initiative! IN THIS SECTION: Like the House of Peace in our last issue, Sophia Project presents a remarkable story of commitment, caring, and deep service. Every outstanding initiative is unique but also an inspiration and a model. This is the first of three articles which will tell the Sophia Project story from several perspectives and make its lessons available to others. Next in this section we have an initiative at the early development stage. Although comparatively abstract at this point, this proposal for a food quality research network compensates with the clarity of its vision and the richness of the interactions it will foster. And following is a short report on a classic biodynamic farm, Temple-Wilton in New Hampshire, which stands at the beginning of the community-supported agriculture movement and is still innovating. 22 •
being human
Sophia Project By Carol Cole and Robert McDermott Sophia Project, a member of the Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America from 1999 to 2010, and an affiliate of the Camphill Association of North America, has served mothers and children at risk of homelessness for thirteen years. For its first eleven years it was located in the inner city of Oakland, California. For the past two years it has continued its work in San Rafael, California. At the invitation of John Beck, editor of being human, we plan to tell the story in three parts of how a wise education within a loving community has brought deep and remarkable transformations to fifty families and 140 children. The story begins and is sustained by the project’s response to the needs of these families. It is based on the conviction that insights of Rudolf Steiner and Karl Koenig show how to create a community that enables individuals—children, mothers, and coworkers—to heal, strengthen, and build necessary capacities. From the first day to the present Sophia Project has been anchored in the Waldorf approach to early childhood education specifically adapted for these children. This combination of a Camphill community and Waldorf education has realized profound results: the children and mothers had been homeless and had suffered abuse prior to joining this project; to date not one of these families has returned to homelessness, all but one of the mothers are employed and live with their children in their own apartments, and all of the children are performing successfully in school. This is the story of the transformation process by which the children and their mothers who suffered from toxic levels of stress, alienation, poverty, fear, and abuse are now well. The Sophia Project required unfailing dedication, a profound ideal of a live-in community, an equally profound approach to early childhood education and transformation, and a loyal network of donors and supporters. This is a dramatically successful story of hard work based on and within anthroposophy in response to inner city families; it can be replicated.
Vision and Approach Many friends with experience of the challenges of American inner cities advised that the kind of project the founders were envisioning could not succeed in west Oakland. Where they saw no end of trouble the founders saw protection and transformation of children and mothers.