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Wendy Priesnitz is a book author, award winning journalist, editor, former broadcaster and mother of two adult daughters. She is the owner of Life Media, which she co-founded with her husband Rolf in 1976 as The Alternate Press to publish books and Natural Life magazine. Wendy is an agent of change who, when she was barely out of her teens, recognized the need for rethinking how we work, play and educate ourselves in order to restore the planet’s social and ecological balance. For the last forty years, her mission has been to help people understand the interconnections within the web of life on Earth and to encourage them to challenge the assumptions inherent in the often conflicting choices we make in our daily lives. In her quest to inspire, support and live grassroots change, she has been at the leading edge of (and ahead of it, in some cases) many progressive trends and movements. She is recognized as a pioneer in independent publishing, unschooling, environmentally sustainable business practices, home-based and women-owned business, and green politics. Her work is rooted in her experience of motherhood, which taught her about the emotional, social, cultural, economic, educational and environmental responsibilities involved with bringing a child into this world. Trained as a school teacher in 1969, Wendy quickly rejected the factory model of processing children and became an early proponent of experience-based, self-directed learning. She founded The Canadian Alliance of Home Schoolers in 1979 as a national support and advocacy organization that kick-started the homeschooling movement in Canada, cooperating with John Holt as he breathed life into a parallel movement in America. In 1987, Wendy wrote School Free – The Homeschooling Handbook, which is now in its fifth edition and has become a best selling classic around the world. Her more recent book on the subject, Challenging Assumptions in Education (2000), is a controversial look at what’s wrong with public education and at the hows and whys of deschooling society. It is on the reading list for college education programs internationally and was updated and reissued in 2008. In 2002, as a way of encouraging and supporting families to trust their children to learn without being taught, she founded Life Learning magazine. She also edited the book Life Learning: Lessons from the Educational Frontier , a collection of essays from Life Learning magazine, which was published in late 2008. Under her co-leadership, Natural Life Magazine continues to help its readers to integrate life learning and natural parenting, green living, sustainable housing, socially and environmentally responsible self-employment, organic gardening and natural healing into an ecologically responsible lifestyle. That work led to her being recruited to a successful run at the leadership of the Green Party of Canada in 1996. Her work in politics and journalism has given Wendy an understanding of the environmental and social dangers inherent in the globalized corporate mindset and of the transformative power of local small business. In the mid 1980s, she began to help life learning families create home-based businesses – as she and Rolf had done a decade earlier in order to unschool their own daughters. So she founded The Home Business Network, a source of advocacy, information and support for home-based businesses, taught women to start home businesses, hosted a small business television show, and wrote a weekly small business newspaper column for a decade. Her book Bringing it Home – A Home Business Start-Up Guide for You and Your Family was published in 1996 and is still helping people balance work and family life. One of the hallmarks of Wendy’s life and work is her belief in cooperation over competition and she has served on the boards of countless non-profit organizations. In recent years, in an attempt to slow down, simplify her life, and make more room for writing, she has lessened her level of participation in that regard. However, she remains a member of the Advisory Board for Holistic Mom's Network. A prolific writer, Wendy has contributed essays and chapters to a dozens of texts and popular books including Linda Dobson's The Homeschooling Book of Answers: The 101 Most Important Questions Answered by Homeschooling's Most Respected Voices and AERO's Turning Points: 27 Visionaries in Education Tell Their Own Stories. She is also a poet, with two published books of poetry, and a blogger. She is currently trying to find time to finish her tenth book, a collection of memoir-style essays about learning, mothering and daughtering, entitled It Hasn't Shut Me Up, as well as an unnamed book about why self-education is the way of the future. She is listed in the Canadian Who's Who and the Who's Who of Canadian Women. "Everything we do in our everyday lives connects us with the web of life on Earth. Therefore, the health of our families and of our environment is a reflection of the choices we make. For the last thirty-five years, my mission has been, through my writing and by example, to help people understand the range of choices available and to encourage them to challenge the assumptions inherent in those choices so that they make the right ones for themselves, their families and the Earth. In my life and my work, I value honesty, integrity, curiosity, communication, mindfulness, civility, balance, laughter, conciseness, simplicity and friendship. I admire – and seek to move toward – bravery and patience. I believe that every experience and encounter provides us with an opportunity to learn and grow. Or, as Carl Jung wrote, "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” ~ Wendy Priesnitz |