Amy Benson May (She/Her/Hers)

A Boulder native and Fairview High School graduate, Amy Benson May was a high school student at the time Treehouse Learning opened its doors for the first time. A Varsity runner on the Fairview Colorado 5A/ Division I State Championship Cross-Country team under head coach Joanne Ernst, Amy’s upbringing was heavily shaped by movement, community, and connection to the land around her. She received her B.A. from Smith College with a degree in Women’s Studies, cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, after a non-traditional path of study, including immersion-based experiences in South America and opportunities to learn French, Portuguese, Spanish and Japanese. 

With the noblest of ambitions at the time to “smash the patriarchy” from within, she began her post-college career as a Wall Street financial analyst in New York at Banc of America Securities in Alternative Investments, Strategy & Corporate Development at BNP Paribas Global Equities, and at Harvard Management Company, the financial arm of Harvard’s endowment. Though passionate about organizational leadership, management, and the intersection of systems, institutions, and culture, she eventually left the fiance world around the time of her own emergence into motherhood, recognizing there were healthier ways to build the world she’d like to see than attempting to infiltrate and transform global systems on Wall Street. 

Amy embarked on a path to become a homebirth midwife and practiced as a doula, but eventually recognized she was called in a different direction to advocate around maternal & childbirth issues, including restorative and regenerative justice issues around race, class, and the environment, beginning through the lens of her own inter-racial family. In early 2012, Amy, along with her husband Osei, and oldest of 4 eventual children left Boston to return to Colorado after the cancer diagnosis of Dr. Nancy Benson, Treehouse Learning’s founder, and Amy’s mother. 

After the death of Dr. Benson, Amy found herself in the position of a business owner, new parent, and educator. She dedicated the next decade to personal and professional learning around early childhood development and whole-person integration primarily through the experience and explorations of a home/world-based education with her own four children on their family homestead. As a family, they focused on self-leadership and self-actualization and empowering their children with skills to thrive on this planet. Amy focused heavily on exploring the impact of generational trauma in order to disrupt/replace dysfunctional family patterns and engage in life-long learning and brain growth, and brings a trauma-informed perspective of supporting well-being and optimal child developmental experiences to her life’s passion and work.

Along with a decade of formal coursework and informal educational experiences, her most influential learning opportunities have come from self-directed engagement with researchers, thinkers, writers, and the community, as well as personal exploratory and self-reflective work around brain neuroscience, indigenous perspectives on whole-person/whole-planet wellbeing, imagining a just and thriving world, and exploring the experiential opportunities that lead to learning and whole-person development.

Part of an entire family of self-directed learners, Amy is a student of Marshall Rosenberg’s Non-Violent Communication, an Alderian approach to Positive Discipline, respectful parenting, empowerment-based models of organizational leadership and systems, and the teachings of Jim Collins, Brene Brown, Dr. Daniel Siegel & Dr. Tina Payne Bryson, as well as a wide variety of indigenous voices on education, land, community, and integrated wellbeing. She believes that a holistic, respect-based understanding of children’s development, including the critical necessity of play, informs the types of adults children grow to become, shapes the world they will inherit, and guides our path to empowering all humans with the skills necessary to solve some of the collective challenges facing the earth and its living things.

Amy’s movement, music, and arts background encompasses distance running (including 9 marathons, dozens of ½ marathons, and everything in between), Karate, and dance (including African, Caribbean, and Afro-Brazilian dance forms). As an adult, she engages her inner creative artist by drawing and painting birds, playing piano, and making up songs, which are inspired by experiences within her own family and shared with the Treehouse Learning community.

Amy feels most content when finding regular time for writing, running, digging in the dirt, and playing with her family. Along with her partner, 4 children, and various living plants and animals (a puppy, geese, ducks, chickens, beehives, an orchard, and a market garden), Amy and her family are each co-learners in permaculture and regenerative growing practices and engage as active participants in creating a more sustainable, equitable, and just future.

As a member of an intergenerational and interracial family, Amy is an active participant in building the kind of world that she’d like the generations following her to inherit through an ongoing process of decolonization and self-awareness. Her passion is building belonging, inclusion, and participating in healing the world’s traumas, and breaking generational and historical patterns through collective togetherness and community where we learn to see one another rather than see one as “an other.“