PUBLISHED: 12:19 13 March 2020 | UPDATED: 12:19 13 March 2020

Blenheim Park School

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Blenheim Park Academy based in Sculthorpe, between Fakenham and Docking, was given the rating from Ofsted inspectors when they visited for two days from January 22.

The inspection team noted that behaviour, attitudes, personal development, leadership and management was good but that the quality of education and early years provision requires improvement.

The report, published on February 12, read: 'Since the school became an academy, leaders have taken effective action to improve all aspects of school life. There is now a stable staff team who work closely together to improve pupils' education.

'Leaders have recently undertaken a complete review of the curriculum in all subjects other than English and mathematics. They have gone back to the core of each subject and considered exactly what pupils need to experience to make progress. This is all carefully planned out to a good quality. It has begun to be implemented but is at an early stage. It is too soon to be able to tell if it will be effective.'

At the time of the inspection, the school had 87 pupils registered.

READ MORE: Ofsted inspectors have highlighted dozens of schools across Norfolk which need to make improvements.

Headteacher Nikki Taylor said she was pleased with all of the 'positive steps' taken at Blenheim Park Academy. She added: 'Our next stage is the implementation stage of our curriculum. We have spent a lot of time on it.

'This is a positive move and we've come such a long way - it's an on-going process.'

Ms Taylor said she was pleased with how positive inspectors were about behaviour at the school and she vowed to 'continue the good work'.

The report added: 'Leaders have raised the standard of teaching since the school became an academy.

'The teaching of reading is strong. Pupils' achievement reflects this.'

Staff was also praised for engaging parents and making sure pupils were 'knowledgeable about British values and what they mean in real life'.

Blenheim Park Academy converted to become an academy on March 1, 2017, and has not been previously inspected as an academy. It is part of the Ad Meliora multi-academy trust, which consists of three schools.

When its predecessor school, Blenheim Park Primary School, was last inspected by Ofsted, it was judged to be inadequate overall.

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Blenheim Park Academy rated as requiring improvement by Ofsted inspectors | Fakenham and Wells-next-the-sea News - Fakenham & Wells Times

The April 1968 issue of the American magazine Progressive Architecture and the May 1968 issue of the UK Architectural Design journal both featured a thematic focus on matters regarding education and architecture. The School Scene: Change and More Change was Progressive Architectures cover claim, whereas AD asked: What about Learning? The cover illustrations of both magazines suggested a technological overhaul of the traditional classroom, with images of computers cut and pasted into a print of a Victorian classroom at Progressive Architecture and a small television set worn like a wristwatch at AD.

Instructional and communication technologies ranked prominently in both magazines reports and case studies from the intersecting fields of building and learning, of educational and urban planning, of spatial programs for a rapidly shifting landscape of knowledge production and acquisition. However, the notion of technology that appeared to be most sought after was technology in the sense of environment, consumerism, and mobility.

Cedric Price guest-edited the AD issue on education (and contributed the cover montage). In his editorial essay, Price made clear how he wanted the change in the school scene to be understood. He attacked education, once an institution of emancipatory potential, as having degraded into little more than a method of distorting the individuals mental and behavioral life span to enable him to benefit from existing social and economic patterning.1

In the final paragraphs of his rant, Price admonishes architects to respond appropriately to a situation that requires a radical break with the established forms and structures of learning and education. Acknowledging the fact that learning can no longer be contained in four-wall units and limited to a particular period in an individuals life, Price claimed education needs to be re-thought. This resonsideration was supposed to attend to the conditions of a social and economic reality informed by technological change and marked by the spatial and temporal ubiquity of learning. For Price, whats key is the reformulation of the architects and planners roles, since their ideas of spatial flexibility, for example, dont adequately respond to the particular time management and privacy needs of a contemporary teenage student. Thus, the architects task would be to provide an individually operable space.

Regarding the transformation of the educational realm, the editors of Progressive Architecture put a similar emphasis on the expansion and the urge to change the attitudes of planners and architects. Introducing their thematic focus, they first offer economic and demographic data about the annual $52 billion paid for education by the US government, the almost-seventy million students between the age of 524, and the approximately two million teachers needed to educate them.

The coupling of econometric and demographic data was meant to be indicative of a new role to be played by the educational sector in terms of the political economy at large. The systems of elementary and secondary education, the editors venture, are taking on the attributes and responsibilities of civic leaders, sociological catalysts, and seminal agents for urban rejuvenation, as well as their traditional responsibilities for formal education.2

Like Price, Progressive Architecture asked for a new thinking as well as a redefinition of participation and interdisciplinary cooperation. Rather than programming separate schools in suburban areas, the journals editors argued, the school must be worked into the community fabric, and must become a contributory member of the community, both to help and ameliorate its ills and to enrich it through involvement with its life and culture. Repeatedly stressing the need for involvement was a way of saying that there was an alarming dearth of integration to be addressed by educational planning, or, using a more poignant terminology, that the social and political fact of segregation was educations main object. There is a feeling, the editorial further tries to explain, that education is being asked to purify all our national problems of racial injustice, violence, poverty, and hatred; to act as a sort of filter through which these impurities might be removed in the process of educating our children and involving their elders the process.

In 1968, education was invested with the hope that it could take on a central role in social and economic change, to become the therapeutic medium to cure the nations disease. In the US, the protests and organizing of the civil rights movement and militant black activism made inevitable the acknowledgment of the imminent social and political crisis of the city caused by racialized urban politics, suburbanization, white flight, and so-called ghettoization. Thus, before, during, and after the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the issues of race, class, and urban renewal were granted high priority on the agendas of public authorities and academic research in education, sociology, urban studies, and the like.

Looking for a response to the crisis of the city, education was considered the key remedying force, and with it the places and spaces of learning. If the analysis of neoliberal governmentality often refers to a depoliticizing educationalization of social problems, the governmental turn to education in the 1960s certainly preceded this contemporary tendency.3 The physical, but also the technological and social environment of education became the object of far reaching conceptual and planning activity informed by a reformist social and urban politics aimed at pacifying inner city unrest. At times, it even sought to heal the wounds of anti-black violence inflicted by municipal governments, their housing politics, and misguided educational policies.

AD and Price seemed primarily concerned with the reconfiguration of the spatiality of learning in the interest of individualized and, ultimately, uncommitted spaces of calm and potential self-education. Progressive Architecture was more openly looking for models of civic participation and the socially and economically generative role of education. However, the approaches certainly shared an interest in nonpedagogical, nonadministrative educational programming, as well as in the future roles of architects and planners in it.4

In line with such gestures of radical breaks with notions and structures of education, both magazines featured articles on the 1967 Rice Design Fete, a twelve-day-long workshop or charrette organized at the School of Architecture at Rice University in Houston, Texas.5 The first three previous iterations of the Design Fete had been devoted to community colleges, fall-out shelters and mental health centers. The fourth, 1967 edition it focused on New Schools for New Towns. The outcomes of this particular event are exemplary of a somewhat split consciousness: of self-proclaimed progressive design and educational endeavors that address the demands of social change, while at the same time disavow the political and social conflicts dominating the discussion in that period.

The event was co-sponsored by the Educational Facilities Laboratories, a New York-based consultancy agency on school building and educational economies funded by the Ford Foundation and long-time proponent of modular-prefab open plan architecture and the SCSD (School Construction Systems Development) system of flexible construction.6 The School of Architecture at Rice, headed by William Cannady, invited Charles Colbert, Niklaus Morgenthaler, Cedric Price, Robert Venturi, and Thomas Vreeland, as well as Paul Kennon, a professor at Rice, to team up with students from various universities joining the charrette to develop a project on the basis of different programs drawn up for the workshop by professional educators for new towns and their education systems.

The programmatic brief of the Design Fete as a whole was drafted by Albert Canfield and John Tirrell, two educational consultants who had recently been employed by the Oakland Community College near Detroit.7 Canfield and Tirrell were extensively cited in Progressive Architecture and published their article Goodbye to the Classroom in the May 1968 Architectural Design issue. They advocated the technologically enhanced programming of small learning steps, the constancy of learning as a continuing element in life. They also argued for the maximum utilization of all community facilities as well as of home study through portable packages, thus spreading communication among the community, so that it becomes an integral part of community living and the personal growth of the citizen.8

In their AD article, Canfield and Tirrell were convinced that due to an increasing effectiveness of self-instructional materials, the need for teachers and tutors will decrease.9 Moreover, they proposed a node for cultural/recreational activities in each of the neighborhoods as well as in industrial, business and commercial establishments. For them, education was on the way from the school building and moving into the domestic sphere, the workplace, and new leisure architectures: cultural/recreation centers will enhance and combine many of the cultural/educational/recreation activities formerly associated with separate institutions, such as the sports ground, art gallery, library, museum, elementary and secondary schools, university and factory.10

These attempts to think differently about education sought to overcome its institutional paralysis, the dependence on spatial conditions such as the schoolhouse, and become more geographically dispersed and temporally extended. However, Canfield and Tirrells proposals remained within a planners mindset. And while they were ingrained by a technological optimism that may have been critical of the established forms and designs of schooling, they happily went along with larger economic and urban trends.

As for the selecting the educational requirements of new towns as its theme, the booklet published about the Rice Design Fete claims : A new town presents an unmatched opportunity to explore new educational approaches and new ways of housing education without the constraints of continuity.11 The blank slate approach of unfettered planning and design in brand new urban environments was intended to engender transfers into existing cities. The program had no strings attached, and thus aimed to bolster the creative energy of the participants.

Among the leading assumptions of the Design Fete was the increasing influence of technology on the learning experience, or the issue of instructional media and electronic teaching assistance. Other concerns were the necessity to involve (or intermix) the educational realm and the community, and last but not least, the importance of mobility in contemporary urban reality, or in other words, the need to find ways of making the time spent in trains and automobiles educational.

Visualization of the proposal by the group led by Charles Colbert. Source: New Schools in New Towns. The Future, Progressive Architecture (April 1968).

Elevations and sections of the proposal by the group led by Charles Colbert. Source: New Schools in New Towns. The Future, Progressive Architecture (April 1968).

Typical plans of the proposal by the group led by Charles Colbert. Source: New Schools in New Towns. The Future, Progressive Architecture (April 1968).

Individualized education diagram, from the proposal by the group led by Charles Colbert. Source: New Schools for New Towns, ed. William Cannady, School of Architecture, Rice University and Educational Facilities Laboratories (Houston, TX: self-published, 1967)

Shoulder carrel prototype, from the proposal by the group led by Charles Colbert. Source: Progressive Architecture (April 1968).

