As a result, mutual aid societies, neighborhood affinity groups, formal and informal place-based community networks, and local businesses and agencies have built trusted webs that provide services supporting families and buffering against climate-related disruptions. They coordinate across multiple social services, including food, housing, education and health. This new, community-driven localism has enabled many robust education liberation commons to grow within and across structures, creating alternatives to, and sometimes replacing, traditional public education systems. Non-commercial social media platforms that are locally governed and managed provide a safe, robust infrastructure for this work.

A local region’s education liberation commons is a cooperative web of community agencies, services, learning resources, tutors, community elders and volunteers. These contributors help build vibrant learning environments and experiences, promote critical consciousness and encourage social action among those who have for decades been underserved and marginalized by traditional educational institutions. Experts, mentors and learning guides come from the neighborhoods, regions and social networks that comprise the education liberation commons. These individuals know their learners deeply and vice versa. For example, the West Valley Rural Education and Liberation (REAL) Commons used its local and global 4-H network to create a dynamic liberatory education environment focused on climate justice and food security. Over the years, more and more independent schools, home school networks, youth development organizations, museums, libraries, parks and science and technology centers have aligned with the education liberation commons in their regions to further their respective missions related to human dignity and flourishing. These organizations and networks contribute resources and direct learners to the commons.

Education liberation commons emerged to address in flexible ways the unmet and changing needs of multiple affinity groups and diverse place-based communities and to make sure that each child was known, loved and attended to with the care, respect and dignity that they deserve. Some families rely on them for all their learning needs, while others use them to make up for what the traditional public education system lacks. Generally, caregivers turn to their region’s education liberation commons to find experiences and connections that provide their children with emotional and psychological safety, support for developing authentic identity and love to drive their curiosity and talents.

Many education liberation commons grew their networks by leveraging existing open education resource platforms that provided shared curriculum and content. With oversight from families and educators, they added applications, such as digital ledgers and recommendation engines, to create alternative ways of managing, sharing and protecting the privacy of educational data, resources and financial transactions. For example, smart contracts help catalog learning experiences and credentials. Augmented and virtual reality applications help connect geographically remote learners to rich media resources, as well as tutors, disciplinary specialists, practitioners and mentors. An education liberation commons’ interconnected social network also build bridges with non-profits and benefit corporations to raise funds to pay for learning experiences and educators, as well as to help credential learning. However, the alternative credentialing system often competes with the authority held by traditional, public school districts, confusing parents, postsecondary institutions and employers who still see a high school diploma as being standard.

Despite this residual authority, public education systems are passively coasting and maintaining the status quo. They continue to focus on academics using traditional, 20^th-century curricular standards and pedagogies. While some schools have implemented project-based learning or personalized, competency-based learning, states and districts remain heavily divided on the extent to which curricula are culturally responsive and school cultures are anti-racist. Schools are more equitable than in the past, but they are not liberatory. Many states continue to dismiss acknowledgement of systemic racism as a political talking point. In other states, whitewashed versions of African-American history and “culturally relevant” pedagogies are taught. Many public schools are simply not willing to devote the time and energy to work through the discomfort and challenges of becoming anti-racist. In contrast, education liberation commons are inherently rooted in multiple ways of knowing, diverse forms of knowledge and culturally responsive curricula. They represent education in service to its communities.

Black, Indigenous and youth of color leaders, as well as LGBTQ+ and disabled youth, cultivate innovation in local education liberation commons and in the design of learning priorities and experiences. They help set social norms by modeling cross-cultural and racial literacies with peers and community members. For example, the West Valley REAL Commons Youth Hive designed a collaborative online forum to inform people about, and mobilize action on, issues shaping their futures, such as climate change and social justice.