📚 Support Youth Education on Giving Tues
Activating our youth innovation work
Hey friends and family,
This is the first time I’m sending a Giving Tuesday email. I want to share an opportunity to make a meaningful impact in the world, fully aware how many non-profits are addressing arguably more immediate and dire problems (please support those too!).
I’m writing to ask for your support for my fiscally-sponsored non-profit, School of Wise Innovation, so we can do our part in maturing innovation culture to improve the health of all touched.
Especially the next generation - not only in how new technologies can be more respectful of their health and development, but also how we might educate youth to become wise stewards of their creative power, in an era when the gap between idea and reality is approaching zero.
If you're open to making a donation, please read this short email. Scroll down for an overview of our broader vision and how we’re heading there.
Does what we do matter if we’re not serving youth?
Having spent years trying to deeply understand the roots of the metacrisis/polycrisis (our multiple, interconnected crises converging and amplifying each other, resulting in a predicament which is difficult to manage or resolve), we agree with education philosopher Zak Stein that education IS the metacrisis.
“When social systems are in periods of rapid transformation the role of schools becomes contradictory. They teach knowledge that is no longer relevant, socialize individuals into roles that no longer exist, and provide the mindsets needed to continue ways of life that are rapidly disappearing.”
How and what we are teaching kids in the modern West is proving wholly inadequate for cultivating healthy adults; let alone ones who are capable of addressing the complex challenges of our time.
Even what we consider “top education” promotes a culture of growth at all costs, tolerating the unintended consequences of lead / asbestos / DDT / PFAS, or social media / generative AI, or simply a toxic workplace or absent parent.
Think of some of your loved ones and communities - doesn’t it suck that we live with so much illness, both physical and psychological, caused by myopic innovation that has polluted our food, water, air, culture and spirit?
Of course, innovation has afforded us tremendous benefits. Thank goodness for refrigeration, dental care, and video calls 😹
Of course, there are serious financial and social incentives holding this system in place that make it challenging to create beneficial outcomes for all stakeholders.
And, systems change. Culture changes. You can feel it changing fast as we speak.
As maturing the goals and mindsets of the system are among the most powerful interventions, let’s explore:
How can we design technologies with more care for our young ones and future generations?
How can we develop leaders capable of bringing ideas to life in ways that are better for all impacted, including themselves and the relationships that matter most?
These are some of the questions we’re asking at School of Wise Innovation, along with leading experts who have been staring at these problems for years.
Our first year of operations has been phenomenal: a series of experimental courses, workshops, retreats and learning journeys that produced countless tears of joy, and a growing team of inspirational collaborators.
Yet we mostly focused on adults who are actively searching for different ways to live, work, and create. This is who our team is currently more closely connected to.
We have been building relationships and planting many seeds with K-12 and university stakeholders domestically and abroad, but have yet to put dedicated resources into mapping the landscape, conducting research, convening experts and prototyping curricula.
For example, in 2025 we aim to develop a novel nature-based rites of passage experience for aspiring business and STEM students.
We focus on nature-based retreat containers as timeless, universal, legal, accessible, and grounded modalities for facilitating an embodied experience of interdependence.
Such initiation containers cultivate humility, sensitivity, creativity and resilience, while bringing awareness to place-based indigenous knowledge systems.
With a modest $10,000 we will be able to begin partnering with great folks in our orbit to take the first significant steps towards activating a key pillar of this emerging educational institution.
Please consider sponsoring a brick in this school if you yearn for the culture change that can support our kids becoming healthy, whole, and responsible adults.
We are operating at a fraction of our potential. We have done a lot with very little. The gap is resources. We need your help to close the gap. This piece of the puzzle is vastly underappreciated and under-resourced. We’re doing the best we can to do it right.
Your donation, no matter how small (crypto welcomed!) will directly support us in building our capacity to design more impactful programming, serve more people, and build better bridges that need to be built.
Happy to chat more! We’d love to hear your ideas and explore ways we can work together. Feel free to schedule a call here. Introductions are greatly appreciated too.
And please consider joining us this winter! All are welcome who are in need of rest and reconnection to what matters most.
With big gratitude,
Andrew & School of Wise Innovation team
Fiscally sponsored by HAPPI: Helping Awesome People Partner Intentionally