Unsurprisingly, the results of each of the working groups happened to be quite different. Charles Colbert, an architect from New Orleans, and his group proposed educational towers constructed of steel pipe, for the envisioned new town would be developed by a steel company in relation to a new steel mill about thirty miles from Houston and was thought to evolve into a self-contained 150,000-resident satellite city. The Towers school facilities would be available 24 hrs a day, serving students at high-school level and above, including adult education.12

Plans show the proposed school facilities; the floors above these would house corporate offices. Although Canfield and Tirrell, the two educational consultants in charge of the program, were advocating the collapse of boundaries between institutions such as museums, libraries, parks, and the educational activity of the community, Colberts educational towers were considered to be bring corporate offices and schools too closely together. Whats more, even though the concentration of high school-level education in the community center seemed to respond to Canfield and Tirrells notion of the community node, it also wildly contradicted the ideas of decentralized, dispersed education. The Colbert group addressed this in almost satirical fashion, with its prototype of a shoulder carrel: a super-individualized learning device incorporating instructional media of all kinds, from television and tapes to computer connection, two-way radio, telephone, slide projector, and screen.

Model of the proposal by the group led by Paul Colbert. Source: New Schools for New Towns, ed. William Cannady, School of Architecture, Rice University and Educational Facilities Laboratories (Houston, TX: self-published, 1967).

Diagram of "movement through activities instead of past them," from the proposal by the group led by Paul Colbert. Source: New Schools for New Towns, ed. William Cannady, School of Architecture, Rice University and Educational Facilities Laboratories (Houston, TX: self-published, 1967).

Diagram of the "Grand Intermix," from the proposal by the group led by Paul Colbert. Source: New Schools for New Towns, ed. William Cannady, School of Architecture, Rice University and Educational Facilities Laboratories (Houston, TX: self-published, 1967).

Sketch of the computerized carrel cars, from the proposal by the group led by Paul Colbert. Source: New Schools in New Towns. The Future, Progressive Architecture (April 1968).

The individualized space of study has always been a particular task for designers of library and workplace furniture. Around 1967, it was already possible to conceive of a mobile learner interface with limitless access to audiovisual and textual archives, a sturdy precursor of what by has become everyones handheld wireless device. Yet freeing the individual from any larger architectural structure and entitling them to become this architecture resembles the nightmarish opposite of any community-centered notion of involvement via education.

Houston-based architect Paul Kennon came up with an educational plan structurally similar to Colberts proposal, yet different in its architectural references. Rather than designing towers, Kennon was drawing on the horizontal model of the suburban shopping mall. Responding to a brief by Dorothy M. Knoell, a programmer at the State University of New York and author of the 1966 book Toward Educational Opportunity for All, for a new town thirty miles east of Los Angeles, Kennons Educational Concourse was a university campus based on a notion of the university as a generator of community services.13

The multifunctional megastructure of the new town is designed as an urban strip with the educational hub as a kind of central machinery. Computerized Carrel Cars allow for speedy commuting for constant learners. The carrel car is in reality a flexible space, the commentary in Progressive Architecture elaborates, [a space] that can be attached to homes as study rooms, serve as a mobile study, docked at the school or drawn up in a protective semicircle like covered wagons to ward off the arrows of ignorance.14 In diagrams, the Kennon group visualized the intermix and the type of movement that would be an ongoing and total engagement with this educational-consumerist environment.

Mobile teaching unit, from the proposal by the group led by Thomas Vreeland. Source: New Schools for New Towns, ed. William Cannady, School of Architecture, Rice University and Educational Facilities Laboratories (Houston, TX: self-published, 1967).

Individual hand-carried unit, from the proposal by the group led by Thomas Vreeland. Source: New Schools for New Towns, ed. William Cannady, School of Architecture, Rice University and Educational Facilities Laboratories (Houston, TX: self-published, 1967).

Central control, from the proposal by the group led by Thomas Vreeland. Source: New Schools for New Towns, ed. William Cannady, School of Architecture, Rice University and Educational Facilities Laboratories (Houston, TX: self-published, 1967).

Child care center, from the proposal by the group led by Thomas Vreeland. Source: New Schools for New Towns, ed. William Cannady, School of Architecture, Rice University and Educational Facilities Laboratories (Houston, TX: self-published, 1967).

Individual study unit, from the proposal by the group led by Thomas Vreeland. Source: New Schools for New Towns, ed. William Cannady, School of Architecture, Rice University and Educational Facilities Laboratories (Houston, TX: self-published, 1967).

Drive-in study unit, from the proposal by the group led by Thomas Vreeland. Source: New Schools for New Towns, ed. William Cannady, School of Architecture, Rice University and Educational Facilities Laboratories (Houston, TX: self-published, 1967).

The group of Thomas Vreeland, who founded the CASE group in 1964 together with Peter Eisenman, Colin Rowe and others, was advised by educators Cyril Sargent and Judith Ruchkin to come up with a proposal for the subtle, minimally invasive makeover of an existing, multi-ethnic, but deteriorating community adjacent to downtown Houston. The program called for an experimental approach to manipulate urban space but refrain from razing the neighborhoods buildings or other ways of creating a blank slate from which to build anew. Starting from the assumption that all participants are learners, with no age barriers who tend to be dispersed, the rehabilitation of the community in decay was designed to be facilitated by the restructuring of learners time, attention to varied learning rhythms, and the potential displacement of learning facilities, even overnight, if necessary.15 The project was strongly informed by the educators ideas about a linear community school that would be equipped with cybernetic devices to retrieve and feedback on data from an electronic database. The purpose of such a linear school would be to foster development of personal qualities of independence, creativity, imagination as well as sympathy, reliability, and responsibility. In the community school the learner becomes free to search, to investigate.

Vreeland and his group abstained from the kind of architectural design and urban planning approach that Kennon and Colbert had opted for, although they share a certain technological optimism. Vreeland rather went for micro-interventions into the existing environment of the neighborhood and for an inversion of the spatiality of the traditional school model. A Volkswagen bus carries educational content and instructional technology to the learners in the city, rather than transporting the students to far away schools.

Through the image of the Volkswagen bus as mobile educational unit, Vreeland also inserted an, if implicit, commentary on the heated debates around the pros and cons of school busing in relation to segregation. Among the measures proposed at the time to desegregate the system were large, centralized, and integrated school campus structures, so called education parks. Such school centers were to be linked with more distant communities mostly by busing. Reminiscent of key events in the civil rights movement of the 1950s, the controversy around busing garnered considerable attention in the 1960s and 1970s. In the process, the image of the bus and of students being transported from inner cities to new suburban education hubs to benefit from integrated schools developed into an icon of educational politics across racial and political divides.16

For Vreeland, the portability of educational hardware was a key methodology to disseminate the school into the community and facilitate educational activity from the point of view of the learners, their interests and needs. But it wasnt only about turning around common ideas of the student and of schooling, of doing away with compulsory learning, grading, and other forms of educational control. Vreelands project aimed for urban regeneration rather than renewal. Their network approach was meant to be capable of functioning as a major regenerative force in the life of the community, a force capable of effectuating gradual social, economic, and cultural changes. At the same time, their project was expected to be productive in scientific terms. Designed as all-pervasive, the network was to touch the community unobtrusively at as many points as possible It works by feeding information about the community for scientific analysis. It forms a sensitive communications network.17

A typology or taxonomy of educational facilities became a tool to visualize and systematize the projects logic and economy, from the individual hand-carried unit (a battery-powered, transistorized radio receiver) to portable conference rooms, mobile teaching units such as the Volkswagen bus, prefab learning centers of different size and functionality, and the central computer bank, monitoring and programming center. The miniaturizing and modularizing of education by way of technological devices, prefab building systems, portability and mobility of spatial units, and centralized databases was a telling attempt at imagining the new town as an essentially nomadic, DIY trailer park environment, deliberately neglecting the symbolism of institutional representation. Immersed in self-organized, autonomous, interest-driven educational activity, this envisioned community is a piece of systems aesthetics, if not a fantasy of alternative cyberneticism. Although (or because) Vreelands project was the only one in the Fete about a multi-ethnic part of the city, it still transcended all troubling divides of race, class, and gender, generalizing the identity of the learner about everything else.

Kit of parts, from the proposal by the group led by Cedric Price. Source: New Schools in New Towns. The Future, Progressive Architecture (April 1968).

(OAS) Open-Air Servicing, from the proposal by the group led by Cedric Price. Source: New Schools for New Towns, ed. William Cannady, School of Architecture, Rice University and Educational Facilities Laboratories (Houston, TX: self-published, 1967).

(OAS) Open-Air Servicing, from the proposal by the group led by Cedric Price. Source: New Schools for New Towns, ed. William Cannady, School of Architecture, Rice University and Educational Facilities Laboratories (Houston, TX: self-published, 1967).

(IESC) Industrial/Educational Showcase, from the proposal by the group led by Cedric Price. Source: New Schools for New Towns, ed. William Cannady, School of Architecture, Rice University and Educational Facilities Laboratories (Houston, TX: self-published, 1967).

(IESC) Industrial/Educational Showcase, from the proposal by the group led by Cedric Price. Source: New Schools for New Towns, ed. William Cannady, School of Architecture, Rice University and Educational Facilities Laboratories (Houston, TX: self-published, 1967).

(RTS) Rapid Transit Servicing, from the proposal by the group led by Cedric Price. Source: New Schools for New Towns, ed. William Cannady, School of Architecture, Rice University and Educational Facilities Laboratories (Houston, TX: self-published, 1967).

(CESC) Commercial/Educational Showcase, from the proposal by the group led by Cedric Price. Source: New Schools for New Towns, ed. William Cannady, School of Architecture, Rice University and Educational Facilities Laboratories (Houston, TX: self-published, 1967).

Cedric Price had been invited to Houston with the knowledge of his outstanding portfolio of peculiar projects of designs for new types of educational environments. Potteries Thinkbelt, for instance, was a large scale project to convert an existing industrial site and its infrastructure in North Staffordshire into a vast educational network for 20,000 students, who he imagined to be hired as wage earners rather than paying tuition fees or receiving grants. Price brought some elements from Potteries Thinkbelt to the Rice Design Fete, where he developed them further. What Vreeland has called the components of the educational experience, Price named parts. For the project that he proposed on the grounds of John Tirrell and Albert Canfields program, Price also came up with a list or taxonomy, a kit of parts.

