Welcome to Wayfinding

Scroll down and learn about the movement to redefine higher education

 The Purpose of This Site

Wayfinding Academy was a unique, two-year micro-college located in Portland, Oregon founded on a two-fold mission: 

1. To help people figure out purpose driven work in the world and start doing it. 

2. To nudge change in the higher education system to make college better for more young people. 

The college served 85 students and operated from 2015 to 2023. 

The purpose of this site is to share the story of Wayfinding Academy and what was learned for all those who arrive here with interest, especially those in the realm of higher education. We also hope it inspires changemakers to action.

Looking For In-Person Consulting?
Many dedicated Wayfinding Academy crew members are still very committed to improving education and are open to consulting those who are looking to do the same. If (even after going through this vast collection of content!) you’d still like more information, please reach out to hello@wayfindingacademy.org

How to use our site: click on any of the chapters below and you’ll be taken to the section with more details. You can either click on “return to the top” to return to this section or keep scrolling to view other sections.

If you’d like to view or download a PDF version instead, you can download that here.

The realization of the Wayfinding Academy dream and experiment-in-action would not have happened without an incredible community of purpose-driven, passionate, dedicated, dynamic, (we could go on) and daring humans with so much heart. We hope you all know that you helped change lives for the better. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Founding team 

The brain trust! The believers. The friends of the good. Thank you, Michelle, Tina, Tim, Bjarke, Jefferson, Sean, Colin, Poe, Jedd, Gina, Jefferson, Sean, Dick and Jesse

Crew

A beautiful idea stays a beautiful idea unless there’s a lot of committed people to jump in and make things happen. Thank you to the doers. Tina, Tim, Bjarke, Jesse, Poe, Ursula, Co, Marzeta, Travis, Tiffany, Tiana, Jen, Jean, Elizabeth, Sean & Amanda, Jonathan, Ty, Felipe, Aliah, TJ, Angela, Erica, Louisa, Lauren, Christopher, Tammy, Amii

Students 

To all the students who came to Wayfinding, thank you for bringing and sharing your authentic selves, your desire to make the world a better place and your amazing creativity. A special shout out to those students who believed in Wayfinding in the first years, when we were still figuring out who we were as an organization. 

Faculty 

Thank you all for being willing and eager to teach in a new model and for your dedication to this unique learning community.  Dick, Jesse, Sean, David, Sarah, Emily, Nick, Felipe, Tiffany, Sarah, Lakeitha, Sean, Iggy, Jonathan, Aria, Aliah, Rachel, Todd, Christopher, Lauren, Corey, Angela, Ralph, Erica, and Ryan

Guides

You sat with Wayfinding students through the ups and downs. Thank you for listening and thank you for sharing your compassion and wisdom.  Poe, Emily, Nick, Tiffany, Sarah, Felipe, Tiana, Jean, Lauren, Christopher, Todd, Sarah, Liz, Sheila, Robin, and Dey

Board members

It’s not an easy thing to be the ones overseeing something that doesn’t have much precedent! Thank you all for taking your turn at the wheel of this wild ride.  Jefferson, Ethan, Sean, Charlie, Cristal, Anton, Katarina, Ali, Judith, Carol, Matthew, Joshua, Sue, Annie, Tucker, Luke, Greg, Christopher, Jason, Co, Ombrea and Jeff

Luminaries

There have been so many wonderful people all over the world who not only supported us once, but over and over again!

Thank you for your incredible generosity and consistency. You really did light the way for this work. 

Major donors
Without you, we wouldn’t have gotten started or kept going. For real. Thank you, Lee & Kathy, Jim, Sean, Ryan, Oliver, Dinsmore Family, Chrissy, Robbi, Trish, Judith, Ali and Maurice, David, Matthew, Ana, Clarence

Organizational donors

Big thanks to the people behind the Larson Legacy Foundation, Jackson Foundation, Healy Foundation, Autzen Foundation, Collins Foundation, Marie Lamfrom Foundation and Metro Central

Dedicated Volunteers

All you behind the scenes, selfless helpers, we see you and we love you! Thank you, Sigfried, Jill, Jessica, Drishti, Mary, Grace, Dick, David and Ciaran

Live Your Life on Purpose, LLC (LYLOP) 

The people who gave us a vibrant home to help make a vision real. Thank you, Sean, Jefferson, Gina, and Sean

Oregon Higher Education Commission (HECC)

Thank you to the administrators we worked with at HECC over the years. You were wonderful and supportive and we are grateful to you for your vision and encouragement while still holding us to the same standards as all other colleges in the state.

Requirements for attendance at Wayfinding Academy: A high school diploma, GED or equivalent. (Applicants who instead completed a homeschooling or unschooling program were asked to submit SAT scores or ACT scores or complete the Wonderlic Basic Skills Test.)

A glance at Wayfinding Academy by the numbers:

• Number of years of operation: 8

• Total students served: 85

• Number who completed the program: 32

• Number of degrees granted: 20

• Average age (at enrollment) of students served: 22

• Gender identity: 36 female, 31 male, 16 nonbinary

• Student Race/Ethnicity Identity (note - some individuals checked multiple categories): 1 Pacific Islander, 1 Middle Eastern, 3 Hispanic, 4 Multi-Racial, 5 Native American, 7 Asian, 9 Black, 62 White 

• Community Workshops (Labs) held: 79

• Core courses offered: 48

• Internships completed by students: 55

• Learn & Explore Trips: 12 

• Number of people employed by Wayfinding: 60

• Total amount of money raised: ~$1.1 Million

• Largest annual operating budget: $484,904 (Year 5 - 2020/2021 Academic Year)

Overview: How Wayfinding Academy Began

It Started with Questions

How can we make college better for more of our young people? How can we make it more human? More adventurous and more practical at the same time? More about exploration, cultivation and curiosity and less about ticking boxes or doing what’s expected? These are the types of questions that brought Wayfinding Academy (aka Wayfinding College) into being.

They started in the head of Michelle Jones, Ph.D, in the course of her 15 years as a professor in mainstream higher education and gained momentum as she took a leap, left her professorship and gathered a community of professionals and kindred spirits (many from her work with World Domination Summit) to begin working on potential answers. And then, in 2015, Wayfinding Academy was crowd-funded into existence due to tremendous grassroots support for the ideas Michelle and her team had set forth.

From Idea to Cohort One

The journey from initial spark to the arrival of the first Wayfinding Academy students took just over two years. The idea for Wayfinding was set into action in June 2014 when Jones and two professor colleagues sat down at a kitchen table to discuss the problems they were seeing with conventional higher education. “[Working at a traditional college,] I could see student frustration growing about the system.” Jones said. “What I heard from them most often was that they felt that the system we have is backwards. They were being asked to pick a school first, then pick a major from a list, and then go try that out, often after being tens of thousands of dollars in debt. We wanted to flip the choices frontwards.” 

Other concerns at the top of the list included antiquated admissions policies, the insular nature of many college campuses, an assembly line approach to the student journey and a lack of rigorous mentorship. 

Two months later, with input from a few more, the idea grew into a draft document - core values and a mission statement for an alternative approach to college. Three months later, even more people gathered together for a planning retreat. After another three months, in February 2015, Wayfinding Academy was officially registered as a nonprofit headquartered in Portland, Oregon. 

“When it came to support for that initial idea, a lot of it came from colleagues I had while I was still working within mainstream higher education.” Jones said. “A lot of them felt that this was definitely something needed in higher education and that there were things in higher education that needed to change, so many of them said, ‘This is fantastic, go do it, we’ll support you however we can.’” 

Several months of successful fundraising followed and then an intense year of logistics, including finding a campus building, hiring crew members (staff), achieving state authorization to grant degrees and seeking and inviting students from all around the U.S. 

On August 29, 2016, the idea for a new kind of college was fully realized when 15 Wayfinding Academy students walked on to campus for their first day of orientation. Cohort One had arrived. 

Overview: College On a Human Scale

The Wayfinding Academy vision, creed and mission evolved from the early groundwork of the founding team and were centered on creating a learning community that would respond to the one-size-fits-all approach of conventional higher education by not only changing the curriculum and flow of the student journey, but by intentionally keeping that community small and relational while also encouraging a high degree of interaction with the community outside of campus. 

