invaluable insights gained from my family’s journey towards confident autonomy, enhancing your ability to navigate challenges and foster resilience in your own life and work.
into personalized coaching and consultation tailored to your unique needs, guided by my expertise in Self-Directed Education, Black joy, deschooling, and decoloniality.
more ease in life with my compassionate guidance and support in navigating grief and loss, integrating healing practices into your personal and professional journey.
my expertise in facilitating transformative experiences to address biases and oppression, ensuring your family or organization thrives through the co-creation of inclusive and supportive environments.
the depth of knowledge cultivated through my years of location independence and cross-cultural community care, empowering you to make informed decisions and drive meaningful change in your endeavors.
I’m a writer-gather, grieftender, and dedicated liberationist. In 2022, I started calling myself a Savorist, and it sums up the what and why of my work.
SAVORIST: One whose life experiences have led them to recognize an urgent need for them to slow down so that they can a) acknowledge harm b) detangle/deschool and c) notice or make important connections.
Savoring is about the designation of sacred space to notice and name these skills and presence these rituals. It’s a type of accelerated intimacy with our own selves.
As an unwavering advocate for personal leadership and intergenerational harmony, I draw from a decade of immersive experience in unschooling to guide individuals in forging stronger, self-directed bonds across all ages and life stages. My exploration of unschooling has deepened my understanding of the essential skills and rituals needed for nurturing consent-based relationships with oneself, others, and the inherent changes of life.
Rooted in a profound commitment to bridging generational divides, my work extends to addressing the often-neglected realm of education around grief, loss, and change. This commitment extends to addressing the echoes of our educational experiences that shape our identities and relationships, advocating for spaces where acceptance and release can flourish.
My work is a living testimony to the power of intentional, liberated learning and unlearning. Through my influential podcast, Fare of the Free Child, and my active participation in a variety of communal projects, I’ve walked with families as they/we cultivate healthier dynamics rooted in respect, consent, and learning to live with things we may not ever fully understand, change, or prefer.
All of my offerings support people in trusting towards daily lives that allow space for paying attention to each others needs, normalizing ritual, noticing our own opportunities to evolve our thinking, and contributing generously to the types of changes we want to see around us. This is a good fit for people in various stages of their lives, from 20-somethings who realize they don’t want to fall into the cycle of pretending to fit into a life design that doesn’t work for them, to recovering academics whose years teaching at the collegiate level have left them spent and unfulfilled. When people are eager to explore privilege, power, and ritual in their relationships with personal leadership and their relationships with others, that’s my jam.
Yes, you can find them all here. These courses support you in pushing back against ageism, schoolishness, unexamined power, freedom devoid of responsibility, white supremacist cultural norms, and rushing past grief and pain. Use these to embrace healthy intergenerationality, humane approaches to all relationships, and of course, being and raising free people.
I sure do. In addition to my (Feb. 2024) certification in Integrative Thanatology, …
I am a mother, partner, and liberation worker who helps people unlearn the barriers to evolving their thinking and their relationships in their homes and all the other ways they connect, work, and serve.
In July of 2016, I published the first episode of Fare of the Free Child podcast, now known among the short list of must-listen-to podcasts for anyone considering parenting and leadership from a liberation lens. The podcast focuses on Black people, Native|Indigenous people, and People of Color (People of the Global Majority) families who practice unschooling and other forms of self-directed, decolonization-minded living and learning.
In May of 2019, I joined the celebrated TEDx Speaker village with a talk I titled Raising Free People where I shared the now widely-celebrated philosophy, “We can’t keep using tools of oppression and expect to raise free people.”
In November of 2020, I released her book, Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work (PM Press) which has been heralded as “the blueprint” for the type of self-inquiry and collective liberation that will help us free our children and ourselves.
I work to challenge and encourage social justice minded people to explore privilege and power in their relationships with leadership. In addition to private coaching and public speaking, I facilitate trainings, establish and customize courses and consultations that help resolve the ways that unexamined experiences with bias and oppression disrupt families’ and organization’s capacity to sustain cultures of belonging.
I’m a founding board member of The Alliance for Self-Directed Education (ASDE) and the mother of two young adults. You can find my views on Self-Directed Education, Black joy, deschooling and decoloniality for leadership and community all over the Internet. My advocacy and organizing work has received national press including Forbes Magazine, Washington Post, National Public Radio (NPR), NBC TV, CBC Radio, and several print publications, including The New York Times.
My organization (Raising Free People Network) accepts (tax-deductible) donations for our projects aimed at normalizing the skills of Self-Directed Education through our relationships with each other, with learning, and with ourselves.
To make a donation of $500US or more, send a check with Akilah Richards in the “To” line to my friends at Geronimo Education at this address: Geronimo Education Corporation. 6100 Monroe Road, Charlotte, NC 28212
“Geronimo Education Corporation (FEIN: 46-1454935) is a 501c3 non profit Doing Business As: Agile Learning Centers. We are providing a fiscal sponsorship for projects of Raising Free People Network — a project of Akilah Richards — because it is directly aligned with our mission and vision. I can confirm all donations would be 100% tax-deductible and would be used for charitable purposes that align with our mission and vision.” – T. Parker
