Welcome to Red Thread Education,
where we teach the art of uncomfortable conversations
for the health of our community.
Every moment of every day, our body is communicating with us. The conversation is constant - telling us about our health, our social and physical environment, and our emotional response to it. Our bodies hold complex information that can teach us about what we need and why. When we learn to understand its language within its context, and how to communicate these needs to others, we will learn how to have healthier relationships.
We offer the health and relationship education you wish you learned at school, where:
we open up conversations around bodies, health, and relationships, in ways that remove shame and centres curiosity
we strengthen people’s tolerance for discomfort, skills for communication, and courage for connection
we use body feedback to guide learning from moment to moment, in an intentional practice of presence
we believe there is power in knowledge, and helping people to understand the cycles that shape them is inseparable from learning how to build healthier cycles for healthier futures; and
we practice what we preach, sitting in discomfort alongside one another to learn together and from each other while setting and receiving boundaries
We are committed to the prevention of gender-based and other forms of violence through contextualised relational education.
We are committed to an inclusive curriculum that is strengthened by its diversity of voices, experiences, and perspectives; because health is connected to the collective.
We are committed to a person-centred education for all ages and phases to learn the skills they want at the pace they need.
‘Everybody’s body is different.
Our approach to education reflects that.’
- Jade, Founder and Director of Red Thread Education
Why Red Thread?
There is a proverb that says there is ‘an invisible red thread that connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place or circumstance. It may tangle or stretch, but it will not break’.
We apply this way of thinking to our practice of teaching, helping learners to broaden their perspective to understand the interconnectedness of our relationships across time, place, and circumstance. We help learners to understand patterns and choices; how people in our history have shaped our present, and how the choices we make in the present can change our future. At the same time, the proverb reminds us of non-linearity, and that we can draw on our future to give us courage to make changes in our present.
As educators, we believe that one of the strongest foundations of building a future of healthy relationships is to learn the skills of curiosity - to find common ground with those who we are taught are different, and to celebrate diversity as a point of strength for the health of our communities. And what is a greater reminder of common ground that connects us all than the most important red thread within us - the circulatory system that delivers nutrients and oxygen throughout our entire body - our blood lines.
Meet Jade
The Founder and Director of Red Thread Education
who is taking the grass roots approach to community health - one conversation at a time
The young people I work with will often ask me, ‘how did you learn to do what you do?’.
Most of the time, they are expecting to hear a simple answer that suggests one structured path that they can follow. And to one end, there is some direction in that. I am a registered teacher who graduated from Queensland University of Technology with a dual degree in Arts and Education, and these degrees have allowed me to spend 15 years teaching language, culture, and history in primary and secondary schools across Queensland. But this response only focuses on what I learned, not how I learned.
Rather, it is a question better answered by sharing some of the stories that have shaped how I have grown. As for most of us, my relationship education was shaped by the relationships I saw everyday - from my family.
It started with the unlikeliest of meetings between two people - one from a small town in regional Victoria and the other from an even smaller village on Selapiu Island - my parents. Complete opposites in most every way, they found common ground in their shared values of community, education, and justice. My mother works as a nurse dedicated to community health, and my father worked as a detective dedicated to community safety, with both finding pathways to teaching others at different times in different ways. And from observing the calm and considered way they teach, I learned how to notice patterns, communicate with kindness, ask questions, receive feedback, remain curious in the face of conflict, and choose connection.
I took these foundational skills and spent the years in which I studied in Australia and abroad and the early years of working as a teacher and travelling solo in a quiet observation of the way people behaved and related to one another. Predictable patterns began to emerge, and I started recognising myself in others, and I saw how we are deeply shaped by the intersecting contexts of our historical, physical, and social environments. This changed the way I taught language and history for many years after, until my curiosity started shifting into consent education and wellbeing. Like many other teachers of my generation and before it, I did not receive a comprehensive and evidence-informed sex and healthy relationship education. We received a one-off lesson from a member of the local community - that is, once throughout the years of my entire high school career - and had to spend time learning through experience and learning as an adult. When I identified that the school I was teaching at was not offering any education around consent or healthy relationships, I offered to run a series of sessions for the year 10 students. And in those four introductory sessions, filling three joined classrooms of over 60 students per session, I learned that I could facilitate a conversation where young people felt safe to ask questions about healthy relationships that would never have been asked when I was a student and for it to feel meaningful for those young people.
Around this time, I found Clayschool Brisbane and started working with clay. I came to learn through its metaphors that how we approach challenges in creativity mirrors how we learned to approach challenges in life. Clay reveals the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and highlights how those stories influence the ways we act and react. At the same time, it invites us to change those narratives and choose how we want to respond, leaning in with curiosity to new stories and new growth. It is not the end product but the process - of learning, un-learning, and re-learning - that matters most for re-wiring our brains and regulating our nervous systems.
It was also around this time that I transitioned from mainstream education systems into teaching in a flexible learning centre (FLC) called Albert Park FLC, and I found myself working in an environment that had consent woven through its entire framework - intentionally shaped so by the lineage of workers who were passionate advocates for radical inclusion. I found myself connecting with a diverse cohort of young people who had been marginalised and disenfranchised from society, shaped by experiences of complex trauma, homelessness, and systemically affected by injustice. I found myself learning, for the first time, how to have uncomfortable conversations. And while Albert Park provided training in Collaborative Problem Solving, Non-violent Communication Strategies, Mental Health First Aid, Trauma-Informed and Reflective Practices - none of these came close to the experiential learning that can only come from a humbling conversation with a young person who is not afraid to be honest. Through the generosity of time spent with these young people, I have learned the humility to walk alongside as a fellow learner - holding complexity with curiosity instead of judgement - and centre every person I meet as the expert of their own life.
During my time at Albert Park, I established a young-person-led clay studio and a health program called Body Literacy - both of which focused on understanding health within social and historical contexts, regulating through discomfort, emotional communication, and critical thinking skills. Body Literacy became one of the two Strategic Improvement Plan focuses within a year of the program running, signifying the impact it was observably creating within the whole-school culture and the need for an integrated approach into all curriculum areas. Through Body Literacy, our young people were able to support True Relationships and Reproductive Health with in-depth and critically considered feedback into a school resource about consent, made available to schools across Queensland.
Over the last two years, I have been directing and facilitating Red Thread programs in Brisbane-based schools. Our flagship program Growing Matters was evaluated consistently within the top three external programs delivered at both Brisbane Youth and Education Training Centre and West Moreton Education Training Centre during that time. Self Centre has recently been added alongside Growing Matters in weekly sessions with the young people, and acknowledged as one of the most requested programs that young people ask to return to. This tells me what I have long known - young people want to learn how to have healthier relationships, and they are ready to have these conversations.
Which is where it circles back to the question that I get asked at both centres - ‘how did you learn to do what you do?”. I will often respond, ‘from uncomfortable conversations like this, with courageous people like you’.