About The Mulch Room

The Mulch Room is a new inquiry into metarelational learning for regenerative futures, through deep deschooling, decolonising and queering, launched in October 2025 by Artemis Bear.

Who is Artemis Bear?

I'm a start up founder, movement builder, community organiser, facilitator, project manager and culture change strategist, working in communities, grassroots networks, and co-operative projects. My work sits at the intersection of education, systemic change, and justice; always centred on relationship, playfulness and care.

Having started my career working in climate / behaviour change policy, I realised how our systems of governance and our wider culture was a barrier to the serious change required to address the era of polyconsequence. The majority of my work in the two decades since has been focussed on metarelational learning for regenerative futures. Practically, this means co-creating the conditions for serious culture change, through deep deschooling and decolonising in community, as well as queering ideas of relationality, as entangled liberatory practice.

I founded The Garden, a self-directed learning community, in 2016, as a metarelational inquiry to see if it was possible (from a then relatively colonised perspective) to create the conditions for a less hierachical and competitive culture, in order to produce new systems of governance. It has also been a much needed community both for families who hold a deep commitment to deschooling and decolonising, as well as for families who have had difficult experiences with the school system.

I now work with and for a wide range of entities to shift from a reductionist, hierarchical, transactional and competitive way of operating to a systems thinking/being, collaborative, reciprocal and relational one. I’m also personally experimenting with ways to decouple my work and finance, in order to live more reciprocally than transactionally.

From transactional to reciprocal

After a brief experiment with a paid for Substack, I decided it’s subscription model is part of the problem. Far from motivating me to write more, I believe that the paid for subscription was a demotivating factor and in fact I wrote less than previously and far less than I had hoped.

I’ve moving my writing over here to Ghost, which is more inline with my values and where I am less a product and more a co-creator. You can still find my previous writing (all now unpaywalled) over at the Myceliorism Substack.

I’ve also set up a Liberapay page, where people who believe in the wide range of work that I do can contribute to resourcing it, if they have the capacity and inclination. It isn’t a contract, a tip jar, or a transaction for goods or services. Money is, for now, still part of survival, so contributions here help me keep tending these inquiries in relational depth. If you choose to contribute, you’re not supporting a project, you’re joining an entanglement, keeping questions alive, and helping me stay in the work of weaving-with rather than working-for.

Thanks for reading. I'm looking forward to finding out what entanglements this project brings ...