Experience Institute

A school you design yourself

The Experience Institute grew out of Victor Saad’s Leap Year Project: a year of learning by doing instead of sitting in a classroom. Each of us designed our own year around three 90-day apprenticeships, with meetups in Chicago in between. I’d heard about it while volunteering on farms in Central America, and it fit like it had been built for me. I focused my year on putting my business skills to work on permaculture design and self-sufficiency, where business, ecology and community meet.

Three apprenticeships

Australia, first. I earned a Permaculture Design Certificate at Geoff Lawton’s Zaytuna Farm in October 2013, writing one post a day, then stayed on to help Clear Springs Sanctuary, a retreat center in New South Wales, get off the ground. I brought the team together, wrote the business plan and built the financial model. After I left, they raised more than $500,000 and bought the land.

Then the Philippines. After Typhoon Haiyan I joined the Earth Village Project in Batug, Leyte, for the Windship build with Earthship Biotecture. I ran procurement out of Cebu, helped build, kept the camp running, and was the project’s chief storyteller, with more than 5,000 photos and videos.

Then Chicago. At Leo Burnett I worked with the chief innovation officer on how to foster creativity and collaboration in the workplace, and finished with a company-wide workshop and a 30-page report.

The toolbox in between

Between apprenticeships we came back to Chicago as a cohort for workshops on self-awareness, storytelling, community building, operations and human-centered design. We redesigned a backpack with Jake Nickell, the founder of Threadless. We did improv. We wrote and documented everything, because reflection is learning: the reflection after the doing is where the doing turns into something you keep.

At the first meetup our storytelling facilitator, Sandee Kastrul, told me I was a talented storyteller. I was surprised. I’d spent most of my life with a severe stutter. In January 2014, at Story Club Chicago, my name came out of the cigar box, and I got up and told a room of strangers about Kenya. I’ve been telling stories in public since.

Structure creates freedom

Before that year I was all over the place, trying to bridge business and ecology all at once. The year gave me a structure, and the structure set me free: it doesn’t have to happen all at once, it can be built one step at a time.

I came home with a permaculture certificate, a business plan that went on to raise half a million dollars, a typhoon shelter that has sheltered people since, and the confidence that I could do this work, not only admire it. My mentors told me to focus. Maybe they were right. I’m still working on it. Then I went back to Nicaragua to work out what to build.