Maintaining college on a human scale would mean keeping cohorts to 24 people or less, creating a high degree of personal interaction from admissions through graduation, structuring feedback on narrative evaluations rather than grades, incentivizing community interaction through group travel adventures, internships, Labs (workshops) and collaborative projects, and providing each student with a Guide (mentor) to meet with one-to-one on a weekly basis.   

Vision

The vision at Wayfinding Academy: To help create a world where more people are doing purpose-driven work that they feel they’re “meant” to do - that they’re happy about that, passionate about it and contributing to society in a way that’s meaningful to them and their communities.  

Creed

The Wayfinding Academy Creed gave more shape to this vision while also leaving a lot of room for exploration and interpretation. It was created before the first cohort arrived in early 2016 and became a guiding document for the rest of the Wayfinding Academy journey. 

Mission

Wayfinding Academy served to further a two-fold mission: 

1. To help people figure out purpose driven work in the world and start doing it. 

2. To nudge change in the higher education system to make college better for more young people. 

From inception, there was passion at Wayfinding Academy for making a difference in the world at the micro level by helping a small number of individuals to live life with more purpose and at the macro level to improve mainstream higher education in the U.S.and beyond. Wayfinding Academy founding team members realized that this widespread change wouldn’t happen without many more people choosing to take action and so they held the intention that their bold experiment might serve to help individual students and provide some inspiration for others working in mainstream higher education to try out similar concepts and actions.

Overview: 

Wayfinding Academy was a grassroots community effort in many ways, but especially when it came to fundraising and finance. From start-up through every year of operation, a significant part of the budget came from broad-based community support from single donations and ongoing donors called Luminaries. Revenue from fundraising accounted for roughly 45 percent of the budget per year, while revenue from tuition accounted for 50 percent (with 5 percent coming from community programs). Perhaps the biggest difference between the Wayfinding Academy and conventional college approach was the absence of any endowments or support from extremely wealthy individuals. In addition, as an authorized state, but not regionally accredited organization, Wayfinding Academy did not receive the benefit of federal revenue from students receiving financial aid.

In general, the financial story at Wayfinding was a mixed bag. A lot of successes and bursts of momentum, but overall the organization was not able to reach a thriving point that would have resulted from the right mix of student enrollment and community contributions (especially enrollment). In the year prior to the COVID pandemic, leadership was seeing incremental improvement in this area but that was quickly reversed in 2020-21.

The Crowdfunding Campaign

The Wayfinding Academy crowdfunding campaign (through the Indiegogo platform) was one of the most exciting and pivotal eras in the organization's history. Through the founding teams’ networks at TEDx and the World Domination Summit and the hard work of starting and running a well-executed crowdfunding campaign, the school’s launch received a lot of broad exposure and support. The Indiegogo campaign was launched in July 2015 from the stage of the World Domination Summit and ran for two months. It concluded after raising $206,451, which at that time was the most successful Indiegogo campaign in Oregon history. 

“I think the main reason for our crowdfunding success was that we had identified something that was bothering a lot of people for many reasons and we were doing something about it,” Jones said.

In addition, the founding team attributes the successful campaign to a lot of advance planning, tailored individual outreach (this was a big one), and a ton of follow up. The Indiegogo campaign helped propel Wayfinding from concept to reality, and in addition to providing resources for securing a campus building and hiring staff, it brought Wayfinding significant local media attention 

Financial Philosophy 

Guided by the Wayfinding Creed, which states that “all people deserve to grow without soul crushing debt,” the Wayfinding approach to finance was rooted in the desire to experiment with a different higher education funding model. Instead of one that keeps admissions departments scrambling to meet quotas and college graduates in heavy debt, this new model would aim to keep costs low and students out of crushing debt by asking community supporters to invest in student education to a higher degree, by offering students and families a lot of flexibility in payment options and by refraining from using payment collection strategies that would compound interest or cause any damage to student credit. If a student did not pay their tuition on time according to the payment plan they chose, we sent reminders and checked in with them in person, but gave a lot of grace. We once considered hiring an outside firm to collect unpaid tuition from students who had dropped out of the college, but in the end decided we did not want to go down the path of sending our current or former students to collections agencies. This decision meant that we relatively often had students who did not pay for their education with us. Most of this time this was a partial lack of payment or getting behind in payments, but in one case we had a student attend most of an academic year and never pay anything. This would often impact our budget in the very short term and we would need to find other ways to make up the shortfall, but across the years the total amount of unpaid tuition we had to write off was approximately $84,000.

Flattened Wage Structure 

From the beginning, it was a goal at Wayfinding Academy to achieve equality and transparency in pay as an organization. To achieve that, the college took a radical departure from the structure at conventional colleges, which generally pay a few administrators a great deal of money, some faculty a good amount, less than that to adjunct faculty and then much less to staff. Instead, Wayfinding committed to paying all employees the same amount regardless of role. The only exception to that was the position of president in 2015 and 2016. In order to jumpstart the new venture and operate within the relatively minimal budget, Founder President Jones opted to take no salary and extended a loan to the college in those years. 

In 2015, pay at Wayfinding Academy was tied to the calculated living wage in the region, which had been established at $38,000/year (Wayfinding set their wage to $40,000). That was increased to a max of $43,000 per year in 2022 although it wasn’t enough to keep up with the dramatic living wage increase in Portland due to inflation and the rising costs of living. As of 2022, the estimated living wage in Portland was $21.85 / hour. 

Cost of Attendance

In their approach to tuition, Wayfinding leaders sought to remove “sticker shock” as a barrier to attendance for students from low income backgrounds through payment plans and need-based scholarships while asking students from more highly resourced backgrounds to pay roughly the equivalent of average U.S. community college tuition. 

Wayfinding Academy tuition was initially set at $10,500 a year ($21,000 total for a two-year degree) and raised to $12,000 a year in 2019. For those unable to pay the full amount up front, monthly payment plans started out at around $450 a month and did not include accruing interest.

Because even $450 a month is still a considerable expense, Wayfinding Academy offered need-based scholarships with minimal paperwork. In 2020, Wayfinding Academy began the Free Tuition Initiative, which waived all tuition for Black and Native American students living in Oregon. No “proof” of race or tribal affiliation was required. This program was created because Black and Native American people were disproportionately impacted by Oregon’s white supremacist history and because college debt is a major factor in the racial wealth gap in the U.S. 

Fundraising Events

Fueled by the founding team’s background in event organizing and from a desire to create a relational community, many of the school’s fundraising efforts came in the form of events. One of the first fundraising events was the Find Your Way Party in August 2015 where a single event record of $43,000 was set and many guests ended up jumping into a swimming pool as part of an impromptu fundraising activity. The idea of inspiring “surprise and delight” became a tradition at major Wayfinding events, especially Orientation, Graduation and the annual Live Your Dreams fundraiser. Some examples included the inclusion of therapy pigs, goats, ponies and llamas (especially Caesar the No Drama Llama), an appearance by Portland’s Unipiper, a community marching band and confetti cannons. 

The Wayfinding Academy Live Your Dreams fundraiser was held annually each spring, with the exception of 2022, and served as the main fundraising event. The attendance was generally around 120 people and invitees included all crew, Guides, faculty, students, alumni, Luminaries (ongoing donors) and those supporting and following the college on social media channels. Live Your Dream events included silent and live auctions, tours, dinner and drinks and usually some form of unique dance party.

Grants and Organizational Support

In the first two years of operation, founding team members sought several grants and attended workshops to better understand the process. No grants were secured and the team received advice from multiple individuals and organizations that foundations generally don’t give grants to organizations that are less than three years old. Wayfinding leaders maintained connections to area foundations, provided regular updates and invited foundation staff to events. In years three and four, Wayfinding Academy Founder Jones increased focus on grant applications. Below is a breakdown of grants applied for and received starting in year three. (Specific foundations are listed in the gratitudes section). This was all accomplished without a paid grant writer position so it was definitely a learning experience! 

