Biography
A School Called HOMEDougald Hine & Anna Björkman are two deep thinkers, community innovators, life partners, and co-parents. They are the founders of A School Called HOME.
A School Called HOME
Personal Website: https://dougald.nu/
Organization Website: https://aschoolcalledhome.org/
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Anna Björkman and Dougald Hine are the founders of a school called HOME, a gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture. HOME is a school that starts from the conversations they bring together around their kitchen table.
Anna’s work as a project leader has taken her from connecting cultural foundations around Europe, to setting up children’s libraries across the Middle East and supporting grassroots women’s organisations in Israel and Palestine. You’ll find her running workshops on security and self-care for activists, or teaching methods for building meaningful projects. Right now, her day-job is as a strategist working with local government leadership in central Sweden. She is also passionate about food and her CV includes professional kitchen experience, cooking for everyone from anorexic women to kindergarten classes to weddings.
Dougald is a social thinker, writer and speaker. After an early career as a BBC journalist, he went looking for another way of telling stories, and what he learned led to the creation of a series of organisations including the Dark Mountain Project, Spacemakers and the School of Everything. He has collaborated with scientists, artists and activists, including a two-year period as leader of artistic development at Riksteatern, Sweden’s national theatre, where he brought together a year-long workshop around the role(s) of art under the shadow of climate change. His current projects include an essay series for Bella Caledonia exploring the deep context of the new climate movements, a forthcoming book with the artists Guggisberg & Baldwin, and The Great Humbling, a podcast he presents together with the futurist Ed Gillespie.Dougald and Anna met in 2011 in the middle of a Swedish forest at the Futureperfect festival. Anna was helping organise the festival and Dougald was one of the speakers. Over the years since, they have made a home together that has become a place of friendship, hospitality and intercultural encounter. From early on, they knew that they wanted to make a wider invitation and create a shared platform for their work. With a school called HOME, they are taking the first steps to making that a reality.The Homeward Bound series in spring 2020 was the first online offering from a school called HOME. A further series is coming soon.- A School Called HOME
- The Great Humbling Series with Dougald Hine and Ed Gillespie
- Notes From Underground Essay Series for Bella Caledonia
- The Dark Mountain Project
- School of Everything
- Spacemakers
- Dougald’s Essays
- Terry Patten’s website
- A New Republic of the Heart website