Using acronyms and little symbols, the kit of parts contained all sorts of technological devices from telephone headsets, slide and film projectors, and assorted items of outdoor and indoor furniture and architecture, including electronic display panels, a portable canopy, and bleacher seating. In his urban-scale taxonomy, Price listed (TB) The Town Brain: Central production and servicing for Educational Facilities (EF), (IESC) Industrial/Educational Showcase: Displays to explain industry to the public, (AL) Auto Link: Education facilities made available to private cars with radio, two-way telephones, and charts, (RTS) Rapid Transit Servicing: Education facilities in buses, trains, etc., including informational panels, and more.

His project for a Total Learning Environment with a Kit of Parts reveled in the potential of manipulating and modifying the urban environment to generate educational situations and place knowledge hubs (or nodes) at the most unexpected sites. A part of the educational landscape could thus be a wrecked car suspended upside down below an elevated expressway, or a boat mounted on the roof of a strip mall. Public parks were to be turned into educational arenas, stressing the equivalence of sport event and schooling; industrial or infrastructural buildings repurposed as screens on which industry would educate the public about what it does while hidden from view; car interiors or bus seats transformed into multi-media learning carrels.

The new town selected for this project was a residential satellite city of medium density thirty miles southwest of Chicago, located on a major radial freeway with a highly educated population of 200,000a population predominantly professional, semiprofessional, and skilled.18 In the article Price published in the May 1968 issue of Architectural Design, the Rice project and its brief had been replaced, while elements of it remained. Renaming it Atom, he abandoned the idea of the plannable finite town, and declared the concept of settlement built for long-term usage obsolete. Instead, he was convinced of the inevitable fragmentation of infrastructural servicing and increased individual mobility and personal independence, and sought to explore its effects on how urban societies are organized.

Price didnt entirely refrain from designing new architectural spaces, as is demonstrated by the LC or Life Conditioner: a simple, box-like structure to contain maximally flexible learning units and placed alongside the freeway. Price explains the typological background as: Two forms, box and tent. Box contains intensive teaching learning facilities and controlled medium-sized volumes food drink and CESC [Commercial/Educational Show-case]. Tentworkshops, laboratories, experimental buildings, etc. Boxes likely to be less frequent in Phase III because of growth of HSS [Home Study Station], while tents likely to increase.19

These presumably cheap, makeshift, highly flexible, and ephemeral structures were meant to constantly be assembled and disassembled and discarded once they no longer fit into an evolved educational way of thinking. For Price, the built environment was rapidly becoming less and less socially relevant, as it is based on ideas of economic growth unaware of the entropic nature of contemporary societies of communication. Fortunately, Price maintained, it is unlikely that education, now entering a period of mammoth expansion in scope and content, will wait around for such stultifying recognition.

Cedric Proce, Atom project: educational facilities network, 1967. Source: Cedric Price fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montral. CCA.

The Educational Facilities (EF) diagrammed in a 1967 drawing, however, show how much organization and geometric order seemed necessary to form the fragmented and de-differentiated urbanscape of learning. It also provided the kind of intelligibility or readability aspired by the community of planners and educators.

For Price, teaming up with progressive educators such as Canfield and Tirrell had been following Prices prior work from a distance and were about to adapt his notion of thinkbelt for their own planning of community colleges in the Detroit area. Their collaboration in the Fete proved inspiring. [The] value of this programme [referring to Canfield and Tirrells conceptual launchpad] at such a time, Price wrote,

is that it has enabled me to show that the built environment together with its integral artifactual kit of parts can help to increase the rate of fruitful fragmentation of educational servicing However the acceptance of educational servicing as continuous, essential feed to the total lifespan, does demand an acceptance of the fact that education together with other essential services must be made available in means and methods comparable with other forms of invisible servicing.20

This rhetoric of educational spaces and technologies becoming invisible or indistinguishable ran against any notion of architecture as built and a potentially monumental statement. Rather, Prices somewhat passive-aggressive de-centering and devaluating of more traditional ideas of shelter and brick and mortar containers privileges a decidedly environmental approach. His approach suggested a wholesale activation of everything towards a new educational functionality that already constitutes the urban infrastructure, from the micro to the macro level.

Like most of his colleagues, Price didnt speak much about what exactly he thinks could be taught and learned in this fragmented, entropic, splintered environment saturated with educational offers and incentives. The curriculum, it could be argued, yields in the training of a different attitude, an attitude directed towards an arguably post-institutional reality of learning. But this reality remained as patterned, albeit non-differentiated of a life-world as the techno-spatial environment it presupposed.

Diagram of the proposal by the group led by Robert Venturi. Source: New Schools for New Towns, ed. William Cannady, School of Architecture, Rice University and Educational Facilities Laboratories (Houston, TX: self-published, 1967).

Proposal to use billboards for education by the group led by Robert Venturi. Source: New Schools for New Towns, ed. William Cannady, School of Architecture, Rice University and Educational Facilities Laboratories (Houston, TX: self-published, 1967).

Town plan of the proposal by the group led by Robert Venturi. Source: New Schools for New Towns, ed. William Cannady, School of Architecture, Rice University and Educational Facilities Laboratories (Houston, TX: self-published, 1967).

Sketch of learning centers within the Educational-Commercial Strip, from the proposal by the group led by Robert Venturi. Source: New Schools for New Towns, ed. William Cannady, School of Architecture, Rice University and Educational Facilities Laboratories (Houston, TX: self-published, 1967).

Sketch of learning centers within the Educational-Commercial Strip, from the proposal by the group led by Robert Venturi. Source: New Schools for New Towns, ed. William Cannady, School of Architecture, Rice University and Educational Facilities Laboratories (Houston, TX: self-published, 1967).

In many respects, interpreting the new town as a space of learning, understanding urban education as educationalizing the urban, and making the presence of the school in the expanded field of the city unavoidable anticipated the proverbial notion of learning from. A year before Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour, and their Yale students started research into the cityscape of Las Vegas in the fall of 1968, Venturi developed a project at the Design Fete that displayed a similar interest in the semiotics and semantics of the commercial street and the futility of good design.

Carol Lubin and Ronald W. Haase envisioned a self-contained 150,000-resident new town halfway between Washington DC and Baltimore for the Venturi group, and called for a library-centered educational system. Responding to the brief, the Venturi group equipped neighborhoods of 500 families with twenty-four-hour Learning Resource Centers, one for small children, one for young mothers, and another for retired persons. These center facilities could be enlarged by the use of both mobile visiting units and closed-circuit television. Special plug-in areas for bookmobiles, artmobiles, scientific exhibitions, and healthmobiles to visit and service the neighborhood would be provided.21 Besides the basic Learning Resource Centers, larger centers such as Town Learning Centers, Senior Learning Centers, and major City Learning Centers were to be distributed throughout the new town grid.

The Venturi group also proposed even smaller learning units in the form of Service Stations. The architecture of these and the Town Learning Centers were to be simple, skeletal, and placed on the educational strip so as to be reachable by car and bus. Fully in compliance with the main street model of the common American settlement and the suburban town modeled after it, Venturi conceived an intermix of educational, commercial, and mobility systems, with the educational strip as the generator of the new town. A commercial educational strip arrangement for a new town provides a constantly diverting route for the pedestrian and the motorist. Rather than denying the existence of and the necessity for the freeway and the attendant jumble of buildings and automobiles, [the project] mingles education facilities directly with those for commercealong a town-bisecting freewayand creates a varied smorgasbord of attractions to compete for the attention of the pedestrian and motorist learner.22

Further archival research is necessary to ascertain how the proposals from the New Schools for New Towns Rice Design Fete were received in the respective circles of planners, educators, and architects. However, already in 1967, blending education into the consumerist environment of the capitalist city, embracing the suspiciously commercial as well as the neo-vernacular of the pop age, and suspending any culturally inherited divisions between high and low, learning and working, education and consumerism in favor of a model of the citizen as constant, life-long learner could be seen as an enervating, even obnoxious stance by critics of the culture of capitalist order.

On the other hand, the scandalizing of traditional, and particularly Marxist modes of critique and criticality as performed by Venturi and others could be read as an early expression of post-modernist avant-gardism. It could also be read as a sign of the refusal to be aligned with more openly political movements and organizations, or only an academic, political, administrative and managerial class that was increasingly concerned with issues of racism, segregation, and integration.

In 1967 Alvin Toffler, a journalist about to assume celebrity status for the 1970 futurologist bestseller Future Shock (written together with his partner Heidi Toffler), edited a collection of talks that had been delivered in a 1966 conference titled Schoolhouse in the City. It focused on the perceived urban crisis which was caused by the continuing racializing of space, real estate speculation and the mega-business of renewal that has led to the deterioration and ghettoization of downtown and urban residential areas, and the production of the suburban sprawl for a white population deserting the city. In many respects, the programs and the results of the Rice Design Fete in 1967 were a reaction to the kind of discussion documented in this volume.

Throughout, the texts in Tofflers anthology were driven by the alarming facts and statistics evidencing urban decay and ongoing segregation. The book tried hard to provide analysis as well as educational and design proposals to solve the crisis. The prominent black leader as Bayard Rustin, for instance, addressed the boxed-in feeling, the sense of no place to go, the lack of outlet in the African-American ghetto communities, as well as the reasons why schools have become a primary target of the ghetto activist.23 Unless there is a master plan to cover housing, jobs, and health, Rustin argued, every plan for the schools will fall on its face. No piecemeal strategy can work.24

Accordingly, educator Robert J. Havighurst emphasized how this crisis requires the active participation of schools and making and implementing policy for social urban renewal. This big-city crisis is reflected in feelings of uncertainty and anxiety on the part of parents and citizens.25 Community schools, Havighurst reported, have made attempts to respond to the crisis by involving the various constituencies in decisions about school policy and practice to foster the links to the community.

Education is embodied in built environments and in the various groups and clients it hosts, employs, and trains, from students and parents to teachers, administration, municipal governments, urban developers, architects, and educators. Drawing on education as a palliative, order- and equality-inspiring institution had become a default mode of crisis management on a national and local scale by the 1960s. The programming of space and behavior through architecture, design, and technology was meant to remedy the obvious lack of political tools to organize public debate and negotiationthat is, of democratic governance.

Proposals for large-scale community schools and education parks by Quinlivan Pierik & Krause/Architects; Emil A. Schmidlin, Architects; and Kiff, Voss & Franklin, Architects,commissioned and published by theEducational Facilities Laboratories prior to 1967.