• Year 3 - applied for 10 | received 0

• Year 4 - applied for 11 | received 2

• Year 5 - applied for 12 | received 3

• Year 6 - applied for 9 | received 4

As with enrollment, Wayfinding was building some momentum in securing grants leading into the COVID 19 pandemic, but with a lack of dedicated position, grant writing was put on the backburner as the entire crew focused on short term strategies for organizational survival.

Fundraising and Finances - What Worked

• Engaging a strong core community of financial supporters 

• Crowdfunding the initial start up costs

• Securing many small to mid-sized donations

• Receiving some supplemental funding from small grants

• Forming long term relationships with local grant foundations

• Inspiring “surprise and delight” at major events

Fundraising and Finances - What Didn’t Work

• Reaching a “thriving” point financially - the college was undercapitalized from the beginning by approximately $500,000 and we were not able to close that gap

• Bringing in a broad swath of the community to partake in Wayfinding Academy events 

• Securing many large donations

• Raising significant revenue through renting and sharing the building space when not in use

• Relying on an individual founder/president to make personal financial sacrifice in order to make the organization’s budget work

• Maintaining a living wage for crew and faculty

Overview: Weaving College and Community Together

Wayfinding Academy was structured in a way to centralize and elevate several key ideas which the founding team believed were often organizational afterthoughts or relegated to extra-curricular realms in conventional higher ed. 

• Creating a true learning community is vital to the mission

• Fostering a strong, structured mentor relationship for each student should be a top priority 

• The organization should seek to weave college and local community together by inviting the local community in and encouraging students to outwardly engage as much as possible

• Instruction should prioritize hands-on experience in fields of interest and many deep discussions with those who are already working in those fields

• There is no better way to stretch minds and broaden perspectives than immersive, learning-oriented travel experiences to other countries and cultures
  
  

The Guide Program

The Guide Program was Wayfinding Academy’s means of providing structured, meaningful mentorship to each student as well as a more human, relational experience. During orientation, each student would receive a Guide whom they would meet with one-to-one for 45 minutes each week. In addition, all Guides and students would meet for 90 minutes as a group once a week. The mission of the Guide Program was to empower students by giving them the framework, tools, guidance, and support to help them gain self awareness, navigate the program’s academic requirements, build a strong portfolio, make connections, and move towards becoming a self-directed lifelong learner.

In one-to-one meetings, Guides would serve primarily as brainstorm buddies and sounding boards for student ideas related to their learning journey, accountability partners to help students set and follow up on weekly goals, assistants in navigating internal and external systems, and helpers in community networking and research.  

The weekly all Guide and student meeting eventually became called the Self Directed Learning Seminar, and was intended as a way to both foster internal community connection and provide a structure for students to gain useful skills that would support them in getting the most out of the Wayfinding journey as well as in discovering and trying out purpose-driven work.  

In recruiting and hiring Guides, Wayfinding sought out candidates with previous experience in facilitating adult education and mentoring young adults as well as those from a wide variety of backgrounds with a diverse range of professional experiences. Initially, all Wayfinding Guides were also crew members (staff). In 2018, the Guide position became separate from the crew role in order for the school to hire more part-time Guides who had other roles in the community to give students more opportunities for connection outside of Wayfinding. Wayfinding leadership found that this separation created communication and cohesion challenges and in 2021, the decision was made to revert to the unified crew/Guide model.   

Guide training consisted of an annual training that was usually two days in length. Because a Wayfinding Guide’s role was also to prepare students for their next steps beyond Wayfinding, the Guides were instructed to strike a balance between supporting students & offering assistance and letting them figure things out on their own. 

Key components of the Guide Program (and training):

The Guide role was intended to: 

• Help students explore who they are and what they care about

• Push students to keep asking “why” throughout the process

• Navigate the program’s academic requirements, including helping students in selecting internship opportunities, staying on track to complete required elements and in seeing how core courses might connect to their interests

• Ensure students understood portfolio projects early in their first term

• Help students develop systems for things to do when they felt stuck or wanting to embark on a new journey (questions to ask, people to talk to, etc). 

• Help students make connections through providing a direct connection, pointing students in the right direction of people to ask, or helping them brainstorm a list of ways to do this.

• Move towards becoming a self-directed lifelong learner
  

Guides were cautioned that the role was not to:

• Be in a parent or best friend role for a student

• Tell students what they were or were not motivated by or interested in. Guides were trained to let students draw their own conclusions, even if the Guide disagreed. 

• Force students to try new things or complete Labs or internships

• Do any course work for students or act as a tutor or proofreader

• Act directly on the student’s behalf in case of academic grievance

• To provide constant support of a networking relationship. Once a connection was made, it was the student’s responsibility to move that forward. 

• Solve all student challenges - brainstorming ideas was encouraged. Giving students all the answers was not.

• Prevent failure

Instructional Approach and Core Curriculum

The instructional approach and curriculum design at Wayfinding was intended to provide students a foundation of self and world knowledge, critical thinking and skill development that would provide lifelong value for each of them regardless of the specific fields they chose to pursue. While the college maintained indoor classroom environments outwardly similar to small community college classrooms, the goal of classroom learning was to amplify guided dialogue, structured group exploration and interaction while decreasing reliance on conventional lecture formats. Toward that end, very small class sizes (student to faculty ratio of 9:1) and physical classroom setup (a one-level, circular seating arrangement) helped to foster this less typical approach. 

In addition to this general classroom philosophy, faculty and other instructors at Wayfinding were encouraged (and to some degree, required) to engage students in outside the classroom learning experiences through field trips, outdoor activities and off-site programming. Faculty were also encouraged to bring in guests to diversify the voices involved in the class experience.

Instead of issuing standardized textbooks, Wayfinding faculty chose a customized variety of books, audio, video and other media as teaching tools. Another key element of the Wayfinding philosophy was to use projects and narrative evaluations instead of quizzes, tests or grades in order to improve knowledge retention, better demonstrate learning and provide valuable feedback on student educational habits, engagement and effort. 

The nine core courses offered at Wayfinding consisted of:

• Introduction to Wayfinding (initially called Wayfinding 101) - This course is focused on helping students uncover their passions and establish a starting point to become  agents for positive change in the world or in their community.

• Understanding our World - Through reading, writing, and facilitated  discussion, students explored contemporary questions related to race, class, sexuality, ability, and gender to clarify personal values and discover the promise (and challenge) of global diversity.

• Understanding Ourselves and Others - This course aimed to give students a better understanding of their personality, perceptions, and motivations as well as how teams best function and form a strong culture.

• Communicating Effectively - This course  developed student ability to focus on outcome, tune in to an audience and develop a message in written and spoken form. 

• Engaging with Information - An introduction to basic research skills set in the 21st century, focused on understanding the scientific method, accurately sorting good information from bad while making fast use of the Internet and other sources of information.

• Science, Technology, and Society - The goal of this course was to develop a foundational understanding of our world’s most pressing technoscientific challenges while also fostering a critical approach.

• Making Good Choices - Students used lenses and tools drawn from the  fields of conflict resolution, economics, social psychology, and sociology to focus on and clarify personal challenges and choices. 

• Designing Our Future (initially called Futures and Citizenship) - This course aimed to help students develop a deeper understanding of sustainability through the lens of environmental science while exploring the power of social movements to solve environmental problems, offer hope, and change the world.  

• The Good Life - This course examined the enduring question “What is the Good Life?” from the perspectives of the humanities.Topics include the cost of the good life, how people have chosen to live as members of local and global communities, and conceptions and expressions of beauty, power, love, and health. 

• Foundations of Resilience - Life delivers challenges to all living things. This course was designed to explore and help provide tools to assist students in creating a process to move through difficulty. 

In total 48 core courses were offered in Wayfinding’s history.

Academic Calendar

The academic calendar was based on a trimester system, with three terms in each academic year. Fall term began the last week of August, Winter term started the second week of January and Summer term began at the end of April or very beginning of May. New cohorts generally began in the Fall and Winter although the pandemic messed with that timing. The trimester system was an intentional choice in order to facilitate multiple yearly opportunities for students to take part in Wayfinding travel opportunities or travel home to visit family and friends.

