Passionate about supporting communities to recover, reconnect & restore their relationships with kith & kin through the sharing of traditional skills, knowledge & unruly education.
Over the last 15 years Hannah-May has worked within many different communities & universities. She’s worked with the homeless, refugee & asylum, women escaping violence, rape crisis centers, gangs, food banks, recovery colleges, recovery charities, organic farms & agriculture.
Alongside this she has been commissioned for creative partnerships with The University of Stirling & Leeds Beckett University.
One of the most potent lessons she’s witnessed throughout these years is the grave consequences of a people displaced from land. The complexity of a people uprooted from place and the ways in which capitalism ravages kith & kin.
Throughout the last 15 years Hannah-May has protested, picketed, organized, co-founded housing cooperatives, rallied and volunteered as a means to support some of the most vulnerable people in Britain.
Through her own recovery she saw how land and the oppression of the human’s relationship with land was a key ingredient in both her collective & personal story. It was the absence of connection to place & the violence of displacement, both literally & symbolically that underpinned the re-production of relational dynamics that suffocated people & place.
Combining a decades worth of experience, activism & research she developed Hedge School. A school that seeks to recover, reconnect & restore our relationships with kith & kin. A school that aims to replenish cultural, environmental & personal resilience through traditional skills, plant work & unruly education.
A leading part of Hedge School’s work is to offer free, community education projects through existing community interest companies, charities & community focussed organizations. In these places we offer courses to marginalized, poor communities who wouldn’t otherwise have access to Hedge School’s offer. Hedge School is partnered with:
The Recovery & Wellbeing College is led by South West Yorkshire Partnership Trust and supported by Calderdale and Kirklees Councils. We work in partnership with volunteers and other supporting organizations to develop and run a range of workshops and courses which promote wellbeing and good mental health.
Most of what Hannah-May has learnt has come from plants, places & communities but they don’t issue certificates!
Hannah-May has a postgraduate degree in Social Purpose Education & Life-Long Learning. She’s trained with Heartwood School of Herbal Medicine as a Community Herbalist. Trained with Coop Culture as a Community & Cooperative Business Development Worker & has received scholarships with internationally acclaimed institutions: International Bateson Institute, Future Thinkers Project & Sociocracy For All.
She's trained with renowned Artist & Founding Director of Wild Pigment Project Tilke Elkins. The internationally acclaimed forager & writer Robin Hartford. She is currently undertaking an apprenticeship in the stories & ballads of Master Storyteller & Traveler Duncan Williamson with his widower, author & ballad scholar Dr Linda Williamson.
Other people Hannah-May has studied with are:
- Forager & author - Robin Harford
- Elder, Author & Master Storyteller David Campbell
- Internationally acclaimed author Kerri Ni Dochartaigh.
She is a member of the Society for Ethnobotanists, the Association of Foragers, & Pigments Revealed International.
Hannah-May feels most at home in the wild moors & woods of Yorkshire or the rugged coast of West Ireland: the land of her ancestors. There you’ll find her, likely with a pocket full of oak galls, curious about the plants and creatures she shares this earth with.
At Hedge School we acknowledge that connection to place & the health of the earth is interconnected with the health of all our kin, the freedom of people & the composting of extractive systems. We are deeply committed to the work of recovering, reconnecting & restoring traditional skills and knowledge as a means of challenging systems of oppression & practicing a new, emergent culture, one of nurture, respect & reciprocity. Hedge School is an ally to marginalized poor communities, we are an ally to plants & all the other beings we share this planet with. We are an ally to all those who still suffer.