Note: We are currently enrolling for immediate spots and for folks wanting to join for the 2024/2025 “school year.”

We’re also hiring for learning facilitators. Check out our current openings here.

Without Walls (WoW) is an outdoor self-directed learning community run by families and a handful of facilitators who are deeply committed to co-creating spaces to thrive. We gather on the unceded lands of Lisjan Ohlone in Richmond, CA and go on weekly field trips throughout the Bay Area. Check out these photos from just 3 months (Spring 2023) to get a sense of what it’s like to be at WoW.

We strive to be a part of a revolution in education–a learning space that is non-coercive and anti-oppressive while centering agency, joy, and collective liberation. We trust all to lead their own learning with the support of a loving community. We make space to explore and grow with the freedom to be our whole selves, while deeply valuing social and racial justice. Read more about our core values.

Learners play, explore, inquire, and create while developing valuable life skills: problem-solving, individual and collective decision-making, conflict resolution, social-emotional wellness. 

We practice Self-Directed Education and many of our families are on an “unschooling” journey–defined by Akilah S. Richards as “a child-trusting, anti-oppression, liberatory, love-centered approach to parenting and caregiving.”

Originally founded as a small pod of families seeking an alternative to traditional schooling during the start of the 2020 COVID wave of virtual learning, WoW has expanded into a youth-centered learning cooperative committed to fostering thriving and free young people.

We learn and play outdoors, in all weather. We practice place-based learning within a community–nurturing respectful relationships with each other, the earth, and our wider communities. 

We value the learning that comes from playing in mixed-age settings. Our community welcomes youth ages 5-18 and currently includes ages 5-11.