Wayfinding class schedules operated under a quarter system with each term consisting of 12 weeks. Core classes were typically held during the day Mondays through Thursday, usually between 10 am to 1 pm although each incoming cohort had some input into class schedule. Thus, Wayfinding students were typically in class from 10 am to 1 pm four days per week and also taking some Labs in the evenings or on weekends.

Labs 

Wayfinding Labs were 12-hour public workshops taught by expert faculty and designed to dive into a specific subject or skill set in a small group setting. They were conceived as a way to bring in a broad array of local experts to help students stretch their minds, learn new skills and build on existing knowledge. They typically took place over the course of a weekend or series of weeknights, and were open to both enrolled Wayfinding students and members of the wider community for a rich mix of perspectives. In total, Wayfinding held 79 Labs in its history. 

Some examples of Wayfinding Labs: 

Internships

The internships element at Wayfinding was intended to actively assist students both in expanding their networks and in trying on the various passions and purposes they were uncovering as part of their journey. In order to get practical experience and understanding of their fields of interest, students were encouraged to undertake a significant experiential learning opportunity with a company, non-profit, governmental, or community-based organization. 

Alternatively, students could opt for a self-directed learning project where they would co-design a significant project that combines multiple areas of interest to prepare them for their next steps  after Wayfinding in their chosen field. 

On either route, students were asked to produce a critical reflection on their internship or project experience demonstrating how they addressed specific learning goals.

While students were asked to do the legwork for outreach and application in securing an internship, Wayfinding Academy provided support in research, evaluation and connection. The college maintained connections with many organizations that were believed to be a good match for students and students were provided access to a comprehensive, tailored list of organizations that offered intern opportunities. Students seeking self-directed project mentors would be provided a list of passionate Wayfinding Luminaries (core supporters) with backgrounds in various areas who were eager to work with students. Wayfinding students completed 55 internships in total. 

Travel and Adventure

Again favoring practical experience and getting out of comfort zones, Wayfinding Academy incentivized travel and adventure through their Learn & Explore Trip program. While they were not mandatory credit bearing activities, Learn & Explore trips were opportunities for Wayfinding students and supporters to engage in multi-day experiences that included learning and stretching opportunities. The trips took place during the three months that students were on break from classes -- April, August, and December. Mini Learn and Explore trips were also offered throughout the year.

Other than an annual spring pilgrimage to walk the Camino de Santiago in Portugal and Spain, the individual trip destinations were selected through an internal community submission and vote process. Once destinations were chosen, sign-up was first offered to Wayfinding College students, alumni, crew, faculty, board members, and Luminaries. Additional space was opened up to the general community at a slightly higher rate. Although students were asked to pay for the trips, they were offered the lowest rates. Each time a trip was offered, the college also offered two to three student scholarships that reduced the trip cost to approximately half price. In addition,  travel hacking and travel planning workshops were offered annually so students could learn how to build these skills in order to travel affordability on their own beyond their attendance at Wayfinding.

Other international Learn & Explore Trip destinations included Tuscany, Ghana, Hong Kong, Macau, Chiang Mai, and Bangkok. Domestic trips included the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, a Civil Rights tour through Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Washington D.C. as well as a trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Student Portfolios

As part of the student journey Wayfinders were asked to develop an online portfolio as a way to show the world (and themselves) who they are and what they can do. It was designed to be easily shared with family members, friends, prospective employers, mentors, admissions

programs, etc. By graduation, the goal was for each student to have completed a portfolio of at least eight projects that they would create and select with brainstorming assistance from their Guide. Students could also opt to create their own website that would serve as a portfolio equivalent. 

Public speaking, small business start-up, fundraising, documentary film-making, event planning, teaching, writing, community organizing -- these were just a few of the skills Wayfinding students developed and displayed through a diverse range of portfolio projects.

A few examples of submitted portfolio projects at Wayfinding included:

• Planning, promoting, executing and documenting an upcycled fashion show and concert

• An animated biography of an immigrant grandparent

• A project on the mechanics and potential of Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors, in order to better understand whether they can play a major part of a sustainable energy future.

• A 10-minute documentary on the origins of plastic, based on deep research into the history behind its widespread use and how it wreaks havoc on ecosystems.

• A prose, poetry and storybook titled, “Growing Pains.”

Degrees Granted

Wayfinding Academy granted an Associates of Arts Degree in Self and Society to students who completed a full set of credits over the course of the two-year program. It required a total of 90 credits. The five credit bearing elements included: 

• Core Curriculum - Nine core courses worth six credits each for a total of 54 credit hours. 

• Labs -  Six Lab credits per year for a total of 12 Lab credit hours. 

• Internships and Self & Society Projects - This element required completion of two separate three-credit internships or Self & Society Projects for a total of six credits. Each three credit element required 108 hours of coursework including on site working time (for the internship), journals, a final presentation and/or project to be added to their portfolio, and meetings with their internship site supervisor or Self & Society Project faculty supervisor.

• Advising and Portfolio (aka the Guide Program) - Degree-seeking students enrolled in three credits of Advising & Portfolio each term for a total of 18 credits (three credits per term for six terms) over the two year program. This included weekly attendance in one-to-one and group Guide meetings. In addition, students were asked to spend six hours outside of class time creating  reflections and building their portfolio collection of work completed during the Wayfinding program, namely projects completed in their core courses and Labs. 

Student Evaluations

As mentioned above in the Instructional Approach section, Wayfinding faculty and instructional leaders employed narrative student evaluations rather than quizzes, tests or grades. Organizational leaders believed this approach would provide more comprehensive and valuable feedback for students, and would more closely resemble evaluative systems they would encounter in most professional fields. 

In addition, with a primary purpose to assist in the intellectual and personal development of students and prepare them for extraordinary lives as engaged citizens, Wayfinding leaders did not believe grades accurately represent the complex process of learning and development that students undergo. In fact, they believed that the assumption that letter grades are equivalent to learning or growth is often detrimental to the development of students. 

Instead, the school used a number of metrics to assist in evaluating the learning and development of students and the effectiveness of the overall curriculum. Student narrative evaluations were a primary tool. Students were asked to complete inventories throughout the two-year program to assess their development relating to the desired learned outcomes of the curriculum. 

An example of a narrative transcript (with fictionalized name) can be found here. 

For even more details on structure and programming, refer to page 29-32 of the 2021-2022 Wayfinding Academy College Catalog. 

Other Experimental Programs

Lifefinding

The Lifefinding program was created a few years after Wayfinding launched because we kept getting the same comment from people who were in mid-life or later transitions: "I wish there was a Wayfinding when I was in school.” 

So we created a program to see if we could help folks who were in those life stages, such as those who were experience work burnout, who were considering a new path, who felt uncertain about life after [retirement, pandemic, empty nest, etc.] or who were just generally seeking a sustainable source of energy and focus or who wanted to realize post-adversity growth.

The course would provide practical exercises and tools to participants who were seeking to (re)design their work and life with insight and intention. It involved a mix of small group and one-to-one interaction that provided for connection, creativity and brainstorming. The goal of the course was to help participants feel more purposeful, energized, meaningfully connected to others and confident in their next steps.

The first and second Lifending courses were held in Portland in 2019 and 2020. The third was a “Lifefinding on Location” course was held in Loughborough, England in 2022.

Far-a-Wayfinding

This program probably wouldn’t have happened without the COVID pandemic and it was one of the loveliest silver linings that came about for Wayfinding. The idea came about during lockdown when our crew was brainstorming ways to continue to try and help students (and keep the college going). Although Wayfinding leaders had never intended to host a virtual program, they wondered if they could create a temporary online course that would bring some of the magic of the in-person program to young people far away. 

They took core elements from the two-year program and restructured them into an eight-week remote learning educational experience. It involved two main components:

Intro to Wayfinding course - An opportunity for participants to uncover their passions and establish a starting point to become an agent for positive change in the world.

Weekly one-on-one Guide meetings - Even within the online format, Wayfinding leaders believed that forming strong relationships with students was the best way to help them grow and increase their own sense of agency. Every Far-a-Wayfinding participant was paired with a Guide who met with them for 30-45 minutes every week to truly get to know them and provide personalized support.

