Dev’s highest priority is creating and sharing special moments. He wears thrift stores clothes, tries to fix his own old cars, butcher’s his own meat, and gets excited about bobcat tracks in the mud. He has a Ph.D. in ecology, has started numerous learning programs and communities, and lives with family in Paonia, Colorado.
What is your favorite travel memory?
A while back a group of gap year students and I decided to travel overland from Guatemala back to Colorado. We wanted to do it using minimal money while maximizing adventure so we took chicken buses north through Guatemala, sitting four people to a bus seat and living off the food we bought on the street. We walked into Mexico and made our way to Palenque. From there, it was second class buses and conversations with locals all the way to the Sinaloa, where we slept on the beach. Finally, we made it to the border and walked with our backpacks into the States and slept in a hidden spot in the woods off the highway.
The next stage of our adventure was to hitchhike to Colorado. Each day we would choose our next place to meet and sleep, then we would divide into groups of two and go stand on the highway and have adventures. We met up and slept in Tucson, under a bridge on Roosevelt Lake, on an abandoned hill in Flagstaff, and then back in Paonia. Each time we met up, there were crazy stories to tell and campfires to sit around.
The whole experience was night and day from traveling on an airplane. We met local people, got dirty, experienced the changing landscapes, and felt empowered by our ability to travel using relatively little money and resources.
How have you changed/grown since working for your current company?
Living in community and choosing adventures inevitably means a life full of chaos, surprise, and ambiguity. I used to think I could control it, that, if I was smart and charismatic enough, I could identify and create the best way. Nowadays, I don’t think it matters much what I choose; what matters is who I am as life happens. Regardless of what comes my way, can I love? Can I take responsibility? Can I find that simplicity that lies on the far side of complexity, the simplicity that comes not from ignoring the chaos of life but from embracing it fully?
The young people who come to our program often feel a lot of stress and pressure trying to figure out “what to do” with their lives. By the end of our year together they often feel less pressure because regardless of what they end up doing, they know “a way to be” that feels right.
What is the best story you've heard from a return student?
I’m reading a 120-page journal by a former student who decided to ride his horse home after completing architecture school in New Mexico. Currently, he’s a month into his trip and partway across Colorado. The depth with which he sees the world and reflects on it is wowing me. It’s the kind of thing we do in our programs--come up with a crazy idea and then do it. In the process, we get to know ourselves and the world.
One of our goals is actually to unlearn conventional institutional ways of thinking, to recognize and transform the whole staff/student divisions and power hierarchies that we often create by habit since most of us have grown up surrounded by power hierarchies in school, work or our families. These habits are just obstacles to what we all crave, which is a sense of connection, shared purpose, mutual respect, and freedom.
If you could go on any program that your company offers, which one would you choose and why?
I would choose the full nine-month gap year, because it’s where people change the most, make life-long friends, and experience the most profound adventures.
In the fall, I like being part of a local community here in Colorado and meeting and working beside the inspiring folks that live here. I like preparing peaches and venison for winter, jumping in the ditch after saunas, and dreaming about possible winternships. I like backpacking.
In the winter, I like going south and seeing the other end of the Colorado River where it no longer reaches the sea. I like being outside for 8 weeks straight, understanding how the country is connected, speaking Spanish and finding petroglyphs hidden under cliffs.
Finally, in the spring, I like building something out of local or found material and designing a big adventure and doing it. I’m always surprised by what happens.
What makes your company unique? When were you especially proud of your team?
We are unique in that we don’t see ourselves as a company. We don’t think and act like a company. Rather, we see ourselves as individuals trying to create a meaningful and interesting life while inviting others to join us for a while on our path.
One of our goals is actually to unlearn conventional institutional ways of thinking, to recognize and transform the whole staff/student divisions and power hierarchies that we often create by habit since most of us have grown up surrounded by power hierarchies in school, work or our families. These habits are just obstacles to what we all crave, which is a sense of connection, shared purpose, mutual respect, and freedom.
What do you believe to be the biggest factor in being a successful company?
Once when I was hopping freight trains, a hobo told me, “If’n you ain’t having no fun, you ain’t helping nobody.”
People want to have fun in life, and I’m not talking about the kind of fun that comes with escaping our lives but rather about the kind of fun that comes from living with a sense of adventure and curiosity, the kind that comes from continually choosing the courage to be real and vulnerable and go for what matters, the kind that comes from being okay with messing up because you went for it.
Successful communities support this way of living, not by policy but by a culture of individual conversations that are honest, accepting and direct and that have the potential to build inspiration, self-awareness and personal choice and responsibility.
