July 2025 Amber Grant Awarded to West Village Homeschool Co-op

Video Transcript

Jama: Hi everyone, this is Jama with WomensNet and I’m excited to introduce our July, 2025 winners. Our Amber Grant winner for the month of July is Anna co-owner of West Village Homeschool Co-op. Anna, can you please tell us a little bit about West Village Homeschool co-op?

Anna: Sure. Thank you for the opportunity. I’m so excited to tell you. So West Village is a community powered homeschool co-op in the Twin Cities. Basically it is the kind of school you wish you could have gone to as a kid. It’s just amazing. We focus on providing really memorable and meaningful experiences for kiddos that they may not be able to get at their home setting if they’re homeschooled or in a traditional setting. So when we succeed at what we do, the kids just love learning and it happens really organically. So basically supporting happy lifelong learners is what we’re after, and we get to work with a lot of great little humans every week while we do this.

Jama: Wonderful. Thank you so much. What makes your business approach unique or different from other homeschooling businesses that are providing a similar service?

Anna: We’ve taken everything that families love about the different co-ops and we’ve tried to bring them into one place. So I’ll go through a few of those things. One super cool thing about us is that we’re almost entirely volunteer run. This keeps classes really affordable, and it also allows us to pay our teachers really well. I’m the director, and we have over 50 parents volunteering throughout the year helping things run. So that’s really amazing. It’s amazing how strong a community feels when everybody has a hand in making it run. And so that’s one thing. Super cool. Another thing that sets us apart is that we have a lot of opportunities for everyday people- often stay at home parents to have a creative outlet, so they get to come in and share their passions.

To be able to come in you just have to like, love something so much that you can’t not share it. And so our kiddos get to learn from really passionate teachers and sometimes even see their parent get to get into their element that maybe they haven’t done for 10 years because they’re living off of three hours of sleep from babies. You know? It’s just so cool. It’s a win-win-win, the kiddos win for sure, the people who come in win because they get to invest in themselves in that way. And then it just lifts the community a lot also. A lot of co-ops are kind of exclusive, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It can be exactly what those families need. But sometimes, like in our area, there’s a lot of religious co-ops and you have to sign a statement of faith. And if you’re not in complete alignment with the beliefs of the people of that co-op, you’re not allowed to participate in the co-op. And I’m not saying that that’s necessarily a bad thing. I think it works really well for a lot of families, but we’re serving a different purpose and we welcome all families from all backgrounds. We have a lot of religious families, a lot of non-religious families, and they all get to come together. And it’s so cool to be in a space where you can feel yourself and also safe where there’s not gonna be politics or there’s not gonna be religion that can be divisive. Instead, what really unites us and brings us together is a love of learning and a desire for our children to learn in really meaningful, kind of unique and cool ways, and also develop friendships.

So I think that that’s kind of unique in that there’s not a lot of places where you can bring like super different people together and have it be so positive and so powerful. Then probably the coolest thing I think about us is that our classes are not like checkbox learning at all or textbook learning. It’s not heavy handed, there’s not a lot of pressure. They’re hands-on, they’re fun. There’s no homework, there’s no grades. One of our teachers who does history, we call it living history because the teacher comes in costume and tells stories as the people from history and brings artifacts that are like the real things the voyagers used when they traveled. We have a teacher doing logical fallacies coming up and it’s, there’re going to be a lot of games, there’s going to be a lot of heated discussion. It’s very hands-on, super memorable. Last year a group built Rube Goldberg machines, and they had to learn collaboration, give and take and cooperation with all their classmates on how to make these simple machines. So you’re not just learning about an Archimedes, you’re not just learning about an Archimedes crew, you’re learning who Archimedes is and what. It’s all about making connections and really fostering a love of learning. Healthy meal cooking is another class coming. One other thing I’ll just share really quick, because I’m super excited about it, is we’re doing a teens program and I have not seen anything like this out there. We are getting the kids together to learn real world skills like repairing bicycles, personal finance, even construction basics. Like what are all the layers from the inside of your wall to the outset and they’re going to build it. And then we might sell it and use the funds- there’s a lot of entrepreneurship opportunities. And then we’re going to send them out into the cities and they’re going to go to a business where they’re going to learn about cybersecurity, they’re going out to a regenerative farm and learn about regenerative farming, they’re going to do some outdoor survival challenges. It’s stuff like that for 30 weeks. You can’t help but grow into a better version of yourself when you’re exposed to tons of ideas and tons of opportunities. I never went and learned about lapidary, like I didn’t even know what that word meant. It’s like rocks, just so you guys know, if you didn’t know. We are going to a rock shop where there’s a man who’s retired and has a rock shop. He’s so passionate and he cuts the rocks and the kids will get the experience. So it’s really bringing all of these things, the community, the creativity, the immersive learning into one place and providing that to the upcoming generation. That’s really what sets us apart and I think makes us really special.

