A Changemaker in the area of strengthening relationships

Rachel Bee (not, to be clear, one of the people in the image above) specialises in helping people to build stronger relationships with others, guiding them so they can co-exist in harmony with family, friends, colleagues and others with whom they need to forge a strong and deep connection. She works, for example, with parents, teachers, young children and teenagers. Rachel is an excellent example of what I refer to as a Changemaker, someone who is actively involved in working at the cutting edge of children’s learning and development, someone whose aims, interests and values resonate with those of Life-Based Learning.

Rachel uses her skills and experience to help others find clarity, happiness and success by giving them a voice and encouraging them to be heard. Key to Rachel’s approach is ‘co-creation’, defined by Rachel on her website as “a form of collaborative innovation: ideas are shared and improved together, rather than kept to oneself.”

You can find a link to Rachel’s website and details of how to contact her at the end of this blog.

Andrew Ketteringham, the chair of trustees of the charity Relate, summed up the importance of strong, lasting relationships in the foreword to Relate’s document What’s love got to do with it? 14 ideas for putting relationships at the heart of policy.

Relationships matter. Good quality relationships with partners, families, friends and wider social networks provide meaning to our lives and are central to our identity. But they also hold the keys to our health and wellbeing; to our ability to engage in and progress in education and at work, to our long-term life chances and to instilling resilience in individuals. They are also the cornerstone of a thriving economy and society.

Andrew Ketteringham, Chair of Trustees, Relate — from the foreword to a Relate publication

Relationships start with the family, with the bond that parents build with their children, who then do the same with their own children in turn. These same relationship-building skills spill out into the wider community, and — over time — our ability to interactive positively with others works to the benefit of society as a whole, cutting across all religious, ethnic and social boundaries.

That is why Relationships is one of nine Life-Based Learning themes. It focuses on pre-teenage children learning how to form fulfilling, empathetic and lasting relationships based on dignity and respect. Children need to be learning about the basic building blocks of healthy relationships — awareness of body language and other non-verbal forms of communication; understanding the potential impact of the words we utter and the way we say them; the universal moral imperative to treat others fairly — in their formative years when they are most open to learning.

LBL is an approach to education in which the life purposes attached to children’s learning make life the focus of that learning. The LBL approach ensures that every individual has the opportunity to know and look after themselves better; that individuals forge better and long-lasting connections with others; and that people as a whole live in greater harmony with the living world that is Planet Earth.

Get in touch with Rachel

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Image at the head of this article by Brad Dorsey from Pixabay.