After a strong initial reception of the pilot Far-a-Wayfinding program in 2020, the course was held two more times

The People

The general overall structure of roles and decision making at Wayfinding Academy was similar to many other small nonprofits. The board would serve as a governing, oversight and (ideally) fundraising body with a founder/president role reporting to the board and serving as the lead administrator responsible for crew (staff) selection and development, oversight and day to day operations.

In practice, while the nonprofit structure was a familiar one, Wayfinding Academy leaders sought to create a collaborative culture that would seek to better elevate all voices and lean less on traditional workplace hierarchies and divisions (hence the choice to use the word “crew” rather than “staff”, etc.). This was evident in the Wayfinding approach to decision making with examples such as students being involved in hiring and interview teams, shared cleaning responsibilities amongst all crew positions and students and rotating the facilitator/leadership role for weekly meetings amongst all crew. 

The Structure - What Worked

• The one-on-one Guide meetings had high impact and helped students form strong mentorship relationships 

• In the first few years, students were highly engaged in nearly all the structural elements  

• Structuring the academic calendar to have 12 weeks on then a lengthy break of at least a month in between terms gave everyone a chance to rest and reflect before starting the next term

• The chosen class schedule left plenty of time open for students to do internships or work jobs if they needed or wanted to

• Faculty got to know students personally and worked closely with them on their projects as well as life goals and students learned the value of forming strong relationships with their faculty (an approach those who later attended another college usually continued)

• People who chose to work for Wayfinding were highly dedicated to the mission and purpose-driven work 
  
  

The Structure - What Didn’t Work

• The Self Directed Learning Guide Group weekly sessions never achieved a clear purpose and effectiveness and in the later years attendance at those was minimal

• In general, especially during the pandemic, student engagement in structural elements began to wane, especially internships, Labs and portfolio projects

• Some students ended up desiring mostly the community aspects of Wayfinding and therefore engaged less in the credit bearing elements. The ratio of these students increased dramatically from 2020 onward, which became disruptive to those who valued academic elements in such small cohorts. 

• The college was understaffed for most of its existence due to not having enough funds to hire more full-time crew members

The Wayfinding Academy campus was a large, turn-of-the century building and surrounding grounds that formerly housed a YWCA, and the Wayfinding community worked together over the years to transform the sterile space into a colorful and cozy home base. 

And while the campus building was a place of comfort and connection, students were also encouraged to embrace the local neighborhood and engage in community building efforts as much as possible. Examples of these efforts included regular orientation tours of the public library next door for incoming students, a neighborhood intersection painting co-led by Wayfinding students, hosting a community free fridge and engagement with the nearby elementary school, resource center and transitional supportive housing community. 

In addition, students were highly encouraged to engage in their own space-making on campus in order to tailor the environment to their individual cohort needs and desires. As a result, students led or participated in most of the space making efforts at the Wayfinding campus, including the creation of an enormous mural in the main event space, selection and inclusion of furniture in common spaces, painting, renaming and revamping “The Dungeon”, a cozy (but objectively creepy at night) basement room that often served as the informal entertainment student commons.

Student Housing

Student housing was not provided on the Wayfinding campus, mainly due to limited start-up resources and, to a lesser extent, because leaders felt that it might provide an opportunity for students to learn and exercise valuable life skills. The college did create and offer students a resource guide to help them find housing, and if they needed temporary housing in between moves, they were connected with Luminaries who were willing to host them. In 2015, the St. Johns neighborhood where the campus was located was the most affordable area in Portland, which was a factor in choosing the location. Most students, especially in the first few years, lived within walking distance or within a 15-minute bus ride or drive.

Overview: A More Personal, Flexible Approach

Wayfinding Academy sought to take a very different approach to the recruiting policies and culture of conventional colleges. Founding leaders envisioned a more personal, interactive system that would engage with potential students as whole humans who did not need to earn the right to a great education because all people deserve that. When crafting their own system, Wayfinding leaders looked at it from the perspective of whether their college program would be the right match for potential students depending on their specific goals, desires and needs. Hence, they created a Matchmaking Department, led by a Lead Matchmaker. In their words, “We are matchmakers, not gatekeepers.”

The matchmaking process was intended to provide potential students with the opportunity to not only learn about the programming and educational approach, but to also get to know the people inside the organization. Similarly, the process was meant to help Wayfinding matchmakers get a deeper understanding of potential students beyond how they presented on paper. More flexibility was also built in, such as inviting students to make verbal applications in lieu of written ones.  

The Matchmaking Guiding Principles included: 

• We are student-centered matchmakers looking to find extraordinary people who are the best match for the vision, values and curriculum of the Wayfinding Academy, along with positive contributors to their cohort and community. We are also focused on enrolling students who we are capable of serving at the given time in Wayfinding Academy’s development.

• The Wayfinding Academy team is committed to investing equal amounts of effort to that of students applying throughout each step in our process. 

• Our application and selection process will be as transparent as possible by including information on why we ask for each component, what criteria we are evaluating and when students can expect to know if they are invited to the next step and/or selected to join our first cohort.

• We will promote opportunity and fairness throughout the process by ensuring multiple team members with diverse backgrounds and experiences review each application and interact with potential students. Selection decisions will be made by this team, not at the discretion of any one individual.
  

The Details of “Matchmaking”  

In general the Wayfinding matchmaking process included 14 steps. More detail on these and the philosophy behind them can be found in this edited copy of a Matchmaking Manual from 2020. Some of the processes here were updated in 2021-22. 

Student applications at Wayfinding were also quite different from those at traditional colleges, and were designed to allow potential students to share aspects of themselves that they might not be invited to share in other educational venues. A sample (original) Wayfinding application is available here. 

This application was modified over time, mostly as later matchmaking teams made efforts to simplify the process and make it easier for potential students to access and complete the entire process online. From the perspective of engagement and relationality, the Wayfinding application process was designed to be more intensive than a conventional one. While it required less paperwork, it required much more communication and one-to-one engagement in the form of multiple conversations and interactions. 

Making Invitations

The final step of the matchmaking process was delightfully impractical, very human and intentionally not “scalable”. It involved just a bit more than sending a letter on very nice paper. The day the school would invite potential students to enroll was formally dubbed Commencement Day but became known as “Owl Day” after a founding team member likened the design of the magic of the process to the way students were invited by owl messengers in the Harry Potter series. 

The reason for the Commencement Day moniker was that, like many other processes, Wayfinding leaders wanted to “flip forward” the commencement day process. Invited students were presented with a custom box (in person, although this was not always 100% possible). Inside the box they found their invitation as well as a cap and gown. The idea behind this reversal was to demonstrate to invited students that they were already valuable humans worthy of celebration. 

A sample “owl days” script can be found here.

Seeking and Inviting Students - What Worked

• The ease and flexibility of initial application encouraged engagement by potential students who felt overlooked or not well served by conventional higher ed

• Many potential students were very expressive and open in their Wayfinding applications and relished the opportunity to present themselves as whole humans

• Many invited students expressed astonishment and gratitude for the highly personal Commencement Day invitations

• Having an in person experience with Wayfinding (event, Lab, personal tour) and making personal connections with members of the community made a big difference in how often students completed the matchmaking process completely.  
  
  

Seeking and Inviting Students - What Didn’t Work

• The flip side of lowering the gatekeeping barriers to application and admission was an influx of students who deserved professional mental health support that Wayfinding Academy was not equipped to provide. This became very pronounced from 2020 onward. 

• One challenge grew more difficult and remained unsolved over time: knowing which potential students would highly engage in the program and grow their own agency versus those who wouldn’t. Combing through volumes of past data didn’t seem to reveal any concrete identifiers.

• Hosting traditional style Open Houses or attending traditional style college fairs was not a successful way to connect with students interested in the option of a different kind of college

• The high cost of living in Portland became an increasingly challenging hurdle: providing resources to assist incoming students in settling into Portland, while empowering them to take agency in using them independently proved to be harder and harder to achieve.

• We continually tried new creative ideas to encourage prospective students to successfully progress through the process (complete applications, scheduling events, accepting invitations) - deadlines, incentives, reminders, introductions….none seem to change the increasing hesitation to commit to something experimental.

