Mike and Amy's path toward Envision began long before there was a campus, a curriculum, or even a name for what they were building. They met in 2007 and soon found themselves on the road together, filming a documentary about sustainability practices around the world. It was in Ethiopia, somewhere between conversations with farmers and elders and families rebuilding their own communities from the ground up, that they stumbled onto the question that would shape the rest of their lives: what does it actually take to raise a generation capable of caring for each other and the earth? The answer they kept arriving at was education - but not the kind either of them had grown up with.

Both Mike and Amy came from fairly traditional educational backgrounds, and both had quietly begun asking hard questions about the model long before they had a name for what troubled them. They watched gifted, curious kids get flattened by standardized systems built for efficiency rather than for children. They saw how disconnected so much of modern education had become - from nature, from community, from the deeper human need to feel needed and capable. So in 2009, they started doing something about it. They began developing their own curriculum, grounded in the conviction that learning should feel alive, that a changing world deserved an education built for the children actually growing up in it rather than the one we inherited.

That conviction sent them traveling the globe together, studying intentional communities, earning their Permaculture Design Certificates, and asking constantly: how do people actually learn how to live well, together? Eventually their path led them to Southern Oregon, where they landed at Trillium, an intentional community in the Little Applegate. They spent two years living off-grid there, working as Sustainability Instructors for recent high school graduates at the Birch Creek Arts & Ecology Center - teaching organic gardening, homesteading, wildcrafting, beekeeping, and herbal medicine making, and deepening their own understanding of ecology and community through the Ecostery Program at the Dakubetede Education Center. Along the way they pursued additional training in wilderness therapy and rites of passage work, learning how nature and challenge could be used intentionally to help young people grow into themselves. It was here, in the Little Applegate, that the real seed of Envision was planted - the belief that children deserve an education rooted in real skills, real community, and real connection to the land. Mike and Amy have been life partners ever since, and have been married since 2012.

In 2020, Amy and Cara Frantz came together with a realization that changed everything: their individual learning groups would be much more powerful as something bigger, built together. Cara had spent the year before building a homeschool collective to meet the needs of her son - A project-based, Interdisciplinary Model similar to what Mike & Amy had been creating. Together, they envisioned multiple age groups learning and growing alongside one another, supporting each other rather than existing in separate, isolated classrooms.

That year Envision expanded to include four learning groups spanning ages 6-7, 8-10, 11-12, and 13+, built on a shared belief in pooling Guide resources, creating a richer campus experience, and growing the reach of this new model of education. In the years since, Cara has worked tirelessly to build lasting stability for the children who pass through our program - securing the land and physical spaces that hold our classrooms and learning experiences, and creating the Envision Community Center as a true home for this vision to keep growing.

We call ourselves Guides rather than teachers because that is genuinely what the role demands of us - not standing at the front of a room delivering information, but walking alongside students, asking the right questions at the right moments, and creating the conditions for real learning to happen. Building an education model this different from the conventional classroom has never been a one-time act. It has been a living, evolving process - testing, revising, and rebuilding curriculum year after year, staying responsive not just to what we believe in theory but to the actual children and families in front of us. Envision has grown the way any good community grows: by listening, by being embedded in the Rogue Valley and Williams communities we call home, and by responding honestly to what students and families have needed at each stage along the way.

At the heart of everything Mike, Amy, and Cara believe is the conviction that children learn best through direct experience - through building, making, investigating, and spending real time outside, not as an occasional field trip but as a fundamental part of how education happens. We have watched, year after year, what becomes possible when young people are given real responsibility, real challenges, and real time in the natural world: confidence grows, curiosity deepens, and learning stops being something that happens to a child and starts being something a child does for themselves. Every block, every trip, every project at Envision carries forward what Mike and Amy first understood in Ethiopia and confirmed in the Little Applegate - that real education and real community cannot be separated, and that the natural world remains one of the most powerful teachers a young person can have.

Over the years, Envision has been privileged to host an incredible network of Guides - guest Guides, temporary Guides, and lead Guides - each bringing their own unique perspective and a deep, genuine capacity for mentorship. We are profoundly grateful for the time, talent, and care these Guides have brought to Envision, and for the ways they have helped shape who we are. To this day, we maintain a strong network of Guides who serve as guests in our classrooms and step up whenever our capacity calls for additional support to fully bring the Envision model to life.