"If I Can't Dance, It's Not My Revolution"

Emma Goldman never actually said it, at least not in those exact words. What she wrote, in her 1931 autobiography Living My Life, was something longer and more defiant: that a young man at a dance had pulled her aside to warn her that her joy was undignified, that it did not befit an agitator to move like that. She told him to mind his own business. She wrote that she did not believe a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal should demand the denial of life and joy. The famous slogan came later, printed on a t-shirt in 1973, a compression of that whole defiant paragraph into something you could wear.

We think about that often. About what gets compressed, what gets lost, and what the original felt like before it became a bumper sticker. We think about it when we watch a three-year-old crouch at the edge of Cherry Creek with absolute concentration, wholly absorbed in whatever is moving under a rock. We think about it when we sit in a circle with educators who are also decision-makers, hashing out something hard together, staying in it. We think about it when a family tells us they didn't think a place like this was for them, and then they showed up, and it was.

This is our attempt to explain how we got here, and why it is built the way it is.

Start With the Water

The Cherry Creek, and Hentzell Park, is public land. It runs through Denver and belongs, technically and literally, to everyone who lives here. We chose it as our classroom not because it was convenient, but because that belonging matters to us, philosophically and practically.

There is a growing body of research on what time in nature does for young children, and the findings are consistent enough to be considered settled science at this point. Studies show that preschoolers who play outdoors for more than three hours a day show meaningful advantages in early learning skills, self-regulation, social-emotional development, and general flourishing. A systematic review published in Frontiers in Psychology found that children who played in nature-based environments showed more cooperative behavior, more pro-social interaction, and more sustained focus than their peers in conventional settings, and notably, children who were considered "underachievers" in indoor settings often stopped underachieving when they got outside. Research also links early nature experiences to adult environmentalism, to ecological literacy, to the kind of long-term care for living systems that, frankly, the world is going to need from this generation of children.

So the question isn't really whether being outside is good for kids. The question is who gets to be there. Environmental justice research is clear that access to green space, outdoor programming, and nature-based education maps closely onto income and race. The families with the most access to quality outdoor experiences are, with depressing regularity, the families who need the least additional support. This is not an accident of geography. It is the downstream consequence of how resources get distributed, and have been distributed for a long time, in this country.

Public land is one of the few spaces where that logic breaks down. A creek belongs to everyone. We wanted to teach in a classroom that reflects that.

Now Pull Back a Little Further

Here is something worth sitting with: the top 1% of Americans now hold more wealth than the entire bottom 90% combined. Market concentration has reached levels not seen in half a century. The gains of the last several decades have flowed, with remarkable consistency, toward the people who already had the most, and away from the institutions, communities, and public goods that most people actually depend on.

We raise this not to deliver a lecture, but because we think the connection is worth naming directly. The dominant model for how institutions get built, and who ultimately benefits from them, is extractive by design. Value flows upward, toward owners and investors and shareholders. The people doing the work and the communities receiving it are downstream of those decisions, consulted occasionally, accommodated when convenient, but rarely the ones holding the wheel.

That model produces a specific kind of childcare landscape, one where quality outdoor education is priced as a premium, where educators are compensated poorly because the margin has to go somewhere else, and where the families who would benefit most from access are the ones least likely to have it.

We looked at that landscape and asked a genuine question: what would it look like to build from the other direction?

What a Cooperative Actually Is

Most people have a vague positive feeling about worker cooperatives and have never encountered one in practice. So let's be specific.

Nature School Cooperative is structured as both a worker-owned cooperative and a Public Benefit Company, which are legal structures that carry real obligations, not just aspirational language. The Public Benefit designation means we are legally required to consider community benefit alongside financial return. The cooperative structure means that the educators who work here have the option of becoming worker-owners, with a genuine stake in how the school operates, and that decisions get made through a process that keeps power lateral rather than pyramidal.

Cooperative membership is voluntary. Not everyone who works here is a co-op member, and that is by design. But the cooperative structure shapes the culture of decision-making, the accountability, and the relationship between the people doing the work and the institution they are building. It means that the school's success and the wellbeing of the people who teach here are not competing priorities. They are the same priority.

The Democracy at Work Institute has documented consistently that worker-owned businesses pay higher wages, offer more stable employment, and survive economic downturns better than conventionally structured businesses. The Mondragon cooperative network in the Basque Country, arguably the most studied example in the world, redeployed workers internally during the 2008 financial crisis rather than laying them off, because the structure itself is a form of collective resilience that shareholder models simply are not built to provide.

We are a small school on a public creek, not a multinational network. But the principle that a different architecture produces different outcomes holds at every scale.

On Solidarity, and Why It's Not the Same Thing as Charity

There is a distinction here that we care about enough to explain carefully, because it shapes everything about how our Pay-What-You-Can model is designed.

Charity operates vertically. Someone with more decides what to give, and to whom, and under what conditions. The giver holds the power. The recipient is, structurally, a beneficiary. The underlying conditions that created the gap between them are not part of the transaction.

Solidarity operates differently. It starts from the premise that the conditions affecting your neighbor's life are connected to the conditions affecting yours, that what erodes one person's ability to thrive tends to erode everyone's, and that the most durable response is to build structures where that is acknowledged and acted on together.

Our Pay-What-You-Can model is not a scholarship program with a gentler name. It is a

mechanism for distributing access based on community participation rather than individual qualification. Families contribute what they genuinely can. People who can contribute more do, and that capacity extends access to people who cannot. No one is adjudicated as deserving. Everyone is a participant in something held in common. The power relationship stays horizontal.

Since we began, this model has offset nearly $50,000 in tuition for families in our community, while maintaining a 1:6 teacher-to-child ratio throughout. We are transparent about what it takes to sustain this: educators need to be paid fairly, and that requires ongoing community support. If you have the capacity to contribute more than your own participation requires, that is not charity. It is the mechanism itself, and it is how access gets created.

Our full impact report is coming soon, and will give a much more detailed picture of where the resources go and what they make possible.

The Architecture We Are Dreaming Into Being

Our stated goal is to become a fully tuition-free outdoor nature-based school. We are not there yet.

But we are operating now, each season, according to values we chose not to defer until the funding was perfect. We hold Nature Nurture Days and Community Caretaking Days on the creek, where families, educators, and neighbors show up together to steward the land we share. We hold listening sessions where the hard things get figured out in the open. We partner with Denver Parks and Recreation, MetroDNA, and other partners not as a grant strategy, but because being genuinely embedded in community is what keeps this work grounded.

Every season, the community gets a little larger. The model gets a little more proven. The possibility gets more real. And now we're in the process of pursuing our state licensure, which we hope will support family access to UPK funding, making our program even more accessible.

Goldman's original words, the long version before they got put on a t-shirt, were about refusing to let a movement become a cloister. About insisting that the ideal include joy, that it not require the denial of life to be worth pursuing. We think about that in the context of what we are building: a school that is also a community, a cooperative that is also a public benefit, a Pay-What-You-Can model that is also a form of mutual care, a classroom that is a creek and a cottonwood grove and a patch of winter prairie and a place where children are learning, right now, what it feels like to belong somewhere.

That is worth being part of. We would love for you to be in it.

Explore our programs for children ages 3 to 6. Read about our values. Find out how to get involved. Our impact report is coming soon.

Or call us at 720-802-2667 and talk to a cop-member directly!

Nature School Cooperative is a worker-owned, Black, women, and queer-led outdoor nature-based preschool serving children ages 3 to 6 in Denver, Colorado. We operate on the public lands of the Cherry Creek Watershed. natureschoolcooperative.org