• Overcoming the money barrier - creative payment plans and community partner scholarships did make a small difference but many potential students decided not to attend because they didn’t have the financial resources. 

Overview: Creating Community with Cohorts

Once invited and enrolled, Wayfinding students continued to experience a highly relational, human-scale and engaged environment at the college. Individuals within each small cohort were encouraged to interact before orientation through facilitated social media groups and upon arrival, the initial experience was curated to maximize community building within each cohort, among the cohorts themselves and with the broader Wayfinding community of crew and faculty. 

Orientation

As with most other processes at Wayfinding, the week-long student orientation process was designed to be connective, meaningful and immersive. The main goals were to show students how excited the existing Wayfinding community was to take an educational adventure with them, to honor all that arriving students had already done to be where they found themselves, and to build a strong foundation for the years to come. 

While there was always an onsite component in order to familiarize incoming cohorts with facilities and support community, Wayfinding orientations were mostly off-site and venues were chosen to foster a close-knit atmosphere and provide a strong dose of fun, outdoor, nature-based, experiences, such as swimming, boating, hiking, yoga and fire-sitting.  

All activities were selected in order to cultivate a community that felt safe, supportive and joyful. Leaders sought to create a mix of activities that were a balance of fun, silly, deep, reflective, challenging and potentially emotional. Common orientation elements included personal introductions, learning how school systems worked, understanding community agreements, team building activities/adventures, communal meals, understanding and establishing school rituals/traditions, collaborative art work, an element of challenge, getting students a “first success”, community scavenger hunts, role playing activities, practicing the skill of quiet, self reflection and discussion of conflict management.

The “What to Expect” Orientation List Provided to Incoming Students:

• Getting to know your Cohort, the other students at the school, the crew (and even some off campus Wayfinding community members) much better

• Exploring the building and thinking about how to take care of it

• Learning much more about how the 2-year program “works”

• Connecting with Guides and Guide Families

• Starting to practice the essential skills of a Wayfinder

• Going on an outdoor retreat

• Spending time outside

• Starting the first core class

• Workshops, games, group activities, team challenges

• Sharing life stories

• Opportunities for students to challenge themselves and to stretch

• Sharing meals with other students and crew

• Re-defining what it means to be a “good student”

• Personal reflection

• Choosing and clarifying first steps

• Chances to share honestly and listen deeply
  
  

Desired Orientation Outcomes:

• Creating a culture of belonging where students feel welcomed and embraced as an individual

• Establishing student connections/relationships with peers, staff, community members

• Spark student excitement and curiosity

• Help students see and understand WFA values into action

• Facilitate student understanding of the importance of diversity and celebrate it

• Establish a sense of place on multiple levels

• Assist students in creating a strong vision for why they are here

• Achieve a high degree of student engagement 

• Provide students a basic understanding of how systems in the city, neighborhood, and on campus work

• Help students feel empowered

• Establish an initial assessment of “where students are at” and how to best assist them in achieving goals

• All participants form respectful community guidelines

• All participants have fun

Graduation

At traditional colleges, grads who want to take part in their school’s graduation ceremony pay fees for printed diplomas and provide their own caps and gowns. That was not the case for graduates at Wayfinding Academy. (Especially since they would have already received a “cap and gown” ceremony when invited.) Wayfinding graduates took part in a free graduation celebration that included elements of surprise and delight, dinner, and carefully-prepared surprise gifts that were designed to help them with their next steps. 

The elements of graduation surprise and delight were tailored to each cohort and included a Wayfinding community marching band, a surprise limousine pickup, the return of familiar therapy animals, confetti cannons and special guests.

Graduation gifts were as diverse as the self-directed learning that took place at Wayfinding, including a full set of starter carpentry tools, attendance at a national writer’s conference in New York and a weekend skill-building retreat.

“Presenting our graduates with gifts wasn’t the most substantial way that we differed from traditional colleges,” said Founder and President Jones. “But it did represent the main idea of how we aimed to fix a broken system; by making it a top priority to focus on students as whole humans and by including them in a true community.”

Gifts would be presented by a speaker for each student, who would take the stage to honor the students’ journey and accomplishments before the audience of family, friends and community supporters. Video of the first graduation is linked here for reference.

Cohort Structure and Student Journey, What Worked

• The relational, personalized and custom journey created a strong bond within cohorts and a culture of belonging. 

• Launching strong with Cohort 1

• Many students reported enjoying and appreciating the weeklong orientation, so much so that cohorts requested a second year reorientation.
  
  

Cohort Structure and Student Journey, What Didn’t Work

• As with any close community, interpersonal relationships between members involved a fair degree of conflict resolution that might not have arisen in more rigid and less relational environments. 

• It was a challenge to create the same sense of community during the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced changes in several key elements of the student journey.

Overview: Measuring What Matters

When it came to measuring results and impact, Wayfinding leaders felt that traditional colleges were missing something important when only measuring financial success (of the organization and alumni) and test scores or grades - the importance of long-term happiness and fulfillment. In their view, it was the more important metric, as a financially stable alum could certainly report feeling miserable and unfulfilled, whereas if an alum reported a high degree of happiness and fulfillment, they were very likely to have enough financial stability to allow them to report those things. 

As they put it, “If we follow the traditional path of focusing on income above all, we will continue to perpetuate a system that sacrifices mental health, the environment and family and community relationships in the consumptive pursuit of endless growth. Changing what we measure is an important part of changing the world.”

Therefore, Wayfinding set out to measure student and alumni happiness, purpose and personal growth with just as much attention as they measured organizational financials and with more veracity than how much students earned after graduating. This process was formalized in the Wayfinding Academy Student Promise Survey, based on the Wayfinding Student Promise, which stated: “We promise to cultivate humans who are empowered to thrive throughout the rest of their lives. They embrace curiosity, are willing to stretch, understand the importance of conscientiousness, know how to create community, and live life on purpose.”

Those six core concepts were measured using 13 peer-reviewed, validated psychology surveys. Students were surveyed at the time of enrollment, half way through the program, at the time of graduation and annually after graduation. More specific measurement categories included: satisfaction with life, subjective happiness, optimism, moral courage, sense of purpose, sense of curiosity and exploration, conscientiousness, grit, personal growth, openness to experience, organizational citizenship behavior, compassion and positive relations with others. 

In student and alumni data available through the first three cohorts In fact, Wayfinding graduates reported improvement in every outcome measured, with big growth in happiness, life satisfaction, optimism, grit and positive relationships with others. On the metric measuring Wayfinding’s primary objective, to assist students in becoming more purpose-driven, alumni reported an average 21% improvement.

In addition to the Student Promise Survey reports, the college also measured and reported other basic demographic and program completion data. An example can be found in the Wayfinding Academy Start-Up Stage Impact Report, available here.  

Early Approach to Anti-Racism 

At its core, Wayfinding Academy was founded to dismantle the status quo that exists to serve a privileged few, and early leaders recognized and related that equity and racial justice work was fundamental to that mission. Toward that end, some of the elements and actions put in place during the school’s first five years included:

• Maintaining social justice as a focus throughout all core curriculum

• Establish a pro-actively focused statement of diversity and justice that clearly relayed how the college placed special emphasis on candidates from underrepresented groups

• Proactively seeking and hiring faculty with knowledge of systemic racism to teach students and help them have hard conversations about these complex and unjust systems

• Establishing an equal and transparent salary and pay structure for all

• Having an equity and inclusion specialist on crew (staff) 

• Offering flexible payment plans to meet students’ financial needs 

• Encouraging and supporting faculty in creating inclusive classrooms

• Using narrative evaluations and feedback instead of grades

• Using project-based demonstrations of learning rather than tests, quizzes, essays

• Offering Labs (community-led workshops) focused on becoming more knowledgeable about and fighting systemic racism (i.e., Deep Dive on Gentrification, Intro to Social Justice, Privilege, Oppression, & Solidarity, Hip Hop and Spoken Word Confronting Facism, Gender and Sexuality in Black Popular Music)

• Implementing a Labs pricing policy that acknowledged systemic racism and disparities

• Offering free use of rental space to racial equity-focused community organizations and other nonprofits

• Establishing an affinity support group for students of color

• Including equity and inclusion topics in every new student Orientation  

• Maintaining crew (staff) focus on equity and inclusion by making it a standing agenda item at weekly meetings

Evolving As An Anti-Racist Organization

As happened at many organizations, the racial justice uprising events of the summer of 2020 spurred Wayfinding students, alumni and leadership to reckon deeply with their positions, policies and actions in regard to racial justice. Students and alumni called on the college to be better and do more and leadership acknowledged that the school had been clumsy in attempts to support the movement and lost focus on some of its ideals.

