Enterprise, Oregon
A field note on curriculum, community, and the long arc of meaningful work
I love when a project arrives naturally, in a phone call you receive on the front porch, from someone you have never met who decided to reach out and explore what is possible.
Lisa is the executive director of a rural economic development organization in Eastern Oregon. She had heard about the Foundations curriculum and wondered if it was a good fit for her area's entrepreneurs. I was just stepping out on my own under the Birds Eye brand, having redesigned the tried and true business planning course I had been facilitating for years at Mountain BizWorks, and was ready to see where it wanted to go. It felt like the right conversation at the right time.
I flew out to Enterprise, Oregon to meet her team, train their facilitators, and introduce the curriculum to a community of entrepreneurs I had never met. The town itself felt like a signal. Enterprise. There are places that tell you something before you even begin. They even put me up in the Eagle View Inn. It was kismet.
Eastern Oregon is high desert terrain, wide open and quietly both beautiful and demanding. The entrepreneurial community is rooted in food systems, farming, and agriculture, with the nearby history of the Nez Perce in Joseph woven into the fabric of the community. Translating the curriculum into that environment, learning what it needed to hold and what it needed to adapt, was an opportunity I felt both thrilled and ready to take on.
The piloting of the Alpine program came next, a curriculum I designed for mid-stage business owners ready to go deeper. We gathered at a summer camp that Lisa had known since childhood. It was early May and I woke up to snow straight above my head in the little round window of the cabin structure. Entrepreneurs arrived for a long weekend and we settled in together, pulling tools from both Foundations and Alpine, designing as we went, training Lisa and her team alongside the participants. That kind of emergent design, where the curriculum meets the room and adjusts in real time, is where I feel most at home.
Years passed. Covid hit us all. The curriculum found its way back to Mountain BizWorks. Our community was hammered by Hurricane Helene and my work became deeply localized in recovery efforts. And then, after things began to stabilize in the hills of Western North Carolina, I made one final trip out to Pendleton to sit around a table with Lisa and her rockstar wingmate Sarah once again.
We exchanged stories of resilience from both necks of the woods and shared updates and adaptations to the curriculum. It felt like a completion and a new beginning at the same time. We updated the curriculum to meet their current needs and left the door open for future creative collaborations when the time, once again, is right.