/THEY · Founder & Director
Kimberly
Kimberly Birch Gill is a practitioner of critical environmental education, social engagement artist, and mama.
She brings over 20 years guiding children and their communities to co-create participatory research and liberatory learning commons, including with the United Nations, Sustainability Education Policy Network, and various grassroots organizations.
Rooted in the relational practice of old growth forests, where knowledge moves through mycorrhizal networks, symbiotic exchange, and the slow intelligence of place, Kimberly specializes in weaving knowledge systems to support collaboration between humans and the more-than-human world towards children's and planetary liberation.
Kimberly received her BS in Economics and BA in Sociology from Westmont College, BFA from Pratt Institute and MEd under a First Nations faculty at University of Saskatchewan.
They were born and raised on unceded Poquonooks, Wangunks, and Tunxis Land also known as Hartford County, CT.
Book a 1-1 with Kimberly
Join our team
Interested in playwork at Brave Nature Collaborative
We're building a team of people who believe children already know how to lead
and want to practice listening, following seasonal rhythms, and learning alongside families in all weather.
Current open roles