About us

Hi, my name is Sara. I have a 17yr old daughter and a 8yr old son. Since homeschooling/unschooling my daughter for about 5 years now and moving to the Austin area from Seattle, we have struggled to find our rhythm that finds her a group of close friends and gets her out of the house several times a week while I work on my career. We have met some amazing people and attended some wonderful events, but we have found we need more consistency and higher frequency of seeing friends, especially being in the social teen years, while also saving searching and planning time for events. After realizing the benefits that come from co-working adult communities, I decided to model this for teen homeschoolers/unschoolers. This serves the homeschool gap of having a place to go on a daily basis, learn around peers, make friends, and be part of a consistent community. Public school kids have this, and so can homeschoolers/unschoolers too!

I can’t tell you how many times my teen daughter and I have gone through talks, tears, and trials of different strategies to make her friends since starting homeschooling in the 7th grade. In public school, she easily made friends and had hangouts, outings, sleepovers, and a typical circle of friends that involved all the social fun and drama that comes with that. And then after homeschooling and moving away, nothing. It felt like it took a marathon in the homeschool world to find her one close friend that lived almost 45 minutes away. We looked at and tried attending just about every alternative school, homeschool group, unschool group, and teen co-op in the Austin area. I swear we’ve tried it all.

So….she started back at public school 2 years ago, in hopes of finally making some close friends. She was committed and excited. But, we quickly remembered why we left public school in the first place - the long hours, unrealistic demands, imbalance of work/life, inefficient teaching methods, and her rapid decline of loving to learn. She wanted to withdraw and I pushed back, I didn’t see any other way for her to make friends. I worked with the school upside and down to make it work, but with Covid in place and the typical standards of school, it made it almost impossible. So the question became, how can she follow the learning methods that work best for her, yet go somewhere everyday and make close friends? Public school kids have this, but homeschool kids simply do not. We love the family aspect of homeschooling and all the amazing benefits that come from that for the parent and the child, but in the teen years, there is even more of a need for stimulation and socialization, which is very challenging to fulfill. As I started searching for co-working facilities for my career, it hit me one day, what if homeschool teens had a place like this? Where they can work on whatever they want to work on to advance themselves, while getting out of the house to be more productive, meet other people, network, and make friends, just like adults do. This is the real world where teens will be headed soon anyway! And it could serve as a transition into that world. Maybe…just maybe…THIS is the answer to our question. Since floating the idea to others in the homeschool world, it has been overwhelmingly positive, and they are pulling us to carry through, to help their teen. That’s a good sign, we might be onto something. And so, here we go…

UPDATE (8/2022): We have decided to drop the co-working space at this time, and focus solely on social-emotional development for teens. Although the co-working space worked beautifully and teens truly enjoyed it, it is not for everyone and the teens found more benefit from our gathering time, focus on bonding, and social-emotional growth activities. It also lines up with my background so I can deliver one thing whole-heartedly! And with recent research, social-emotional development truly is at the heart of all success in life.

Here is a little more about me - I am currently licensed as an LMFT Associate (Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Associate) in Texas and recently started working at a group practice, and also starting a private practice in Austin, treating adults, couples, and families with teens, on days I’m not running TeenTurf. I was also an LMFTA in Washington and had a private practice for 6 years working with adults and couples on a wide range of issues. I founded and ran an online mental health therapist matching referral service out of Seattle, called CareNook, LLC. I also founded a non-profit Sunday Assembly chapter in Olympia, WA which is still going strong bringing together athiests/agnostics/all religious beliefs to focus on common human values we all share. I hold a Master of Arts in Psychology from Brandman University-Chapman University System and a Bachelor of Social Work from Texas State University. I've worked as a social worker in a school and hospital setting. In my earlier years - I was a substitute teacher for middle/high school classrooms; I was the director of an overnight week-long high school summer camp, a summer-long adult leader, and a camp counselor many times for varying ages at an outdoor camp, Slumber Falls in New Braunfels, Texas. I love working with teens and believe that when we allow them to be themselves and bring their ideas and beliefs to the table in an open way, they flourish and the world benefits.

This is a photo of us after Isabelle’s gymnastics meet, as you can see, we have become a total mix of Seattle and Texas :-) We are excited to meet you and your family, find things we have in common, and learn from the things that are different.