Prior to the publication of the Toffler anthology, the Educational Facilities Laboratories published a small report on the school-city problem, showing a selection of architectural designs for large-scale community schools and education parks.26 These and many more designs produced in this age of rapid educational expansion formed the backdrop of the 1967 Rice Design Fete explorations. It was from there that the architects and their associated teams of educators and designers tried to make sense of the agreed-upon task of educationalizing the city through reprogramming urban space. To involve themselves with the social crisis produced by anti-black urban and educational politics would have been too much of a distraction from their core professional agenda of working the brains of administrations and planning committees. However, it is remarkable how their lack of interest in (or insight into) the stratified and segregated social realities of US cities constituted a common attitude across all projects at the 1967 Rice Design Fete (with the slight exception of the Vreeland groups proposal). As progressive as their designs may have appeared in the eyes of the architectural and educational community and their potential clients, their lack of political traction utterly failed the scale and the urgency of the problems at hand.

The self-critical transgression of traditional architectural languages and its engagement with educational theory and practice at the 1967 Rice Design Fete showed what an assembly of white, male, Western architects was capable of in terms of progressive thinking and doing at the time and in an academic setting. Still, the blind spots of the Design Fetes results are conspicuous, considering the ubiquity of anti-black violence, epistemic and otherwise, in the public sphere and mass media of 1960s America. Some determination must have been required to turn away from these realities, particularly when asked to conceive design solutions for new towns, themselves epitomes of white flight and racial divide.

One may wonder if the task of designing educational facilities muted such concerns. Presumably benevolent to the core, the very envisioning of future learning environments might have lured the participants of the Rice charrette into a fallacious post-urban-crisis, if not post-race state of mind. Why didnt anyone feel the need to refer to the traumatizing experiences and memories of school and academia? Maybe recalling ones own individual suffering in the institutional spaces of education could have instilled some empathy, if not solidarity with those being schooled beyond the color line.

This said, so many of the results from the Design Fete appear utterly contemporary and adventurous compared to the majority of contemporary educational buildings that still have yet to transcend rather traditional conceptions of the spatial conditions of learning. As digital as todays classroom might become, the compulsory presence, often for the entire day, in a built environment known as school, is testament to a key threshold still to be surpassed. The 1967 projects therefore might still prove inspirational, regardless of their blind spots.

This contribution derives from a presentation given at Nottingham Contemporary on November 8, 2019. A video recording of the presentation is available here.

Architectures of Education is a collaboration between Nottingham Contemporary, Kingston University, and e-flux Architecture, and a cross-publication with The Contemporary Journal.

Tom Holert is a researcher, writer, and curator. He is the co-founder of the Harun Farocki Institut in Berlin. Hes currently organising the research and exhibition project Education Shock. Learning, Politics, and Architecture in the 1960s and 1970s, at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (forthcoming September 2020).

The rest is here:
Educationalize and Fail - Architecture - e-flux - E-Flux

Friday March 13 2020

Paul Ngunyi holds a postgraduate degree in Industrial and Organisational Psychology. PHOTO | COURTESY

I dropped out in my second year and went out in search of a new path in IT.

I first worked as a trainer on basic computer knowledge and while at it, I learnt more about computers.

I then advanced to system administration, technology consulting, sales and customer care services.

Paul Ngunyi holds a postgraduate degree in Industrial and Organisational Psychology. He is a business, career and personal success coach, and the author of Youth of Honour and The Art of High Performance.

How has your family shaped your life?

I am the firstborn in a family of 13, so I learnt to be responsible and to take up leadership roles at a very young age. By age 10, I already knew how to cook, clean and do other household chores, and I would do them diligently without needing to be asked.

What kinds of people do you coach?

As an industrial psychologist, I focus on career professionals and entrepreneurs who want to improve their lives and their businesses. I also coach individuals who feel stuck in their careers, businesses and relationships. Additionally, I do group coaching using a 10-week programme called Self and Business Transformation, which focuses on fostering success through self-knowledge, and career and business improvement strategies. More than 100 individuals have so far graduated from this programme.

How do you improve your knowledge?

I regularly read books that offer tips on personal and professional development. I also like discussing the contentious issues on these subjects with different people to get their perspectives. I also source for online content on YouTube, as well as professional and business journals that are available online.

What was the most radical decision youve ever made and what did it teach you?

I had to drop out of college due to lack of school fees, but that ended up being a good thing because out of it, I crafted a new career in information technology.

However, to be truly happy, I had to find my passion, and I realised that guiding others and helping them succeed gives me great satisfaction. I use my experience from the corporate world, and my training in psychology to live up to my purpose in life, which is to be a business and personal success coach. I learnt to make lemonades whenever life handed me a lemon instead of complaining, and I also learnt that optimism, excellence and hard work are important ingredients of success.

Is this the career you envisioned during your youth?

I had planned to be far more successful, but I did not know exactly how I was going to achieve that. Growing up, I wanted to be a mechanical engineer, but I didnt have anyone to guide me.

I was inclined to science-related courses because I was good in sciences. However, I later found out that I was also very empathetic, and a good listener. I was also good in teaching and debates, so I went ahead and created a career in coaching.

Why did you quit your Bachelors course in Mathematics?

I dropped out in my second year and went out in search of a new path in IT. I first worked as a trainer on basic computer knowledge and while at it, I learnt more about computers.

I then advanced to system administration, technology consulting, sales and customer care services. All this time, I found great fulfilment whenever I trained my students and helped them find technological solutions. My IT career grew and soon, I was working for global IT brands. In 2002, I qualified as Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, a highly sought after achievement at that time. I worked for brands such as Hewlett Packard and Lenovo, who enriched my career.

But to become a good success coach, I had to get professional knowledge, so I enrolled for a Masters degree in Industrial Psychology.

Have your parents forgiven you for this?

Yes. They have always known that I am responsible enough to make good decisions, and they are very happy with me. When we were growing up, my family was the poorest in our village. However, the story has since changed. My parents feel very proud when they see me offering guidance to my siblings through coaching and to many other people through my books.

Now that you are 40, which were your most significant milestones?

My coaching and leadership journey started taking shape when I was in secondary school because it is there that I began to understand the world beyond my village. This critical awareness of my surrounding and background grew deeper while I was at the university, after which I went on to record the best years of my life my 30s. In the third decade of my existence, I grew to know myself much better even as I continued working. I became courageous enough to pursue my passion in Psychology. Self-awareness, career growth, establishing a family and personal development made my 30s so fulfilling. I now look forward to even better days ahead.

What are your weaknesses?

I detest operational tasks that are repetitive and which demand keen attention to detail, such as administration. I prefer to just offer solutions. I can also be impatient when progress is slow, and this sometimes makes me come across as demanding and overbearing.

Which chapter of your book would you recommend to young professionals?

Chapter one of The Art of High Performance, which highlights the basic components of success self-knowledge, strategy development, goal setting, all-round development and critical success strategies.

Supporting personal and community development projects. Over the years, I have spent my time and money transforming my rural community by paying school fees for many young people. I also spend a lot on books and enrolling for short courses.

What is the biggest lesson you have learnt?

That it is only by pursuing your passion that you can realise true happiness.

How do you take care of your physical wellness?

I watch what I eat, avoid negative emotions, bad relationships and unhealthy religious practices. I value my family and regularly make efforts to continue growing in my career.

The rest is here:
I was a drop out but Im now loving life! - nation.co.ke

Weve all heard of pet therapy, a.k.a. animal-assisted therapy, a.k.a. people relying on animals to help them recover from or better cope with various health issues ranging from cancer to anxiety (thanks, mayoclinic.org).

So its understandable why people might assume that Tamarack Farm HorsePowerment, with its horse-driven sessions, falls into the same category. Theyd be wrong.

Therapy is more about dealing with the past and learning coping strategies; HorsePowerment basically picks up where therapy leaves off, says owner and founder Carol Allen. Our mission is to supply skills for the future, help people develop their leadership and communication skills through tailored equine assisted learning programs.

Carol Allen, founder of HorsePowerment, poses with Arie and Rollin in front of her classroom. Photography by Sarah Farkas.

Were sitting at a folding table in her classroom, an open red barn on the edge of Tamarack Farm in Coventrys village of Greene. Allen and her husband, Ron, are on brand she in a fuzzy zip-up embellished with wild horse illustrations and he in his workman jeans. (The most country thing about my attire is my sturdy boots; I was warned to wear shoes I wouldnt mind getting dirty.) We also have some company: A sweet cat named Sammy purrs away on my lap and two muzzles poke out from the stable behind me, overseeing our chat.

Allen, a Pennsylvania native who grew up riding horses and later driving and training them, started HorsePowerment last year while getting ready to retire after twenty years in education.

I knew that I wanted to continue helping my kids, my special needs population, during retirement, she explains. Then, one day, I was reading through a horse magazine and there was an article about programs that help humans understand, based on the way they interact with horses, how they can improve their communication skills, team-building skills, leaderships skills, confidence and more.

But whats so great about horses?

Horses are prey animals, so their number one concern is safety, Allen explains. They naturally work best in teams, as a herd, and they react immediately to whats in front of them thats whats kept them alive for millions of years. They can perceive what you are thinking before you even decide to act on it. If youre nervous, not having a good day or not giving the task at hand your undivided attention, theyre going to pick up on that and think that they cant trust you as a leader. They will keep their distance. Through their reactions, horses are able to show us when we are being clear, focused and effective. It gives people the opportunity to experience immediate, direct and unbiased feedback.

Arie and Rollin are the stars of Tamarack Farm HorsePowerment. Photography by Sarah Farkas.

Allen already had the horses: Arie, a twelve-year-old Arab-Paint, and Rollin, a thirteen-year-old Morgan. Regularly calling them her boys, Allen likens them to the odd couple as Rollin is messy and Arie is neat (but neither is immune to a treat or two, I learn when they gobble some up from my palm). She also had more than thirty years of experience with the gentle giants, and had her spacious property, Tamarack Farm, to set up shop.

I said, You know what, Im going to get this training, she recalls. Its amazing how when one door closes, another door opens.

Allen went on to get her certification in Equine Assisted Learning through the Equine Experiential Education Association, or, as she calls it, the E3A. The associations certification course not only taught her how to be a facilitator, but also helped her establish a business model. HorsePowerment is the first and only of its kind in Rhode Island and there are other examples in Utah, Arizona, Vermont and Texas. In addition to keeping her up to date with the EAL world, Allens E3A membership allows her to keep in touch with other such members.

They all have their own piece they focus on, Allen says, Theres one down south that focuses on helping firefighters because first responders have to be able to build as a team and work together in stressful situations.

And though her own emphasis had centered on special needs populations, Allen has started to expand her reach. She recently hosted a group of camp counselors who wanted to better connect with their newer, more diverse group of campers, including those with behavioral challenges and those on the autism spectrum. Allen especially wants to work more with corporate teams interested in professional development.