Specifically, college leaders promised that the school would improve by becoming an institution “...that publicly acknowledges the long history and ongoing perpetuation of systemic racism and normalized white supremacy. (And) one that better reflects on how we have benefitted from that and acknowledges the debt we owe to Black residents past and present.” Additionally leaders would strive to help the college become ”a more diverse and active participant in the Black Lives Matter movement.”

Beginning in June 2020, the college implemented the following policies and actions:

• The Free Tuition Initiative, which made tuition free for Black and Native American Oregonians attending the in-person program and the Far-a-Wayfinding virtual program. Leaders ideally hoped to expand this initiative to students from other parts of the country and/or other racial and ethnic identities. For the 2020/2021 academic year, Wayfinding leaders chose to start with local Black and Native American young adults because of the unique history of racism in Oregon that had disproportionately targeted these groups. After launching the initiative, 6 students attended Wayfinding through the program.

• Offer a virtual Far-a-Wayfinding program to remove access barriers and engage in a more diverse and geographically distributed student population and provide flexible alternatives during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

• Began planning the launch of a second Associate’s degree program which will focus on social justice, equity, civic engagement, and sustainable futures. This program was not launched before dissolution.

• Ensure that job postings circulate first among communities of color in Portland. 

• Wayfinding crew (staff) collectively committed to attend professional anti-racism training sessions, backed by a $2,000 financial commitment from Wayfinding Academy to pay for learning resources/trainings.

• Include land acknowledgments at hosted events and in other communications.

• Facilitate an anti-racism language project where the Wayfinding community defined and researched approximately 70 terms to inform our ongoing community conversations - staff, faculty, students, Board members, and donors were involved in this project.

• Joined the Partners in Diversity and Portland Means Progress organizations in order to have more conversations outside the school’s own network, support the work of these organizations, and use their reporting tools for accountability. The training sessions and other opportunities were made available to all Wayfinding crew, students and Guides.

• Dedicated a portion of all monthly external communications to concrete actions the Wayfinding community could take to dismantle white supremacy to ensure that anti-racism continued to stay in focus for both internal and external community. 

• Create a permanent section of the college website devoted to racial justice education and resources.

• Hosted three anti-racism listening sessions with students, alumni and internal community to ensure that leadership was building action plans in partnership with them, rather than acting unilaterally.

• Purchased goods and services from BIPOC-owned businesses whenever possible, preferably those local to campus. Examples included: catering for events, branded items, consulting services, accounting services, and building maintenance services.

• Committed to working with internship hosts to ensure all student internships are paid. The goal was to better help students and to raise awareness that unpaid internships generally require a level of privilege for students to be able to access.

• Root development/fundraising approach in equity and social justice. Leaders looked to “prioritize the entire community over individual organizations, foster a sense of belonging and interdependence, present our work not as individual transactions but holistically, and encourage mutual support between nonprofits.” Inspiration and source material from: Community Centric Fundraising

• Include anti-racism commitment statements in every course Roadmap (syllabus) to reinforce with all faculty and students the importance of having an inclusive and anti-racist classroom.

• Committed to being a college that promotes anti-racism and actively participates in the dismantling of systemic racism in higher education.

• Provided an anonymous reporting form that could be used by anyone in the Wayfinding community if they witnessed something of concern. This form would automatically alert the President and the Director of Student Experience of the incident.

Nudging Change In Higher Education

As a small, experimental college with limited resources and attendance, Wayfinding founders knew that the school’s direct impact would be a tiny drop in the higher ed bucket. 

Wayfinding leaders were also firm believers that they were furthering ideas whose time had come and that many others were being simultaneously ignited by them. They were excited to play any small role in nudging and inspiring others to adopt and experiment. Here are a few of those ideas that Wayfinding crew hopes will continue to spread and gain momentum in higher education: 

• The creation and expansion of free tuition programs, especially for racial and ethnic minorities that suffer from historic and ongoing white supremacist policies. 

• Abandoning (or at least focusing much less on) standardized testing in admissions.

• Using more holistic evaluation processes instead of letter grades in both admissions systems and to provide feedback on student achievement and growth.

• Elevating mentorship and hands-on practice as highly supported and vital elements of the higher ed experience. 

• Grounding students’ education in their core values and desire to make a difference in the world, to connect with and get started on living purpose-driven lives. 

Impact, What Worked

• Helping students and alumni (especially pre-pandemic) in creating lives that they felt had more purpose, as well as moving the dial on other key core values and metrics, such as growth in happiness, life satisfaction, optimism, grit and positive relationships with others. 

• Implementing robust longitudinal surveys to collect the above data

• In general, especially for several students who had been chewed up by the rigidity of traditional education, helping them to grow in confidence and blossom into more empowered humans working to make their world a bit better.

• Supporting several first generation college students in completing the program. 

• Supporting several students in attending college through the Free Tuition Initiative

• Playing some role in drawing attention to and sharing innovative ideas and approaches in education and nudging change in conventional higher education. 
  

Impact, What Didn’t Work

• Wayfinding Academy was unprepared for the reality that some students and alumni, as they became more aware and activated to make social change, would practice and aim intense efforts at those that strove to be student and social justice supporters, such as Wayfinding leadership and other progressive individuals and organizations. In hindsight, preparing for this and developing robust systems and policies may have allowed more effective and productive communication and action. 

• Maintaining a high initial rate of student completion and graduation that fell in 2020 and beyond. 

Overview: Student Advocacy Versus Gatekeeping the Status Quo

Aye aye aye, what a process and topic this is! We certainly understand the benefit of having governing and oversight bodies to help ensure and certify that qualified institutions of higher education are truly benefiting students, providing them paths to strong futures and helping them learn and grow, not perpetrating fraud or fleecing them. 

Looking back after nearly a decade navigating the existing bodies that do that, it’s hard not to question if some of them have lost touch with true student support and advocacy in favor of becoming gatekeeping entities that prioritize protecting the conventional status quo (because many of the individuals governing those bodies operate in and benefit from the status quo.) 

Long story short - accreditation, especially the regional accreditation that is needed to allow student access to federal financial aid funds, is expensive and arduous, and we believe it’s a pretty significant obstacle to innovation and progress in higher education. The regional accreditation process was a factor in the challenges that led to our leadership's decision to dissolve. For higher ed nerds who want to dive deep, read on! 

Oregon State Accreditation

For this, we were authorized by the Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission (HECC) on June 14, 2016 which gave us the ability to award an Associates of Arts degree to our students. It’s what allowed us to begin the journey of doing what we do: shaking up the way higher education is done. 

This, however, was just the beginning of the journey to formalizing a college and receiving full accreditation. Going further in the process was optional, but in order to receive access to federal resources, an institution must be regionally or nationally accredited.

Regional Accreditation

When we first called our regional accreditation body in 2016 to gather information about the process, the staff member fielding the request said she’d never heard of a brand new college applying for eligibility in over a decade of employment, so it was a unique situation and many of the processes involved were developed many years ago, after the 1917 founding of the accrediting organization for our region.

At the time, some in our community wondered why we were pursuing an additional level of accreditation at all since it didn’t impact the way the college functioned since founding. And some asked if the process was even aligned with our values. These were valid questions that we considered over several years. Ultimately, we arrived at the decision to continue because of two overarching reasons: 1) it could be a great benefit to our students, and 2) we believed we could do a lot to work both on the inside and outside of the traditional higher ed model to change it.

For the student benefit, it was largely financial and aligned with the Wayfinding value to provide them with an affordable education. While the college had done everything possible to help students not pay more than they could manage, federal aid was another big tool in the box to assist students with finances. 

