Brad's Wish List
There's a lot of stuff I want to do!
This is really just a brain dump of what I'm up to and ideas I'm interested in pursuing.
I'm not expecting anyone to read this and think "oh, I can help with that!" for everything here.
But if something here does resonate with you, or you have ideas or resources that could be helpful,
please get in touch .
Continual Aspirations
I want to enable kids to thrive and be their best selves, both now and in the future.
On the whole. we don't do a great job of this as a society.
I want the kids in my orbit to have more for themselves.
This also means I need to bring more kids into my orbit, which is a challenge in and of itself.
This means not only pursuing direct engagement with more young people myself,
but also working to build up the capacity of the communities I'm a part of to serve more kids.
I want to be constantly surrounded by agentic, capable people.
Your community shapes you and you shape your community.
I want to be around people that I can push to be better and that can push me to be better.
I need awesome young people in my life to keep me grounded and to remind me of what's important as much as they need more positive, ambitious influences in their lives.
And I need more experienced mentors around me to help me be a better mentor and better person.
At Least Kind of Happening
I want to write more.
I particularly want to write more about mentoring, education, and youth development work.
I've really enjoyed putting together the essays & talks I have listed here ,
and I want to develop some of this stuff further in a form that can be shared more widely.
This will also help me clarify my own thinking on these topics & help me be a better mentor & leader to the other mentors I work with.
There may be some opportunities to leverage this to help support my youth-serving non-profit work, too.
I also have a potentially MCU-scale speculative fiction world bouncing around in my head that I might eventually like to get on paper.
I want to write software that people find useful.
GatherPack is starting to be a thing!
And I've got a few other more proprietary projects I've done for clients through Sledgehammer Infosystems out there in the wild, too.
I've got a couple other ideas that I'd like to push forward on, too.
I've got a half-started flexible, modular ERP system idea targeted at small businesses & non-profits,
a concept for sandboxed developer environment & associated infrastructure automation tooling that could be really useful for teaching programming,
a model for facilitating the strategic planning process & tracking progress against goals for non-profits & other organizations that could be turned into a web application,
and a few other ideas that would be neat - and potentially profitable - to pursue.
I want to teach kids how to write software & leverage technology to help people.
I get to do some of this with the Westside Robotics kids, but not as much as I'd like - my focus at meetings tends to get pulled in a lot of different directions.
I've got a few ideas for how to spend more time doing this, getting more people to help, and making this a more regular part of what I do that are starting to become more concrete and implementable.
I want to mentor people that want to be better mentors.
I want to see more young people get access to high-quality, highly engaged mentors.
We've seen some meteoric growth in the number of kids we have involved in our Westside Robotics family of programs over the last few years, which is fantastic.
And I know that same sort of demand is out there in other communities, too.
I want to help other communities build up their own capacity to serve more kids with high-quality,
highly engaged mentors, whether that's through a FIRST program or something... different.
More or Less Attainable Future Goals
I want to do some non-profit consulting work.
I've got a decent bit of experience under my belt now working with non-profits, particularly in the STEM education & youth development space.
I want to leverage that experience to help other organizations be more effective in their work.
I've particularly enjoyed the couple of times I've been involved, either as a facilitator or participant,
in mission/vision refinement & strategic planning exercises, and I'd like to do more of that!
I want to make books.
I don't just mean writing a book - I mean literally making physical books.
Books are great!
This would be a really cool thing to pair with my photography work or some of my writing,
and could easily be leveraged into some of my non-profit work, too.
I want to make more art.
I enjoy photography and graphic design work, and I want to do more of it.
I've done the occasional senior or family portrait session for people in the past, and I even shot a wedding one time.
I don't have any grand ambitions to be a famous artist or anything, but I do occasionally feel a need to scratch that creative itch.
I'm particularly interested in doing some more artsy portrait photography work,
including stretching into 3D capture, digital sculpting, and 3D printing for more physical portraits, too.
I want to start a chain of arcades where the kids build the machines & make their own games.
We need more accessible third places for kids, and arcades are a great fit for that.