A group of car salesmen reached out because they kept losing customers after the initial meetings, Allen says. As it turns out, some of the younger employees were finding that they were spending too much time on their phone and their focus and attention werent on the customer, whereas the older sales reps were more personable and had those relationship-building skills. And that all came out with the boys. They werent able to establish the connection in the session. So, we took the observations and applied it to the real world: If youre talking to someone and youre fidgeting or you dont look them in the eye or youre not focused, the person is going to feel like they arent valued or worth your time. Theyre not going to want to work with you, just like the horses didnt.

When I joke that her programs might even be good for couples, Allen agrees wholeheartedly. Yes, it can benefit anyone!

How does it all work? Those interested in booking a HorsePowerment session can sign up directly through their website, horsepowerment.net. From there, depending on the type of program (personal development and wellbeing, corporate leadership or youth development, for example) youre interested in, Allen will ask participants to fill out a simple, confidential questionnaire so she can plan and customize the upcoming session to the individual or groups needs.

She shows me an example of an agenda for a corporate session, which takes up half a workday (Most like to schedule it in the morning, but were flexible, she says). The agenda kicks off with getting to know the horses, and then leads into a sit-down review of what the participants can expect that day. The group will go over a summary of the questionnaire results and everyone involved will come up with one to three goals theyd like to achieve through the program (i.e. learning to delegate or building up confidence).

She also highlights the importance of horse communications and safety (read: how to avoid startling a horse). Then its time for an activity.

One example is Balls in the Air. In this exercise, five people usually participate, with one person hanging back, taking notes, while the other four interact with the horse. Two stand at the front to lead while the other two stand on either side and hold three grapefruit-sized balls (labelled with team goals) each against the horses flanks. Together, the four must successfully navigate a winding obstacle course without dropping any of the balls. The target? Assessing the groups ability to employ creative problem solving, prioritization, teamwork and effective communication.

Afterwards, Allen and the group will go over what happened during the activity, what worked and what didnt, and how the observations and skills can apply to the real world or, more specifically, in the workplace. They then break for refreshments before engaging in another activity with the horses. Finally, the group will do a recap to identify the days takeaways, assess any achievements and finalize an action plan for moving forward.

Sounds way more fun than your typical professional development day sitting in a conference room, right?

Were hoping businesses will turn it into an annual outing, Allen says. We usually have repeat visits with all of our other participants. Once they come out here, they want to come back. Because every time you visit, youre learning something about yourself.

See more here:
HorsePowerment is an Equine-Assisted Learning Program in Coventry - Rhode Island Monthly

Young MUSIAD in partnership with the National Agency, held on 23-28 February in London within the scope of Entrepreneurship Bridge Project 12 young entrepreneurs from Turkey were introduced with investors in London.

PREPARED FOR THE GLOBAL ARENA

The participants, who came together under the umbrella of Erasmus Plus, in cooperation with EU support and MSAD UK branch, had the opportunity to meet foreign investors, explain their initiatives and get to know the entrepreneurship ecosystem in England. Our young entrepreneurs also gained competence in opening up to the global. In the event, which was held with consultations on the startup development program, entrepreneurs were brought together with important institutions that would open the horizon and get support. Entrepreneurs had the opportunity to present one-to-one interviews and presentations to angel investors, accelerators and start-up consultants.

WILL INCREASE TURKEY'S PRESTIGE of R & D -In

MSAD President Abdurrahman Kaan stated that young entrepreneurs will be very productive in order to improve their horizons and gain a vision for the future by participating in such events abroad. Pointing out that young people should follow the trends in the world closely and take action by generating new ideas, Kaan said, Our country needs entrepreneurs, not imitators, but role models. In this regard, we think that the fact that our young entrepreneurs especially focus on innovation-R&D, start-up and technology issues will play an important role both in advancing their personal careers and in making our state a respected and prestigious country in the international arena. found the assessment.

SUPPORT FOR YOUTH IS NOT ENOUGH

ECONOMY

MUSIAD denies false allegations

Go here to see the original:
Young MUSIAD members met with investors - Crypto Dictation

Kyle Bardouche at Jack Henry stockist Lone Flag in Encinitas, CA

We are now judged in a different criteria for credibility, professionalism, creativity, confidence and approachability. In a word, impressing is out, empowerment and flexibility are in. Men and grooming are having a meeting and grooming seems to be schooling us - and for good reason.

As the new corporate America seems to evolve, the hard and fast rules that once governed the traditional nine-to-five workplace are bending and with them the ways American men dress and groom themselves for business. For generations, the attire and grooming practices were unchanged. The majority of American men and women were wearing dark suits or serious apparel in conservative colors and style as well as practical and standard grooming practices. As a matter of fact, I recall my older brother and I trying on my fathers old spice and others standard brands at that time.

Organized culture and work attire have definitely changed and our society likes the change. Nowadays, corporations are being reengineered so they are flexible and adaptable, ready to take on the changes that are inevitable.

The new business environment calls for different values, behaviors. dress and grooming. Fresh choices, creativity and relaxed clothing are the new rules the modern office. With that comes flexible time, job sharing, summer hours and home offices. This switch in business development has created a new sense of style and grooming for American men where there will be no turning back. Alas, the brand Jack Henry has developed a grooming brand to adhere the rapidly transitioning market.

Clay Pomade and the Deodorant are a favorite of Kevin Love ( NBA Cleveland Cavaliers)

It started with one guy: Jack Henry.At the time he had just turned two and his hair was getting uncontrollable. His parents Kyle and Erin tried to reel it in style it a little.At the time, Erin asked Kyle if she could use his hair product and Kyle tossed her his pomade. She caught it, turned it over and said, Have you ever looked at whats in here? Do you even know what half these ingredients are? Im not putting this on our son.As it turned out, that product contained 33 ingredients, 98% of which were synthetics. Erin went on a mission to find a cleaner alternative - a hair product made with natural ingredients. She was unable to find what she was searching for henceforth, she decided to make her own. After a bit of research, she created the first batch of OG Pomaderight on their stovetop at home.

Jack Henry Deodorant

Kyle tested it on his hair and quickly realized it felt right. Not only was it clean and minimal, but the performance was great. It was everything hed been looking for himself: zero shine, zero grease, zero crunch. He could run his hands through his hair and it felt like nothing was in thereyet he could still restyle all day, even in moisture and humidity.

After that first batch, they realized they were onto something. Their aim was to build a brand to give guys access to clean, natural body care products. Additionally, they aimed to educate men on what was in the products they were using. So they started a brand: Jack Henry.

Clean and minimal packaging

The current collection consists of clean and minimal hair, skin and body products. They never use any synthetics or questionable toxins. The brand launched face oils in early 2019, as there was a need when it came to simple skincare for guys. they also just released their fully natural and cleanDeodorant this past December.

Jack Henry Clay Pomade is their best seller

TheJack Henry Deodorantquickly became the second best seller. They went through 10+ iterations over eight months of development. It was by far the most complex product they formulated because a deodorant doesnt just need to smell good, but it really has to perform. They set out to develop something fresh, earthy, and uplifting, and it had to be on brand.

I recently has the privilege of speaking with KyleBardouche,Founder of Jack Henrywhat men are seeking in deodorant, how everything the brand makes comes from a personal need and a desire to create the products they wished existed in the market and why all of the products are handcrafted by the team in small batches in Southern California- and why this gives the brand the most control over the process and quality at every step!

Kyle described Jack Henry as an extension of himself by living a conscious lifestyle. Not only about ... [+] what he eats, but what he and his family put on their bodies

Joseph DeAcetis: Talk to Forbes about the history, and development of your brand?

Kyle Bardouche: I started Jack Henry in 2017 after realizing how many questionable ingredients were in the hair product I was using at the time. When I went on a mission to find a cleaner alternative, I discovered that there was nothing out there for guys, although there were some really good options for women. I was alarmed that the hair product I was using then, which came in this crisp white container and was marketed as natural was far from it. So we created our Clay Pomade which is our best seller and only contains four total ingredients. It is simple yet sophisticated. After that, we realized pomade was just the tip of the iceberg. There were so many other body care products that had all these questionable ingredients, so we launched our skincare line in 2018 and a year later in 2019, we released our Deodorant stick, which has been a huge seller and is a favorite of NBA Star Kevin Love.Our Philosophy is simple, we believe in crafting the most effective, clean, and pure products. We believe in simple, purposeful ingredients that are sourced from the finest locations. We believe in inspiring and educating. We also believe it goes beyond the actual product. It's about the design, the craft, the way it's made, the way you use it, and most importantly, the way it makes you feel.As for sustainability, our products come in fully recyclable glass containers. All of our ingredients are certified organic and/or wild-crafted, and we dont skimp on the quality. All of our products and formulations are developed and produced in-house by our team. We don't use any synthetics or toxins. I think you may also find Who is Jack Henry interesting, as essentially its you, its me, its anyone who wants to live a more conscious, healthy lifestyle.Personally, Ive been obsessed with hair since I was two years old. Id use my moms hair spray and spike my hair. In middle school, I was all about LA Looks blue hair gel that left your hair looking wet and stiff as a board. After changing my eating habits and really starting to take care of my mind and body in my mid-20s, which is a constantly evolving process, it took me about five more years to develop an awareness of what I was putting on my body. Its not something that happens overnight. I really just try to learn everyday, make better decisions, and lead by example for my kids.Ive always had a rebellious side. I hated school, and I always thought there were other ways of doing things, which I now see was the start of what some might call an entrepreneurial mindset. My educational background is in computer technologies. I thought I wanted to do something in the tech space, but my true calling was really using technology to communicate, build and distribute products that Im super passionate about. I taught myself marketing and business skills by following mentors, reading books, learning from experience, and connecting with others in the space. My background and passions finally came together in about 2013, but before that, I never really knew you could start your own business or work for yourself or that connecting with people was actually called marketing. Understand people and youll understand business.Its also really important to connect with people who share the same beliefs and passions as you. No one can do everything on their own, and thats one of the biggest things Ive learned along this journey. Its all about the people you surround yourself with, the team you build, delegating responsibilities, and being open to growth-both personally and professionally.

Jack Henry uses zero synthetics and zero toxins

Joseph DeAcetis: In your words, what is your competitive advantage in development and specialized product?