In addition, accreditation could assist Wayfinding graduates in receiving transfer credits should they decide to seek a four-year degree. Wayfinding was not designed for students who knew they wanted or needed a four-year degree to move into purpose-driven work, but it was something that several Wayfinding students discovered they wanted or needed. 

So when a student graduated from Wayfinding indicated they would like to continue their college education at a 4-year college and get a Bachelor’s degree, we attempted to work with the colleges they were applying to next to generate a transfer (a.k.a. articulation) agreement. We met with mixed results. Other non-traditional colleges like Prescott, Warren Wilson, Goddard, Antioch, and Evergreen worked with us and our students to transfer their Wayfinding credits into their Bachelor’s degree programs. Other more traditional colleges like Portland State University and University of Portland were not willing to create these agreements. It was a time and energy intensive process with lots of human interaction to get these transfer agreements in place, so having regional accreditation would have made it quicker and easier and less burden on the students and less uncertainty for them, which aligned with our values.

What the Process Looked Like

Once we graduated our first cohort (which we did in 2018), we were eligible to apply for regional accreditation. It took a bit longer before we submitted an eligibility application because of a series of events such as leadership changes at the accrediting organization, our need to hire a Provost and create an institutional succession plan, and a requested accounting audit. Once those things all cleared, we ultimately submitted our written responses to overarching eligibility questions issued by the regional accrediting body in Fall 2020.

These responses were meant to be the first step to determining the quality of our programming based on the benchmarks of the body as well as to understand both our long-term viability and stability as an institution. We developed a 66-page document answering their questions which, in truth, was an interesting process to showcase our model authentically within a question framework that was meant for more traditional and much larger institutions. 

An example was the type of unique data we showcased in our eligibility application. We didn’t track or measure how much money our students make after graduation. But we did track and measure their sense of purpose and happiness.

A couple more examples included the ones around institutional effectiveness--asking whether we evaluate and publish how successful we are as a college--and measurements for student learning. Because we didn’t issue grades or have traditional data markers to “show” effectiveness or evaluate student success in a numerical way, we indicated how we rely on qualitative measures that are true to our values. We even took some sections like the non-discrimination question even farther than the question intended, and showcased our work around social justice and anti-racism that had become a centerpiece of our approach.

It was an interesting process to show how we are different from other higher education institutions and even to, perhaps, show how one college doesn’t have to look like all the others to be effective and worthy of accreditation. 

After submitting these responses, we reached the final stages of determining whether we were eligible for accreditation. The last hurdle of the eligibility process occurred when a group of Wayfinding leaders, students and alumni spoke in a hearing to the board that reviews applications. The 20-plus commissioners of this gatekeeping process were mostly presidents at traditional colleges and universities that have already received accreditation. We showed up at this hearing in the only way we know how to do: authentically and with student voices front and center. 

Ultimately, Wayfinding Academy was denied accreditation by this body. While we can’t speak to the specifics of the reasoning in our case, we could talk about why a theoretical experimental college might be denied, and theoretically threatened with legal action if they theoretically shared any of the results publicly. 

In this theoretical example, a college could be told by a governing body that one of the reasons for denial was they didn’t have a physical library, even though a public library might be located right next door and even though  … the Internet. This theoretical college could also be told in so many words that they haven’t quite accrued enough financial resources. Which theoretically seems reasonable if a society wanted to treat educating its young people the same way it treats companies that manufacture fingernail polish for dogs. Also, theoretically giving that reason might do little to acknowledge the significant power a governing body has to assist small theoretical colleges by removing barriers to resources and growth.

The Wayfinding advice to that theoretical college would be to spend energy, time and money working with other organizations to change the conventional higher education machine. 

Credit Transfer

As mentioned above, Wayfinding leaders very much wanted to assist students if they discovered they needed or wanted to get a four-year degree after graduation. However, there was nothing black or white about this process and we found it very challenging to communicate the nuances to potential students in an easily digestible way. 

Ultimately, the following was the Wayfinding communications approach to this topic: 

“Wayfinding Academy is authorized by the Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission (HECC) to grant degrees and transferable credits. Transfer of credit to other institutions is always at the discretion of the receiving school, and generally depends on comparability of curricula, and may depend on comparability of accreditation. We are committed to working with partner colleges and universities to do what we can to smooth the path for any student who transfers to a four-year college after graduating from Wayfinding.

So, the short answer is yes, it is possible to transfer credits, but it’s not often simple and we have no control when it comes to whether four-year institutions will accept Wayfinding Academy credits, especially those where we don’t have existing transfer agreements. We do have transfer agreements in place with several four-year colleges that have shared values and philosophies where we believe our students could thrive after Wayfinding. These include:

• Prescott College (Prescott, Arizona),

• College of the Atlantic (Bar Harbor, Maine)

• Goddard College (Plainfield, Vermont)

• Warren Wilson College (Swannanoa, North Carolina),

• Evergreen State College (Olympia, Washington)

• Naropa University (Boulder, Colorado) *in progress

• Antioch College (Yellow Springs, Ohio) *in progress

• Flagstaff College (Flagstaff, Arizona) *in progress

The colleges in bold above are where some of our alumni are currently continuing their education. We are always working on relationships with more colleges and if a student has a specific one in mind, they can let the Provost and/or Chief Academic Officer know and we will begin the process of establishing a transfer agreement to make that process easier and more customized for the student wanting to go on to complete a bachelor's degree after Wayfinding.

We highly discourage potential students from thinking about attending Wayfinding Academy as a simple way to gain four-year college credits or to only attend Wayfinding Academy as a “shortcut” on that path. It is not our intention or purpose to serve in that capacity, but rather to help students identify their purpose-driven next steps and start down that path. If they discover that those include attending a four-year institution, we will do what we can to help.”

Accreditation Process, What Worked 

• Achieving state accreditation in Oregon was an involved process but ultimately one that made a net positive impact on our organization and students. The administrators we worked with at HECC over the years were wonderful and supportive and we are grateful to them for their vision and encouragement while still holding us to the same standards as all other colleges in the state. 

• Some students who chose a path that involved a four-year college degree were able to fully transfer all or most Wayfinding Academy credits to partner organizations, such as Goddard College, Warren Wilson College, Evergreen State College, and Prescott College.

  
  

Accreditation Process, What Didn't Work

• Spending years and thousands of dollars applying for regional accreditation and not receiving it was a pretty significant blow. 

• Several students in later cohorts expressed that they didn’t feel well enough informed on the Wayfinding Academy credit transfer process, and were initially under the impression that it was a viable path to easily transfer two years of credit to a four-year university

Ultimately, Wayfinding Academy was not able to fully regain the momentum, vitality and enrollment that was building pre-pandemic. And so, after months of deliberation over many Zoom team meetings consisting of board members, crew, core supporters and founding team members around the world, the decision was made to dissolve as a nonprofit college as of April 2023. While this deliberation period sparked a lot of creativity, ideas and enthusiasm, there was very little for continuing to operate inside the higher education system as an accredited college.

Wayfinding leaders wrote quite a bit about the deliberative process, organizational challenges and lessons learned along the way, which are all available here, along with much, much more in every blog post ever written. In short, the goal of the final deliberation process was to ensure that the community of Wayfinding could move into the next seven years with clarity, enthusiasm and joy. The decision to dissolve was the right one to allow that.

It’s true that dissolution was the end of one unique organizational story of learning and growth, which can be hard to put down, but Wayfinding leaders hope that others can glean inspiration and learn from it for many years to come. That’s why it’s all written down here!

And, of course, the ideal long-term vision for those who created and led Wayfinding Academy was not dissolution. And while the story of the organization has come to an end, organizations are made of people, and many of the people behind this story are far from being done working on their ideal long-term visions. Maybe someday, you’ll join them.

Wayfinding Academy leaders are grateful to all the journalists and messengers who took the time to learn about and share the Wayfinding story. Here’s a few of the favorites.

Want More?

Many dedicated Wayfinding Academy crew members are still very committed to improving education and are open to consulting those who are looking to do the same. If (even after going through this vast collection of content!) you’d still like more information, please reach out.