Jama: Very nice. Thank you. I want to take some of those classes! 

Anna: Come on over!

Jama: So you’re doing a bunch of really cool things in terms of learning- field trips, hands-on learning, just a lot of different things. What strategies are you using to let people increasingly know about your business?

Anna: This is a tough question. When you sent it that I was thinking about, because like we are not trying to get a huge customer base necessarily. We’re just trying to get the people who are aligned with this idea of maybe learning non-traditionally and in a very immersive, holistic way. So I would say our best marketing is the kids. They leave class and they’re just buzzing about what they learned and what they did and how funny that teacher was and the project. And they want share the fun fact with their parents. So parents see the sparks and then the word just spreads. Or some of the kids will tell their friends and then they’ll tell their parents. And so we, we’ve been pretty lucky in that. It just kind of has unfolded before us. We have a few initiatives that we’ve done that I’ll share that I think could potentially be helpful for others in trying to grow their businesses. And so we’ve hosted some public events that are no membership needed, they’re open to everybody. Homeschool or not, members of our co-op or not. Everybody loves getting something for free or a good deal with some of these fun activities. So we have done weekly beach days in the summer where it’s just open. Somebody can come with their kiddos and just know that there will be people there to welcome them and hear their story. There’ll be other kids to play with. So just very lighthearted informal gatherings has been really helpful, especially for us to meet some of the families and help them get to know us.

We do these monthly field trips and those are really cool because when you have a large group, you can often negotiate deals and get things cheaper. And most of us are strapped for cash because we’re on like a single parent income trying to make ends meet. We took a group to do a high ropes course and the expense for that was like 40% cheaper than if you go by yourself. And it’s not a cheap activity, but when you come with a group, whether or not you’re a member of our co-op you’ll be able to participate in activities at an oftentimes reduced rate. So that’s pretty cool.

One of the things I think is super fun and one of my favorites is parent workshops. You don’t even have to be a parent, you can still come to the workshop. We started parent workshops last year. One of the parent workshops was a professor from the university and they talked about raising sexually healthy children in a culture and in a day and age that can be challenging with some of the with some of the internet and the social media and the comparisons. Just so many things are hard in this category. So bringing in a professor to communicate to all of us and give us some very practical hands-on stuff. That was awesome.

This coming year we have one of the moms, a plant medicine mama coming in. She’s super passionate about plant medicine and she is going to do a DIY fire cider class in the fall. Again, people from the church that’s hosting us can come, other families can come. It’s open to anybody. They can come and they can leave with their fire cider for the winter months. It’s so practical and it’s fun and it’s social. So they’ll get to do that at these parent workshops and they’ll leave healthier and they might smell like vinegar, but it’s all good!

So we do occasional emails to our subscribers. I’ve made a very strong effort to not do a lot of emails. I just was reflecting for myself when I get weekly emails from groups and businesses-I don’t even open them because they’re just always going be there if I want to look at it. But when I get the people who send out an email maybe once a month, maybe once a quarter, I click on those ones because it’s fresh, it’s new. So we really try to limit the emails that we send to our subscribers. If we need to fill a few seats we’ll post on our local homeschooling Facebook groups. Yeah. We do very minimal of that. It’s really the community connection that spreads the word the very best. And we have amazing teachers with amazing gifts that they finally get to share, so they’re even sharing what they’re doing and that spreads a word. And then just these awesome families. So it’s such a collaborative thing that makes it all possible. It’s not really one marketing strategy, it’s kind of loose, the big picture.

Jama: Great. Thank you so much for sharing. Congratulations Anna! We’re so excited about everything you’ve already been doing, and that you’re going to continue to do, especially with this additional grant funds. And so thank you so much and we appreciate you taking the time.