Kyle Bardouche: The beauty & grooming industry is built on beautiful people and elegant packaging; very rarely is it focused on the actual product or formula itself. I was surprised that most products on the market arent even the original formulation of the brand selling them. Most brands will go to a manufacturer and purchase a formula that the manufacturer uses for other brands and will just change something as simple as the scent.All of our products are not only formulated and developed in-house, but they are also tested on us, our friends, family, and professional athletes. We have a rule that we wont use any synthetics or potential toxins. It has to come from the earth or we dont use it. Our ingredients are organic or wild crafted and sourced from small family farms across the globe - organic lavender oil from France, organic coconut oil from the Philippines, Hinoki oil directly from Japan. Everything we make comes from a personal need and a desire to create the products we wished existed in the market. We are focused on creating products that not only help you look better, but also feel better.In short, we flipped things around and started with fewer, but more effective ingredients. Additionally, we lead with transparency and education, use minimal black and white packaging to keep the focus on the products purpose and ingredients, and allow the marketing flow naturally from that. We didnt want to rely on flashiness, but rather we just wanted to make natural stuff that actually worked.

Joseph DeAcetis: In your words, what are men seeking today in deodorant?

Kyle Bardouche: I think what men look for in deodorant is simple it has to perform. Nobody wants to worry about carrying around their deodorant and reapplying during the day. At the same time, I think men are becoming more conscience about not only what they're eating, but also what theyre putting on their bodies. They dont want to sacrifice performance or health. Its really about living a fully conscious lifestyle.

Sam Way & Lewis Jamison shot by Lauren Luxenberg

Joseph DeAcetis: Talk to Forbes in detail about the current product offerings and why it is important for consumers to be aware of this brand?

Kyle Bardouche: While each Jack Henry product was created from a personal need, they represent really universal needs.Most of us didnt know that we should be looking at the ingredients in our deodorant or pomade at all, much less that the ingredients we put on our body could be drying and irritating or even have serious health effects. Our skin is our largest organ, so what we apply to it every day isnt inconsequential.At the same time, we all want to look and feel our best, so its not enough that a product is just natural, it also has to perform and be simple to use. When we searched for products that checked those boxes, we came up empty-handed. We believe no one should have to choose between performance and health, and thats the philosophy behind everything we make.

All products were developed from a need of not being able to find anything that existed in the ... [+] market

Joseph DeAcetis: What are your day-to-day responsibilities?

Kyle Bardouche: Running a startup, you have to be super flexible and willing to help wherever you can. My main role is staying focused on the growth of the brand and making sure we are delivering exceptional products. I still do day-to-day tasks that other founders may not do. Were a culture and customer-focused brand, so its very important to stay in constant conversation with customers. I run our social media, post every day, and respond to comments and DMs. I direct and oversee all our content, from working with our photographers, designers, creators, athlete and partner relationships to managing Instagram and overseeing paid ads, all the way to keeping our website operational and up-to-date. That honestly takes up a lot of my time.Additionally, I formulate all our products, so Im always playing with ingredients, researching ideas, and dreaming up how we can improve on whats already out there. However, every day looks different, sometimes I'm helping pack orders in the morning and then will have a phone call with a retailer such as Nordstrom in the afternoon. Were still a lean, small team of seven phenomenal people so I help to make sure they have what they need to be successful with their roles.

Joseph DeAcetis: Where is the product made and why?

Kyle Bardouche: All our products are handcrafted by our team in small batches in Southern California. This gives us the most control over the process and quality at every step.

Jack Henry street campaign 2020

Joseph DeAcetis: You have the floor: Talk to my viewers about why they should try this product now ?

Kyle Bardouche: We began developing our new Deodorant in April 2019. We first focused on developing a product that outperformed everything else, so thats where the beeswax, coconut oil, baking soda and bentonite clay come in. The mix of beeswax and these botanicals help absorb your sweat and eliminate any odor.Next, we focused on the scent. We wanted the scent to be uplifting and relaxing at the same time, much like walking through a Japanese forest. Scent or fragrance are very delicate materials, especially if youre working with pure essential oils. It needed to be subtle yet sophisticated. We started with our base note of Hinoki oil, which is sustainably grown in Japan and comes from the Japanese Cypress tree. Hinoki oil has calming and relaxing properties and can be described in one word as clean. Next is our organic Juniper oil, which is harvested in Bulgaria from the Juniper Berry and has a fine, fresh, woody-green aroma. Next we take a more widely known oil - organic Eucalyptus oil that we source directly from Portugal, which gives the deodorant a fresh, uplifting and invigorating note.In combination, these seven total ingredients work with your body to absorb sweat and odor to help you smell great all day long. Based on our testing, it lasts 48-hours with typical usage so you can skip the shower if you need to.To us, a product isnt ready until weve stripped away anything unnecessary. The ultimate question when it comes to development is How can we create a product that performs with the least amount of ingredients? Theres a quote we live by: Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away, by the French poet Antoine de Saint-Exupry.

Read the original here:
Meet Jack Henry: A Grooming Brand For Men That Refuses To Use Any Synthetics Or Questionable Toxins - Forbes

The University of West Florida is asking all students in university housing to leave campus by 5 p.m. Sunday, as all dorms will close and instruction will be online until March 30.

Here is the statement from UWF:

Instruction

All courses will be offered remotely from March 16 until March 30, 2020.

Housing and Residence Life Closure All students living in university housing must return to permanent home residences or a non-campus alternative housing arrangement,effective immediately, today March 14until March 30, 2020.

If you need to visit campus to gather personal belongings, you may do so until5 p.m. on March 15, 2020.

We understand that there will be extenuating circumstances. Housing and Residence Life will work with students who are not able to return home during this time period on an individual basis. Please contact Housing and Residence Life athousing@uwf.edu by 5 p.m. on Sunday, March 15, 2020.

Campus Services Limited campus services will be available to those students who are authorized to stay in campus housing, including dining services and residence assistance. Counseling, Psychological Services and Health Services will move all appointments to telephone.

All other campus facilities, including but not limited to Health, Leisure, and Sports Facility, Aquatic Center, University Libraries, the Education Research Center for Child Development and athletic facilities will be closed.

Employees Reporting to Work Changes Only essential personnel are expected toreport to workfrom 12 a.m. Sunday, March 15, 2020 through 11:59 p.m. Sunday, March 29, 2020. Employees who are unsure of their status must seek guidance from their supervisor.

Non-essential personnel, including OPS and student employees, are expected towork remotelyduring this time period. Supervisors are expected to provide assignments to employees. Employees working remotely are expected to:

If employees are in roles that do not traditionally accommodate remote work, supervisors must assign other work, projects or professional development that can be performed remotely.

Faculty who need to visit campus in order to utilize university tools to continue to fulfill the academic mission must notify their dean and department chair before visiting campus. Faculty that need in-person services from Global Online may visit campus. Virtual training bootcamps are also available to faculty through theGlobal Online website.

During emergency and adverse situations, supervisors are encouraged to allow employees to fulfill family care responsibilities due to illness or closing of schools, daycares, assisted living facilities, etc. during telecommuting if the employee can effectively balance family care and work.

An employee who is unable to work due to a family care emergency may use one of the following types of time off to account for time away from work, with supervisory approval:

All employees are still required to submit leave reports and time sheets by the appropriate deadlines. Please contact Human Resources with any questionshr@uwf.edu.

Social Distancing Social distancing is the best way to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Social distancing refers to measures that are taken to increase the physical space between people to slow the spread of the virus. By maintaining a distance of six feet from others when possible, people may limit the spread of the virus. Social distancing also minimizes the number of interactions that provide the opportunity for the disease to spread.

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UWF Moves To Remote Operations; All Students To Leave Dorms By Sunday; Most Employees Work Remotely - NorthEscambia.com

Don't bottle up your emotions only to have them hit during a busy week

LAUREN PETTIT

Your brain deals with a lot. Just because you're having a bad time doesn't mean you should bottle it up. Talk to your friends and loved ones to live a happier life.

HALEY BRICKWEDEL, Evergreen Columnist March 13, 2020

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Fear, anger, sadness, joy, disgust, surprise and trust are all emotions felt, sometimes daily. Expressing these emotions is easier than pushing them away or down. At the end of the day, the emotions are still there when they are not dealt with.

Emotions are fabulous teachers, said Isabel Gaila Barbuto, a counselor at Moscow-based Mental Wellness Coaching & Consulting.

No one likes to be friends with the person who emotionally vomits on them, with quick fits of rage or random tantrums of tears.

These emotions are visitors, arriving to show how an individual feels in a moment. Talking about each emotion and accepting the emotions as they come up can be the only way to understand them.

As you get more comfortable with these guests and visitors (the emotions) there is a new sense of safety, an internal dialogue with the family (the individual and their emotions), Barbuto said.

It can be emotionally draining for others when emotions are not accepted on the individual level. Going to a party while sad never ends well. Lashing out and saying hurtful words are not forgiven lightly.

Befriend and establish new relationships, welcome them (the emotions) to create a new relationship with yourself and these thoughts, Barbuto said.

Studying an emotion wont teach an individual anything until the emotion is experienced and put into practice. For example, dealing with one emotion at a time can be easier than dealing with all seven at once. With school, work and life, students should not let their emotions stress them out or become overwhelming.

Rather than reactions, practice a responsive mode that stays calm and at ease that is able to maintain an anchoring and grounding to know the next best action to take, Barbuto said.

Living in your 20s and being in college are some of the most stressful years of life. This is a time of development, as well as experiencing emotions about your future life and career. With so many things to do a day, let alone in a week, there is no denying that students feel every emotion.

You can develop self-efficacy, that is calming on the biophysiological level and emotional cognitive level. The judgment, resistance and pushing away begins to fade away when you welcome emotions, Barbuto said.

Many times students have to push off emotions until after an exam or paper (even I am guilty of this). Pushing these emotions down and not addressing them is where they can really grow and fester.

With so much strain on students, the university provides events and activities to reduce the strain on students. The university recognizes that college and students in their 20s are feeling stressed and overwhelmed.

When I am overwhelmed I either hangout with friends or exercise, if I have the time. Sometimes I take a nap, said Alondra Romero, a freshman studying mechanical engineering.

The gyms around campus provide Sweat the Stress Away. This is a program that give students a chance to work out and meet other students. The program includes climbing, esports, swimming, CrossFit, yoga, boxing and so much more.

There are even times where there are puppies on campus, trivia, wellness seminars and more. These can be more frequent during midterms and finals. However, these events that run for a single hour during a busy week cannot fix everything.

Express every emotion. Lean into them hard and get to know them. My mother used to always say there is more than just anger there. Many times emotions can come in pairs. Sometimes sadness can be expressed as anger, or vice versa. This all becomes clearer when knowing emotions on an individual and personal level.

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OPINION: Feel comfortable to share your emotions - The Daily Evergreen

It was weird that no one had heard from Jake Millison in a few days.