But arcades are expensive to set up and maintain, and they tend to be pretty passive experiences.
If the kids build the machines and make their own games, they get to learn a whole bunch of stuff along the way,
and they get to be active participants in the space rather than just passive consumers.
I want to start a tea shop.
I'm a fan of tea, and I think it would be really cool to open a tea shop that also serves as a community space for people,
particularly young people (since again, we need more accessible third places for kids), to hang out, work, and learn.
Maybe even have a small library or bookstore component, too.
I want to put on intentionally focused liminal, transformative, positive-disintegration-filled experiences for young people.
Pipe Dreams & Other Slightly Unhinged Stuff
I want to start and live in a nerd monastery.
Imagine if a boarding school and a retreat center for community-minded entrepreneurs, craftspeople, and creatives had a baby.
A place where people could come to learn, create, and collaborate on projects, both technical and non-technical.
A place where people could disconnect from the hustle and bustle of everyday life and focus on their passions and interests.
A place where people could find mentors and peers who share their interests and values.
A place where people could live simply and intentionally, with a focus on personal growth and community building.
I want to build a huge facility to support the FIRST Robotics programs and other like-minded youth development efforts in my community.
This is fundamentally the same idea as the nerd monastery, but a little more tightly focused, and maybe a hair less... cult-y.
I envision a space where kids can come together to learn, create, and collaborate on robotics projects, as well as other STEM-related activities.
This facility would include a huge makerspace, full fields for FIRST & other similar activities, meeting rooms, youth-run or youth-supporting business spaces, flexible open areas for events and gatherings, maybe an arcade, and a small auditorium-type space for presentations and showcases.
It would be a hub for innovation and creativity, where kids can get hands-on experience with technology and engineering, and where they can connect with mentors and peers who share their interests.
It would also serve as a community center, hosting events and workshops for people of all ages interested in youth development, mentoring, and education.
I want to buy a mobile office van and travel rural Indiana to find, support, and connect the exceptional
young people out there in the underserved fringes of the state.
This is also a partial implementation of the nerd monastery idea, but on wheels.
Rather than bringing talented, interested, interesting young people to a central location, I go to them.
I want to find the exceptional young people in rural Indiana who don't have access to the same opportunities or resources or connections as the kids that live down the road from top-tier universities.
Do the stuff their school counselors would be doing if they had the time, bandwidth, and resources to do so, as well as providing more targeted mentoring and support.
I want to help them build their own communities of like-minded peers and mentors, and find ways to support and improve their local communities, too.
I want to go to grad school.
I've had vague thoughts about going back to school for more than a decade now, but I've never really been able to pin down what I want to study or where I want to go.
My interests are pretty broad and interdisciplinary, and I haven't found a program that really fits what I'm looking for.
I would also have to pick a direction to focus on, which is... hard.
Right now the winner is something roughly at the intersection of developmental psychology and anthropology,
linking Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration with van Gennep & Turner's work on rites of passage & life stage transitions,
making the case for more intentional rites of passage & transition rituals in modern culture.
Or maybe I go for something more practical, like an MBA or MPA to support my non-profit work.
I want to grow my own tea.
This is an odd one, especially since I'm typically kind of... averse to outdoorsy manual labor type stuff,
and the plants that have been in my care tend to not have the longest lives.
But tea is great, and I think it would be really cool to grow and process my own tea.
Tea's not really grown around here because it gets too cold, but I think it could be done in a greenhouse or something of the sort.
I want to do a longitudinal research study, and art project, and journalistic body of work, where I follow of
a handful kids around throughout middle & high school to document what's going on in their lives & in youth culture
in general.
Mix my desire to write more and do more art, my general interest in youth development work and how kids grow up, and the whole mobile office van idea together and you've basically got the idea here.
I want to get a better understanding of what it's like to be a kid growing up today and how that changes over time.
I want to see how kids are navigating the challenges and opportunities of growing up in a rapidly changing world,
and how they're finding their own paths and identities.
I want to document the good, the bad, and the ugly of youth culture, and share those stories with a wider audience.