I run a Gap Year Program amid the mountains and organic farms of Colorado, and one of my main goals is to help students be successful in living their sustainable and resilience-centered values. I’ve spent decades trying to figure out how to do that.
I used to think that teaching about sustainability and resilience meant teaching students how to make solar ovens, build with straw bales, eat local farm-produced food or glean from dumpsters, poop in composting toilets, understand permaculture principles and ride bicycles.
I still think such things are useful skills, but a number of years back I began questioning whether these were really the most important skills to be modeling and teaching. I noticed, for example, that most students don’t actually go on to build straw bale houses or start permaculture projects, but the ones who were able to apply functional work and attitude skills to our time building straw bale cabins on our program were also able to apply these same skills to other things they were doing later. What seemed to matter in the long term had less to do with a student’s mastery of straw bale technology and more to do with how much fun they were still having after 6 hours of work mixing straw and mud. I began to suspect that I should be concentrating more on work and attitude skills than on the specifics of how to build a window buck.
Over the years I noticed other foundational skills that seem important to a student’s ability to thrive in our program and then later to contribute resilience and sustainability to their communities. Often the students either arrived with these skills or they didn’t. Those who had them thrived, and those who didn’t struggled. It seemed to me that these were the skills I should be teaching. Over the years I’ve honed in on three general skill areas:
- Communication and group governance skills. The ability to feel valued and connected in a group. The ability to use the full intelligence of group members to make wise group decisions and work as a team.
- Mastery of choice and freedom. The ability to see options and take ownership of one’s choices, to consciously make and keep agreements, to perceive adventure and abundance, to avoid victim or savior mentality.
- Money Management and practical vocational skills. The ability to live within one’s means and stay out of debt. Development of a trade or vocation that is needed in any community and that can align with one’s values.
Each of these skill areas is complex, and I could ramble forever about why these skills matter and how they are developed. Recently, for example, I gave a TEDx talk about alll the lessons on governance and communications learned from watching how groups of people deal with doing the dishes.
As result of noticing the importance of these foundational skills, the emphasis of my program is now much different than it used to be. Yes, we still use composting toilets and solar ovens, but now we give these things less attention than how to facilitate a conversation or how to lead, follow and feel connected while blues dancing. Yes, we still harvest local foods, and we also go out of our way to emphasize that there are many more paths to living sustainable values than having an organic farm and practicing permaculture. Yes, we still build with cob, and we also teach how to frame a conventional 2×4 wall, since this is what most students will get a job doing.
A huge emphasis throughout is simply how to live together in a way that feels good. It seems to be a hugely important sustainability skill. For example, one of the fastest ways to drastically reduce one’s carbon footprint is to take on a roommate or two, but despite this, most Americans share their living quarters with relatively few people. Why? Because we “want our privacy” which normally means we don’t want to spend our time arguing over whose turn it is to do the dishes and sweep the floor or who ate more than their share of cheese. Most of us don’t have the skills to live happily together.
In the gap year we practice these skills by living together in tight quarters and making group decisions and agreements. The things that come up become our curriculum, and things always come up. How do you continue live contently with somebody you just broke up with? What happens when people who agreed to cook don’t show up on time? How do you deal with that person who never stops talking?
Part of money management is not going into debt to go to college or attend a gap year program. Because of this, I have worked hard to keep The High Desert Gap Year affordable. The current cost is $7,500 for nine months of room and board and programming, including most travel costs. It’s relatively very cheap, but still it’s a lot for a young adult to earn on their own. I’ve spent a lot of time scheming about jobs that gap year students could do while on the program so that the program could cost less and we could have more opportunity to practice work skills. Most recently the plan is to have them teaching middle schoolers—I’ll let you know how it goes.
I’ve found that teaching resilience and sustainability by these new definitions doesn’t come easily. It’s rarely about teaching information. Neither does it mean much talking about the state of the world. Rather, we have moved in the realm of personal habits and behavioral patterns, often touchy ones that are deeply embedded. It is the realm that often we leave to parents or counselors instead of education programs. Change requires direct and often awkward conversations. Habits resist change.
Despite all of this, it’s proving an incredibly rewarding path. We see young people changing their very ways of being in ways that are transformative and in ways that make them much more effective in a group and in the community. We notice that we leaders and staff are having to grow and change to be effective, and it feels right. We are noticing that the professionals who teach CEOs and business managers or using similar strategies and that we can learn from each other. We see the potential for being more effective , and it’s exciting. Most importantly, the young people seem appreciative. It’s the direction they want to take as well.
For more about the High Desert Gap year program see highdesertcenter.org. Dev Carey runs the program out of Paonia, Colorado. The program runs from early September through the end of May and includes outdoor adventure, working on farms, dancing, building, travel, and a lot of practice making choices, living as a group, communicating and managing money.