Maybe someone who didnt know him, an outsider to Gunnison, a small Colorado town on the western slope of the Rockies, might assume he was flaky or unreliable. At 29, Jake still lived with his mom and spent most nights at the local dive bar, the Alamo. But Jakes friends knew he was deliberate, a creature of routine. If you had plans to go to the movies on Saturday, hed text you on Wednesday: What time should I pick you up? And then again on Thursday and Friday just to confirm. On a motorcycle trip to California, Jake was the one who brought tarps and first-aid kits. He definitely wasnt the fall-off-the-face-of-the-Earth type.

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Jake had spent most of his life on the 7-11 Ranch, his familys property just outside Gunnison. Hed drive into town most evenings, work out at the gym, then stop by the Alamo. He always sat at the same table and always ordered the same drink: a Coke, because anything stronger made him nervous. His friends, a close-knit group of half a dozen guys, would show up after their shifts at the mechanic shop or the lumberyard. Theyd shoot pool for a couple of hours, then Jake would head home to the ranch. Everything was like clockwork with him, his friend Antranik Ajarian told me.

On Wednesday, May 20, 2015five days since anyone had heard from Jakehis friends Nate Lopez and Randy Martinez drove out to the 7-11 Ranch. They turned into the driveway, then drove past the barn decorated with the antlers of deer, elk, and moose, testaments to the propertys glory days as a hunting camp. They didnt see Jake, although they did spy his truck, his motorcycles, and his dog, Elmo.

In the horse corral, they spotted Jakes mother, Deb, a wiry woman whose frail frame belied her stubborn strength. Deb told Lopez and Martinez that Jake had gone to Reno, Nevada, to train at a mixed-martial-arts gym; he wasnt responding to their texts because hed dropped his phone in an irrigation ditch and left it behind to dry out in a bag of rice. Her explanation was logical enough. But the more they thought about it, the more it didnt sit right with them.

Another few days passed, and still no word from Jake. His friends called and stopped by the ranch. They werent sure what else to do. Ill let you know when hes back, Deb would say. Were they paranoid, or did she seem annoyed to see them? The situation felt weird, they kept saying to one another. It just felt weird.

After about a week, a Gunnison County patrol sergeant named Mark Mykol, alerted to Jakes sudden disappearance, called the ranch. Deb said her son had taken off with a friend whose name she didnt know. She thought they were headed to Reno to go camping. He did this sometimes, just up and vanished, and she seemed less worried than irritated. Mykol marked the case status as unfoundednothing to see here. But Jakes friends kept insisting that something was wrong. A week later, Mykol called the ranch again. This time, Deb admitted that she and her son had been arguing; he was almost 30 and still living at home, after all. Hed grabbed some camping equipment, a gun, and a wad of cash, then gotten into a car with someone she didnt recognize. She figured he was in Nevada looking for work, or in California with friends, or in New Mexico with his father; shed stopped trying to keep tabs on him.

But Debs story only left Jakes friends more confused. It was as if she were talking about an entirely different person from the Jake they knew.

In the ski mecca of Crested Butte, the median price for a house is $750,000; Gunnison is its more rugged, affordable neighbor 30 miles south, a windswept town of hunting outfitters and craft breweries, and the home of Western Colorado University (motto: Learning, elevated). Gunnisons 6,500 inhabitants are an eclectic mix of hippies, hunters, college kids, ranchers, and professional mountain bikers. At the Traders Rendezvous, you can pick up an antique rifle or a taxidermied wildebeest; a few blocks down the street is Shamans Corner, a combination massage parlor, tattooist, and metaphysical gift shop.

When I visited Gunnison in November 2018, the big news was a local ranchs cattle relocation: Cows will be walking down HWY 135 between 9-noonish, the Gunnison Regional 911 Centers Facebook page warned. With the snow please be safe and budget a few extra minutes as the girls make fast retreat down valley. Thanks for the patience.

Jakes parents split up when he was 6 and his sister, Stephaine, was 7. His father, Ray, whom Ajarian described as an old crazy gun guy (he meant this as a compliment), eventually moved to rural New Mexico. Deb got remarried, to Rudy Rudibaugh, a widowed rancher two decades her senior. When I stopped by Traders Rendezvous, everyone had a story about Rudy. He was a tough little turd, as one man put it, who had served as a frogman in World War II, lurking in rice paddies and breathing through a straw as he stalked the enemy. After the war, Rudy bought the 7-11 Ranch and based a successful hunting business there.

Rudy was known for doing things his own way. In the pre-cellphone era, he used carrier pigeons to send messages between hunting camps. When Jake and Steph were little, Rudy and Deb bought an African lion cub; they kept it chained in the horse corral and fed it a diet of roadkill. Neighbors complained that it frightened the livestock; eventually somebody shot and killed it from the highwaythe Gunnison County equivalent of a drive-by shooting.

From September 2013: Hanna Rosin on murder by Craigslist

Jake and Stephaine were homeschooled by Deb, in part so they could help out on the ranch. There was always plenty of work on the 700 acres: branding calves, baling hay, repairing tractors, leading hunting trips, caring for the horses. As Rudy got older, he had a harder time keeping upand Jake was expected to pick up the slack. The family was often the last to finish putting up their hay for the season, because Rudy and Jake handled all the work themselves, Jakes friend and former neighbor Adam Katheiser told me. And when Rudy was no longer able, it was just Jake.

As a teenager, Jake began attending public school for the first time. Early on, he got in trouble for the rifle in the back of his truck; he hadnt realized you werent supposed to bring firearms to school. After spending much of his youth isolated on the ranch, Jake began to amass a group of friends. He and Ajarian, both introverts, found it easy to be quiet around each other. Their crew grew to include other guys with similarly low-key temperaments. They went camping, fiddled with their motorcycles, and made fun of one another for all the project vehicles that never quite got all the way fixed.

After high school, Jake stayed at the ranch while most of the crew rented apartments in town. Jake could be standoffish with strangers, but he was inseparable from his friends. He seemed to have a boundlessoccasionally exhaustingappetite for hanging out. He could be a know-it-all, and if he thought you were doing something stupid, he wouldnt hesitate to tell you so. His friends sometimes rolled their eyes, but they appreciated that they always knew where they stood with him. We used to say, Yeah hes an asshole, but hes our asshole, Ajarian said.

Jake was 23 when Rudy died, in 2009. Stephaine had already received an inheritance of $30,000. Jake didnt get any money; the assumption was that he and his stepbrother, ShaneRudys son from his first marriage, who lived in Texaswould eventually inherit the ranch. Now the full burden of maintaining the property fell on Jakes shoulders. If he thought about shirking his obligations, he never did. Gunnison ranchers dont move away, Jakes friend Tom Page told me. Jake was tied to the land, to his familyand to a dying way of life.

Though the mythology of the American rancher looms large in our national imagination, economic pressures and climate change have made small-scale ranching ever more precarious. Since 2000, the Colorado River Basin has suffered an unprecedented period of drought, and low commodity prices and the rising cost of living havent helped matters. The suicide rate in Gunnison and other rural Colorado counties is more than twice the national average.

Faced with a deficit of water, Colorados booming cities have turned to a buy and dry policy, in which farmers agree to let their land lie fallow and lease their water rights to thirsty urban areas hundreds of miles away. By the time Jake took charge of the family ranch, the gulf between rural and urban Colorado was vast: the agricultural land of the Rockies western slope lying uncultivated and slowly drying up, while in Denver so many new buildings were being erected that there was a waiting list to rent a crane.

Ranch life was becoming the purview of wealthy hobbyists who could afford to indulge in cowboy fantasies. In Gunnison County, not far from the 7-11 Ranch, the billionaire businessman Bill Koch built his own private replica of an Old West town, complete with a saloon, church, jail, and train station; the propertys 21,000-square-foot mansion is stocked with memorabilia, including firearms that belonged to Jesse James and Sitting Bull.

News accounts would later refer to 7-11 as a $3 million ranch, but when Jake disappeared, it was kind of a junkyard, Lopez told me. Jake lived in the lodge, a building that had been intended for big gatherings and camp suppers; now it was so cluttered with Deb and Rudys collectionsstuffed rattlesnakes, old bits and bridles, ancient guns, antique machines with unclear usesthat it barely had enough room for his bed.

Jake once asked Katheiser to help brand calves. Katheiser had helped friends out before, and knew that typically a calf was herded into a mechanical chute, where a clamp closed around the animals neck, immobilizing it and then flipping it on its side. Katheiser was surprised to see that the 7-11 Ranch had no such equipment. It was a day of rough, physical worksnagging the calves with a rope, wrestling them to the ground, then holding them down to be branded. The corral itself needed maintenance. But Jake could never get to it, because the fences need fixing, the truck needs fixing, and weve got to brand all these cows now, Katheiser said.

Faced with more than they could handle, the family sold off much of their livestock and stopped hosting hunting trips. Money became a source of tension between Deb and her son. Jake didnt receive a paycheck for the hours he put in at the ranch; his eventual inheritance of the property was supposed to be payment enough. In the meantime, if he wanted to go to the movies or the Alamo, hed have to ask Deb for cash.

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Frustrated, Jake found other ways to scrounge up money. He cut and sold firewood. He worked part-time for a landscaping company. He came up with a scheme to grow marijuana to sell to college students, which his friends found hilarious: Dude, you dont smoke weedhow are you going to test your product? He cultivated psychedelic mushrooms and looked into starting a chimney-sweeping business.

One summer, Jake made good money working on a commercial fishing boat in Alaskabut when he returned home, he ended up giving Deb $15,000 to help keep the ranch afloat. He was always pissed off about that, Ajarian told me. He always said he shouldve just said Fuck the ranch and kept it. But while Jake may have talked about the property as if it were an anchor dragging him down, he was unwilling to walk away. What if the ranch was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity? What if he could restore it to greatness?

However much Jake worked, it wasnt enough for his mother. If the ranch wasnt thriving the way it had under Rudy, it wasnt due to the drought or the economy or any of the other forces that plagued ranchers across the western states. The problem was that her son wasnt trying hard enough. She complained that he slept too late and left jobs unfinished. Whenever you were out there, Ajarian said, theyd be at each others throats.

When Jake vanished, some of his friends hoped that hed finally reached his limit and taken off: Fine, you guys deal with this place. It was nice to imagine him somewhere sunny, California maybe, free to do as he pleased. But that daydream never quite felt plausible. Maybe he wouldve abandoned his family, Jakes friends thought, but he never wouldve abandoned them.

In June, Jakes friend Max Matheny and his sister, Molly, met with Mykol at the sheriffs-department headquarters. Molly had called Ray, Jakes dad; he said he hadnt heard from his son in weeks, and suggested that she file a missing-person report.

