ABOUT US
The Northeast Unschooling Conference is an annual gathering of unschooling families. The conference is located in Wakefield, MA, at the beautiful Sheraton Four Points in the greater Boston area.
NEUC provides a dynamic mix of speakers, presentations, hands-on arts workshops, opportunities for reflection, connection with a broader unschooling community, and conference activities geared towards engaging, entertaining, inspiring, and empowering each member of your family.
THE HOTEL
Join us at the lovely Four Points by Sheraton in Wakefield, MA.
Our hotel is the beautiful Four Points by Sheraton in Wakefield. To get our special conference rate of $135 per night (an unbeatable price), book online by clicking here, or call the hotel directly at (781) 245-9300. Be sure to tell them that you are with the Northeast Unschooling Conference to make sure you receive our special room rates. Conference rooms are booked directly through the hotel. Find out more about the Sheraton Four Points hotel on their website here.
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Registration does not cover hotel rooms. Call the hotel directly at (781) 245-9300 and be sure to tell them that you are with the Northeast Unschooling Conference to make sure you receive our special room rates.
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Click here to see our accessibility information for the hotel. The hotel boasts beautiful rooms outfitted with a microwave and mini-fridge, lots of room size choices that will be flexible for your family, access to a full athletic club with a beautiful inground, indoor pool, and a convenient location within easy walking distance from Marketstreet Lynnfield, a beautiful shopping plaza.
Marketstreet gives us great proximity to wonderful vegan, vegetarian, and carnivorous dining options, yoga studios, entertainment centers, and shopping. If you’d like to explore Boston, you’ll be excited to hear that Four Points is less than 25 minutes from the center of Boston. Come early, stay late, and enjoy the area!
The Northeast Unschooling Conference space is held in the conference center of the Four Points, the same location as the hotel rooms. We are lucky to have a conference space that grants us complete privacy from other guests, allowing us to create our own culture and community for the duration of the conference!
Our conference takes place across eight conference center rooms, with access to plenty of communal hangout areas to help us build and foster community!
Our Programs
The Northeast Unschooling Conference boasts a variety of robust programming designed to appeal to all members of your family. Our programming comes in four categories: funshops, panels, discussions, and presentations.
Funshops are hands-on, interest driven programs where people share skills, create community, learn, and play!
Panels aim to represent a particular demographic, such as grown unschoolers, or address a particular topic, such as concerns around math. Three or more presenters with a depth and breadth of knowledge will speak about their own unschooling journeys, and answer your questions.
Discussions provide an opportunity for our community to come together around a particular topic, sharing wisdom, talking, and listening. These may be unschooling specific topics, closed identity groups, discussions about social issues, and much more! Each discussion will have at least one facilitator to keep the conversation on track.
Presentations allow one facilitator to take the lead, creating a workshop or speech on a specific topic. Some presenters may choose to take the podium, while others may sit in a circle to share their wisdom.
Programming for folks of all ages will be offered in every timeslot. We appreciate your patience as we put together the program booklet for 2020. Stay tuned for an announcement about our keynote speaker, and a full schedule jampacked with programming options.
Keynote Speaker
Maleka Diggs (She/Her) is an unschooling momma of two daughters, a youth advocate, equity and inclusion trainer, presenter, and founder of Eclectic Learning Network (ELN), a secular, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) centered network dedicated to providing resources, training, and workshops to families. ELN creates learning spaces that shift ways toward learning as a lifestyle and partnership-based relationships through unschooling and self-directed learning approaches.
Maleka Diggs
Event Organizers
The Northeast Unschooling Conference is the first-ever unschooling conference to be organized entirely by grown Unschoolers! Our conference organizers, Emmett and Rhianon, met at NEUC as young children in the early 2000s!
Emmett DuPont (they/them)
Rhianon Small (she/her/they/them)
Emmett DuPont is a 24-year-old always unschooled adult living in Western MA. Emmett started attending the Northeast Unschooling Conference at the age of nine and attended every year ever since. NEUC gave them the space to come into their own as an adult and allowed them to grow up surrounded by other children and teenagers who understood the unique struggles, joys, and challenges of unschooling.
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Emmett graduated in May 2019 from Hampshire College with a B.A, double majoring in Public Health and Entrepreneurship, and double minoring in Culture, Health and Science and Reproductive Rights. Emmett is now a high school teacher at an alternative learning school called LightHouse Holyoke, whose mission is to bring unschooling philosophy and interest-driven exploration to ALL teenagers, regardless of family structure or socioeconomic status.
Rhianon Small is a 23-year-old, life-long unschooler currently living in southern RI. Rhianon graduated from the Community College of Rhode Island in May 2018 with an A.A in General Studies and from the University of Rhode Island in May 2020 with a B.A. in Psychology and Political Science. Rhianon is currently looking to work in psychological research with an emphasis on multicultural issues with the aim of creating social policy proposals.
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Having attended every Northeast Unschooling Conference since its inception when she was 6 years old, Rhianon has grown up in the community and views it as a second, vast, and loving family. Her goal is to share the joys and hardships of unschooling and to foster an environment where unschoolers can feel safe and understood, regardless of their sexuality, gender, race, religion, or ethnicity.
What Does Registration Cost?
Don’t Miss Out
Registration for the Northeast Unschooling Conference is inclusive of all conference events, programs, speakers and workshops, and covers the full four-day experience.
Registration does not cover the cost of the hotel (an unbeatable price of $135 a night) and food. We are lucky to be surrounded by incredible restaurants, as well as being allowed to bring our own food into the conference space. Every hotel room is outfitted with a mini-fridge and microwave, so feel free to bring your own food, too!
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Our conference registration price is $100 for adults over 18, $85 for children 4 to 17, and children under 4 are free. We also have a family rate available as well. The pricing will be slightly higher for at-the-door registration and slightly lower in our Earlybird window (until May 31).
We never want conference pricing to keep a family away from our event. If these prices are a hardship for you, please feel free to use the 5% or 10% discount codes listed plainly on the registration page. If these prices still feel unachievable, please feel free to email us and name your needed discount rate, and we will send you a personalized discount code: neucinfo@gmail.com.
If your family can afford to pay a little more, please consider making an additional donation by purchasing a “donation” ticket when you register. It will help us keep our policy of allowing families to name their price.
Attending NEUC has been helpful in my unschooling journey as a mother of 4. It has helped reconfirm and support our lifestyle. It has given me confidence in the way we our raising our children.
A dynamic conference we left feeling secure in our choice to unschool. Each member of our family left more confident, inspired and connected.
As a grown unschooler, I remember the feeling of relief that my siblings and I felt at NEUC. It was a haven. A place full of people who learned like we did and who helped us feel like we weren't alone in our unique journey of living life and learning.
Program
Proposals
Got an idea for an activity, or event at NEUC? Want to suggest a speaker? Contact us!
community guidelines
This is what we believe. Please take a moment to read through what we stand for.
frequently
asked
questions
Find answers to the most frequently asked questions about NEUC here!
Land Acknowledgement
We want to acknowledge the original and rightful inhabitants of the land our conference is held on.
