12/07/2026
My newest Unschool Adventures program for teenagers is called "Make Month", and I'm super excited because it centers on real, tangible, and vitally important skills for navigating adulthood—especially for teens contemplating creative, entrepreneurial, and freelance careers.
📅 When: March 9 – April 6, 2027
📍 Where: Dolores, Colorado
👥 Who: Sixteen participants (ages 14–19, flexible) plus three adult staff
💰 How Much: $3900
⏳ Application Deadline: August 31st
That's idea behind Make Month. The plan is to bring together 16 teenagers for 4 weeks, each of whom will create something that will benefit at least one real person, and has the potential to benefit many more. Each teen will start building their thing, and almost immediately they'll solicit feedback, both from the outside world ("test users") and their peer community. Then they'll take that feedback, figure out what to integrate, and go back to making. Repeat until complete!
Example projects include...
📸 A photography project that helps older people tell their life stories
🎉 A landing page for an event that you're organizing for other teenagers
🛠️ A website, video series, or guidebook that addresses a specific problem
🎙️ A podcast or newsletter that explores a topic dear to your heart
💡 An app or digital tool that people need (and no one else is building)
🐿️ an Etsy store for your hand-knit squirrel costumes
Most projects at Make Month will be digital because a laptop, camera, or microphone travels better than a pottery wheel. But fundamentally, as long as it can be made, tested, revised, and launched from a hostel in Colorado—and finished within a few weeks—then anything is possible.
The inspiration for Make Month came from my early 20s, when I was coming up with plenty of ideas for creative projects, writing, and businesses, but never sure where to put my energy. I'd build castles in the sky, spin my wheels, and eventually learn that no one was really interested in my version of what seemed important or valuable.
What was missing was feedback, i.e., contact with reality. I needed to get in touch with actual people who might be consuming, enjoying, and benefitting from whatever I dreamed up. I needed to do this quite early in the process, not late. Mostly I needed to get out of my own head, tame my ego, and learn from others, without sacrificing my voice in the process.
Make Month will happen at the Dolores Bike Hostel in beautiful southwest Colorado: a hostel that I just discovered in May on my cross-country bicycle tour, and one that's usually closed from November-April. I offered to rent the whole thing for a month during that time, as I've previously done with Unschool Adventures Writing Retreats. The owner was delighted. Soon after, Make Month was born.
I'll be working at the program along with two other adult staff. Our roles will be to organize meal preparation, keep the place in order, run daily meetings and small-group check-ins, and offer regular workshops about creativity, feedback, and the "design process" using material borrowed from the Stanford d.school. We'll also be creating our own projects alongside the teenagers, And our crucial final mission: stay out of the way! We'll be giving teens the time, space, and minimal scaffolding they need to exercise their creative and entrepreneurial muscles on their own, with each other, and in connection to their online communities.
And outside of "skill building," this is just going to be a ton of fun! The teens will get to make new friends, live in a cool hostel together, wander around a safe, beautiful, outdoorsy town in Colorado, cross-pollinate with other kinds of brains, enjoy a lot of freedom, and get into all sorts of hijinks. The simple act of living together for a month with other 15 creative teens and a handful of autonomy-supportive adults is its own education.
And like all Unschool Adventures programs—I might not get enough applicants to make this a "go!" (That's the "contact with reality" I deal with whenever offering my programs.)
The application deadline is August 31st. If there's enough interest at that point, it will move forward. If not, I'll cancel it and have two more months to figure out how I might use this hostel for another purpose. Maybe a retreat of a different kind for older people? Maybe something else entirely? Maybe nothing at all, and I just live off my savings next year?! Ah, the joys and terrors of the entrepreneurial process!
Applications are open. There's a link to the full description + application in the comments, or you can simply search for "Unschool Adventures Make Month".
📸: Unschool Adventures Writing Retreat 2014 in Crested Butte, Colorado. Photo by Damian D.
