What excites you about experiential education?

I fully embrace Micah Jacobson’s phrase “open to outcome” in describing what excites me about EE.  Every group is a blank canvas. Eventual outcomes are unknown.  It’s “living in the here and now” to the fullest.  My spouse, life-partner and fellow-facilitator Linda always says, “facilitating groups is appealing to the highest common denominator for a living.  It’s like eating your favorite dessert every day and not gaining weight!”  For me, it’s about being need-fulfilling.  I love the challenge and process of feeling out individuals and groups and providing what they need to move forward… I also embrace Christian Itin’s and Scott Bandoroff’s “Double Diamond Model” in looking at facilitation as a two-way process, an act of gift-giving between individuals, groups and facilitators… All behavior is communicative, whether you are paying attention or not, and whether you “get it” or not, so it’s endlessly fascinating!

That’s true about the groups I work with and equally true about working with college students.  I am approaching six years at Venture.  Watching people develop over their years with us is a tremendous privilege and joy. We truly make a difference in these student’s lives, wherever their careers and lives take them. Lastly, I grew up in the shadow of JFK.  I wholeheartedly believe in the concept of servant leadership.  Engaging with and enabling people, groups and my community have been hallmarks of my professional and personal life.  Experiential Education has been my prop, my tool, my bully pulpit and my “raison d'être”.

What is Venture?  What do you do there?

Venture is the outdoor and experiential education program for the fast-growing 24,500 student urban University of North Carolina at Charlotte.  Venture provides “transformative group experiences using tailored challenges & guided reflection”.

• Venture offers a variety of experiential education programs for student groups, academic classes, faculty, staff and community groups.  In our fiscal 2008-2009 year, we provided about 375 outdoor trips, challenge course, mobiles and climbing wall programs.
• Venture is a resource for students, faculty, staff, and the Charlotte community to learn about experiential education and group facilitation.  Each year, Venture staff teach nine academic courses.  Each semester, we provide two 2-day facilitator trainings on our team development and high team challenge courses and mobile team activities.  We have worked with local schools and community organizations to provide facilitator trainings. 
• Venture provides Challenge Course programs for non-university groups, including partnering with our local schools and police dept in an extensive gang-prevention initiative and developing experience based training and development programs for business clientele.
• Venture has an active student leadership development program called VOLTAGE (Venture Outdoor Leadership Training and Group Experience) that allows us to have students assist and/or lead many of our programs.

I am the associate director for team development.  That role includes sharing the management and development of the entire Venture program with my colleagues: Sandy Kohn is our director and holds a ½ time academic senior lecturer position. Sarah Fox manages our trips program and student development.  Scott Moulton manages the climbing program and on-campus mobile and challenge course programs.  Ginny Fox is our office manager.  Emily Webb is our ½ time graduate assistant. I manage our challenge courses, team building programs, challenge course staff development and scheduling.  My work has a strong outreach component, supporting the University’s mission of building positive community relations and building social capital. 

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Give an example of what your work provides for other people

Every program I design and facilitate provides a nice narrative to answer this question, because every group is about tailoring a program to meet a distinct need.  The needs assessment process is the foundation for meaningful design and implementation.  I’ll limit myself to two examples:

One current example is a large community-based initiative called “No Easy Walk”, gang-prevention program run by our local school district with funding from our local police dept and our state juvenile justice department.  Four Title 1, high poverty-level schools and one alternative school are involved.  No Easy Walk is a gang prevention and social responsibility program aimed at providing middle school youth with skills and alternatives to resist gang influence and involvement. No Easy Walk helps youth become confident leaders and provides opportunities to become positive role models in their schools and communities. Venture is working with 100 sixth grade students at each school over five ½ day programs to build their confidence levels and basic team skills to enable them to work together in service projects involving their schools and communities.  We co-facilitate small teams using many of our college students as leaders, providing that positive role-model and bonding experience. The longer-term focus is, after three years of sixth graders going through this program, to have a significant portion of each school’s population with this shared experience to build from throughout the academic milieu…

How did you get involved in Experiential Education?

After High School, I followed what I thought might be a religious vocation and served as a Jesuit Volunteer in the mountains of NC.  Part of my job was managing an Appalachian Trail hiker’s hostel.  Part of my job was leading weekend retreats for High School youth groups, including a hike up the AT.  I didn’t end up in the priesthood, but did get a lifelong dose of the outdoor adventure bug.   I pursued a degree at UNC Charlotte and co-created a curriculum with my advisor and College of Human Development and Learning that I called “Outdoor Education” in their Human Services track.  Really, it was about my own journey of experiential learning.  I was a UYA volunteer (University Year for Action, a VISTA program), helping organize and raise up an impoverished neighborhood and worked for Venture as a student employee, as well as a number of outdoor education contract jobs with a variety of camps, schools, agencies and organizations.  Through all of this, I learned about how much I did not know, and stayed at UNC Charlotte for a master’s degree in Community Counseling…  That led to almost 8 years as a counselor, then director of a Runaway Shelter (and a leave of absence at the Canadian Outward Bound Wilderness School), then 15 years at the Charlotte Outdoor Adventure Center before joining Venture again in 2004.

When and how did you become involved with AEE?

My first awareness was the library at Venture in 1978, containing the published papers from the pre-AEE symposia on Experiential Education, as well as every conference proceedings.  My first involvement was in 1980, at the Toronto Conference.   I attended a number of conferences every few years or so.  In 1989-90, I was a part of SEEN (South Eastern Experiential Network) and hosted a conference at the Charlotte Outdoor Adventure Center.  The next year, it was merged into the AEE SE region.   In 2004, after starting at Venture, I attended the conference in Norfolk and became more involved in the Association leadership through the EBTD group. I have attended every conference since.