Meet the Nova Scotians bartering for a sense of community

In Eleanor Wynn's backyard in Halifax, she gently lifts a chicken into her lap as a group of people look on.

"You don't want their wings to move around, so you pick them up and hold them like a football," she said. "They want it to be firm but not squished."

This demonstration is part of a workshop on raising backyard birds — a way to increase food security and, as a bonus, keep down the tick population, Wynn said.

But the people gathered here aren't exchanging money for this knowledge. Instead, they've come with baked goods and jars of honey to offer.

It's part of a co-operative initiative called Life.School.House., where community members offer workshops and swap homemade goods based on a barter system.

"People like the barter, and they like how accessible it is, that it's citizens teaching citizens, and not experts necessarily," said Jenn Stotland, one of the attendees. "We all have skills we can share."

Since starting, the initiative has spread across Nova Scotia and other parts of North America.

It's a model participants and organizers say can connect people to support at a time when those supports — after nearly three years of pandemic and amid a rising cost of living — are needed more than ever.

Co-operative started in 2018

Jennifer DeCoste started Life.School.House in 2018.

At the time, she and her partner had just bought a home, and were wrestling with how to be responsible stewards and community members.

"So we had looked around for a couple of different ways that we could make peace with our treaty responsibilities," she said. "And one of the things that we came up with was the communal use of the space."

The model they settled on has its roots in 19th-century Denmark, where a network of residential folk high schools started as a way of building community through vocational training and cultural enrichment for ordinary people.

In 21st-century Halifax, DeCoste says the Life.School.House expanded quickly. In their first year, they hosted roughly 60 workshops in their house, and sponsored others who wanted to open their own folk schools in Digby and the Annapolis Valley.

Model expanded across North America

More recently, branches have started across Canada, and into the U.S. and Mexico — a reflection of how much people are looking for community throughout the pandemic, DeCoste said.

"The one thing we have in common is that everybody's looking for something, anything, that they can do that helps re-form those connections that helps address the mental health impact of the loneliness and the isolation that we've been feeling over the last couple of years," she said.

The use of bartering, in both the delivery of workshops and in events devoted to the sharing of homemade items, is central to how this model aims to build connection.

"Times are tight, money is tight for a lot of people," DeCoste said. "Being able to exchange with somebody else and have them recognize your jam, or the scarf that you knit, for the huge gift that it is, that's connecting community."

In the Annapolis Valley, the local folk school inspired by DeCoste's example has expanded into other measures to address food insecurity.

Maureen MacInnis said she started the Annapolis Valley Folk School, which is separate from Life.School.House, after learning what DeCoste was doing in Halifax.

Over the past four years, she estimates she's run more than 400 workshops on everything from family budgeting and raspberry pie to rotational grazing, and the group continues to grow "exponentially."

Last year, after MacInnis learned about the proportion of children experiencing food insecurity in the Valley, the group started a food pantry that is stocked by the community.

'It makes it available to everyone'

They've recently started offering monthly cooking classes to help those accessing the pantry learn to make simple meals.

MacInnis said it's important these workshops, as well as others the folk school continues to offer — such as a recent workshop on wreath making —are offered on a barter basis, rather than as charity.

"It makes it available for everyone — the people that need to learn how to cook cannot afford to spend $20 to come," she said.

"But you can find something in your home that you can gift to the facilitator and still feel like you're an actual part of the whole."

MacInnis said the model can help people support one another in challenging times — a practice that draws on the example of marginalized communities, for whom barter was essential.

DeCoste hopes more people learning about the Life.School.House model will be encouraged to try it themselves. In 2022, she wrote a book about the co-operative's experiences, which is available for free through their website.

Back at Wynn's workshop, she shows attendees the coop she built, with chickens and guinea fowl inside.

The guinea fowl are particularly good at keeping ticks in check, Wynn said she and her neighbours have already noticed a difference.

For Wynn, who says she's concerned about the climate and biodiversity crises, she said teaching and learning about ways of incorporating more self-sufficient and locally produced food through Life.School.House events is a way of building a more sustainable system.

But she said the model taps into something deeper. "I live alone and work from home, so I'm really devoted to trying to build my community, especially after the isolation of COVID."

Connecting with people through the sharing of skills, she said, is a way to make that rebuilding happen.

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