CalmFamily
CalmFamily
How it started
In 2013 I trained with Sarah Ockwell-Smith as a BabyCalm teacher, and six months later as a ToddlerCalm teacher. Along the way I had also trained as a doula, a sling consultant, an antenatal teacher, an infant massage instructor, a mindful hypnobirthing practitioner, a pregnancy, birth and baby yoga teacher and an infant feeding specialist. I was studying psychology with the Open University at the same time. In 2015 an opportunity came up to save the BabyCalm and ToddlerCalm brands from disappearing. I took it, with the support of two other teachers who have become great friends and now sit as non-executive directors of CalmFamily CIC.
What is CalmFamily?
CalmFamily is an education community. It is a rather wonderful combination of a social enterprise and a collaborative learning organisation, offering a cascade of education that sets out to change society by supporting calmer relationships with children. We are a family.
What do we do?
We take the scientific evidence of how humans develop, behave and interact, and build education and support programmes from it. Consultants, trained to a high standard, deliver those programmes to help people have empathy for one another and treat each other as equals. We describe this as enabling calmer relationships. We work as a community of professionals, providing education and support online and in local communities across the UK and internationally.
Our education programmes
The CalmFamily approach
Our approach to education is rooted in our values. The community is built on them as a foundation, which gives us solid ground for making sure we add value to society. We never think of ourselves as the experts. We are all learning, and children are our best teachers.
Our values
Evidence — we educate with the best evidence available. Equality — we balance the rights and needs of all people. Empathy — we seek to understand and hold space without judgement. Empower — we inform and support individual choices. Excellence — we keep learning and insist on quality. Ethics — we work with integrity and social justice in mind.
The Calmer Relationships concept
Collaborate for solutions
we work together with the other person towards solutions, solving problems and keeping the connection through reciprocity and repair.
Accept what is
we accept the person in front of us as they are, accept ourselves as we are in the moment, and accept the situation.
Learn and grow together
we consciously balance our goal of guiding and supporting the other person's positive development, and the long-term health of the relationship, against meeting the essential short-term needs of both.
Meet and balance needs
we take time to think and to inform our approach, we pause before we act, and we stay aware of what other people need.
Empathise always
we seek to understand deeply, and to hold space for the other person's own perspective, feelings, reactions and thought processes. If not straight away, then eventually.
Respond with compassion
we respect the other person's autonomy and boundaries, and we respond to their needs.
The business
A social enterprise
A social enterprise has two essential parts: a strategically successful commercial business that operates to make a profit, and operations and profits that exist for a social aim. CalmFamily's governing documents state plainly that we operate for social aims, and that our profits are directed towards them.
An education community
CalmFamily is a community of educators who believe education can cascade through society like ripples on water. We educate our consultants and professionals, who educate families, so that children are better served and go on to educate and raise future generations. It is our intervention in society, to create a better future for humans.
A learning organisation
This is a proven strategy for a successful, profitable and adaptable business, built on a set of principles rooted in learning. CalmFamily has adapted the original principles into our six strategic Cs: a cooperative systems approach, challenging mental constructs, collective learning, continuous personal mastery, collaborative vision, and compassion-based leadership.
Collaborative leadership
Collaboration happens at every level, with thorough peer support for individual businesses across the community. Project teams keep developing new interventions, protected within the community, for the good of society. The community gives individual voices a louder and wider platform, and makes bigger ambitions possible through teamwork.
A playful culture
We are driven by passion, simply. We do what we love here and we love what we do. We look for ways to play in order to create change, and when it stops being fun we work together as friends — reigniting the joy, or supporting each other while we rest. When a game isn't working, we change the rules, think outside the box and keep exploring, until we find a game that works and reminds us that we are just children playing together.
Ethical enterprise
Conscious consumerism through preventative boycotting, positive purchasing, purpose-focused partnerships and grassroots change. Sustainable practice through our core aim of protecting the next generation: giving back more than we take, favouring sustainable development over exponential growth, and protecting the planet through efficient use of resources, transport and energy, with risk-benefit analysis throughout.