Mykol didnt think that was necessary. Everything Deb had said had checked out so far: It seemed that Jake had just taken off. But the sheriffs office did reopen the case, and alerted law enforcement in Reno to be on the lookout for Jake.

Ajarian, too, says he tried to file a missing-person report. The sheriffs department, Ajarian told me, kept saying the family doesnt want it. Several of Jakes friends said they were told that only family members could file such reports, although according to Colorado law any person with relevant, credible information suggesting that a person is missing may make a missing person report to a law enforcement agency.

Nate Lopez spent a lot of time talking with local law enforcement. They just told me that the only people they can really believe is the family. If they say that Jake went on a trip, and theyre the last people to see him, thats what you have to go by until theres evidence that shows otherwise, Lopez told me.

Jakes friends refused to let the matter go. Steph messaged one of her brothers friendsdo you have any idea who keeps reporting jake missing? I would really like [if they] could just call mom instead, she wrote. But Jakes friends called the ranch so often that the sheriff told them to knock it off.

It was dismaying, if not surprising, that law enforcement seemed slow to wonder whether Jake Millison had been the victim of a crime. Most murder victims in the U.S. are maletypically young men of colorbut you wouldnt know that from watching TV, where the victims who get the most airtime tend to be young, attractive white women. As a culture, were not as attuned to young mens vulnerability to violence.

While law enforcement seemed to accept Jakes familys story, his friends found themselves bumping up against an uncomfortable possibility: that one of his family members was complicit in his disappearance.

Three years before Jake went missing, Steph, who had been living in Denver, moved back to Gunnison with her husband and son. She earned money taking tourists on horseback rides, and dreamed of giving her son a country upbringingcrisp mountain mornings; lying in the tall grass, aiming a rifle at soda cans. Though Steph described herself as not good with backhoe things, she was a skilled horsewoman who identified as a country girl.

Despite their shared upbringing, Steph and Jake never got along. Yes hes mellow with his friends but with family he is a complete dick most of the time, Steph texted a friend around the time she moved back to Gunnison. Jake made it clear he was unhappy that his sister was back in town. Steph had already used her inheritance to put a down payment on her house in Denver; now he worried she was trying to stake a claim on the ranch, too.

Steph and Jake had worked out a kind of sibling dtente, which is to say that they mostly avoided each other. But things were different with Stephs husband, Dave. Where Jake was reserved, Dave was cocky. Everything about him seemed to grate on Jake, including Daves cara white Ford station wagon with flames painted on it. Jakes friends say his annoyance was undergirded with fear; he saw Dave as unpredictable, potentially violent. He made awkward half-jokes about keeping a gun nearby in case Dave attacked him.

Jake began training at a jiu-jitsu gym in Gunnison. He took to it right away; the tactics and technicalities and focus on self-mastery suited his temperament. Jiu-jitsu translates as gentle art, Page, who trained at the same gym, told me. Theres no strikingits all about distance management, leverage, control. Its like playing chess with the human body. Jake had always been chubby and withdrawn; jiu-jitsu helped him grow more comfortable in his body, more used to asserting himself.

Jiu-jitsu emphasizes personal development in all areas of life, and Jake became preoccupied with bettering himself. He adopted a strict diet and chided his friends when they ate at Taco Bell. He chugged a gallon of water a day for a few weeks, briefly convinced that hydration was the secret to health. His mania for improvement extended to the ranch, which he periodically tried to clean up, whether his mother liked it or not. He told Ajarian he was bringing junk into town on the sly and tossing it into Dumpsters.

With Dave and Steph back on the ranch, things could get heated. One day, Jake plowed snow into huge banks that blocked Daves car; in the argument that ensued, Dave took off his jacket, revealing a gun. (Dave later claimed that he was planning to set the gun aside so they could fight with their fists.) That afternoon, Jake filed for an order of protection against his brother-in-law. Had it gone into effect, it would have essentially banned Dave from the ranch. Jake withdrew his complaint a few days later, but the animosity between the two men remained so strong that Deb declared they couldnt be on the property at the same time.

Steph was furious when she and Dave had to move to an apartment in town. My younger brother is trying to ruin my life, she wrote on the website Moms.com in 2014. How can I make [my mom] see that it is unhealthy for him to be there controlling her and her property like he owns it?

By the following year, Deb seemed to have taken her daughters advice. My mom might be kicking my brother out soon, Steph messaged a friend on Wednesday, May 13. That Friday night was the last time anyone saw Jake. A few days after that, Steph posted on Facebook: Have you ever been woken up with such awesome news you wanted to run outside screaming?

No more jake???? a friend replied.

Apparently Reno, Steph wrote. Long story tell you soon.

As the weeks ticked by, Jakes friends grew more and more frustrated. No one seemed to be treating Jakes absence as the emergency they felt it was. Steph and Dave moved back to the 7-11 Ranch and were acting like nothing was wrong. If the sheriffs own son had vanished, Ajarian couldnt help thinking, the deputies would certainly be doing more than they were. Finally, the friends decided they couldnt rely on official channels for help.

Ajarian was in the hardware-store parking lot when he spotted the first significant clue: Jakes beloved 1976 Harley Sportster, albeit with a new, slapdash paint job and a modified gas tank. Dave was riding it. If Jake ever saw Dave Jackson breathing on his motorcycle, it wouldve been the end of the world, Ajarian told me. And this guy is riding around on it. And why is it spray-painted all these shitty different colors?

Two other friends were shopping for used bikes when they discovered a couple more of Jakes motorcycles for sale in a local shop. They obtained a copy of the title to one, a Honda, which had both Jakes and Debs signatures on it. To Ajarians eye, Jakes looked like a blatant forgery. You could see Debs signature and you could see Jakes signature underneath it, and its the same fricking handwriting, he said. To Jakes friends, these motorcycle clues were a blatant sign that Debs story didnt make sense. If Jakes family expected him to return, why were they selling his stuff?

One day, Ajarian ran into Deb at the grocery store. He barraged her with questions: Where was Jake? And if she didnt know, why hadnt she filed a missing-person report? She muttered something about not wanting to get in trouble for filing a false report if Jake turned up.

Finally, three months after Jake was last seen, Deb Rudibaugh officially reported her son missing, claiming that his interest in martial arts had brought him into contact with a bad crowd. I figure he got in over his head with something and is either in witness protection or in hiding or dead, she later told investigators.

Ajarian created a Facebook page called Where is Jake Millison. He posted photos from their motorcycle trip out WestJake posing next to a giant redwood; Jake wearing a helmet, making goofy facesand asked people to share any information that might be useful. Someone reported seeing Deb, Steph, and Dave burning Jakes mattress days after he vanished. Someone else pointed out that shortly after Jake disappeared, Dave had changed his Facebook profile picture; in the new photo, he was posed on one of Jakes motorcyclesanother thing Jake never would have tolerated. The tips that came in to the Facebook group were shared with law enforcement. The accumulation of facts, plus Jakes friends persistence, began to convince the department that this was a serious matter here, Mykol said.

Winter brought bad times out at the 7-11 Ranch, Dave texted a friend. With Jake gone, much of the work fell to him. Im sick of being a slave for [Steph] and her mother on this ranch while she is in the lodge warm cozy f****** around on her phone, he wrote. When he threatened to leave, Steph brandished a gun and fired a bullet at the floor. Around the same time, Debs health began to deteriorate. Within a year, she was admitted to the hospital for a collapsed lung; a biopsy revealed that she had Stage 4 breast cancer.

Despite Jakes friends attempts to keep the investigation energized, months passed without much development. A year went by, and then another. Ajarian was alarmed to realize that hed gotten used to Jake being gone. He and his friends sometimes joked about a gray-haired Jake popping up in 50 years, cackling about the epic prank hed played on them, but the unspoken truth was that they all assumed he was dead. Not knowing why or how, or where his body was, was maddening. There had been no funeral where they could make speeches about how much hed mattered to them and cry together for his loss. His family continued to live as if hed never existed. With no official action, it was hard not to feel as though Jakes disappearanceand his lifedidnt matter. The friend group slowly began to disperse: Lopez moved to Texas; Katheiser was in Colorado Springs. Sometimes Ajarian thought of Jake almost as a ghostthere and not there at the same time.

Although the investigation stalled for years, the Gunnison County sheriffs department disputes the idea that it didnt take Jakes friends concerns seriously. We were working pretty hard, Mykol told me. It just takes a really long time. You cant just show up somewhere and searchtheres a thing called the Fourth Amendment, you know what I mean? Mykol also pointed out that the department had only one investigator for the entire county.

Finally, the sheriffs department asked the Colorado Bureau of Investigation for help on the case. Two years after Jakes disappearance, Ajarian met with a CBI agent who told him they were making progress. She said, I cant tell you anythingbut things are in the works for you guys.

On July 17, 2017, official vehicles crowded the county highway by the 7-11 Ranch. As ambulances and fire trucks waited, search teams and dogs spread out over the 700 acres. Later on that day there are reports that theyve found a body, and you just know, Katheiser recalled. Theres not another reason for a body to be out there.

The news spread fast across the small town. While Jakes friends had been calling the sheriff, visiting the ranch, posting on Facebookfor nearly all of that time, his body had been wrapped in a tarp and buried in a manure pile in the corral.

The fact that Jakes body was found on the 7-11 Ranch seemed to confirm that at least one member of his family had played a role in his death. But which one? There were almost too many potential motives: Stephs lifetime of animosity toward her brother, plus the tension over who would inherit the ranch; the constant clashes between Deb and her son. And then, of course, there was Dave. In the weeks before he vanished, Jake had told friends that if anything ever happened to him, Dave would be responsible.

From October 2018: A shocking number of killers murder their co-workers

Investigators questioned Deb, Steph, and Dave separately many times. Their stories were contradictory, confusing, and self-serving. Everyone agreed that Jake had once been his mothers favorite, but that in the years before his death, the dynamics in the family had shifted; Deb began complaining to Steph about Jake, and Steph was happy to egg her on. As Deb told investigators, Steph was insistent that her mother evict Jake. He was a freeloader, she argued. Without tough love, hed never become independent. Sometimes she hinted that more drastic measures might be necessary. The only way that hes going to leave here voluntarily, Deb claimed Steph had said, is if hes in a body bag.

Stephs efforts at persuasion seemed to work. Investigators found an amended version of Debs will, dated three weeks before Jake vanished. Instead of leaving the ranch to Jake and Shane, the propertyand everything else she ownedwould now go to Steph. Jake would get nothing.

Deb told investigators that the week Jake went missing, she had been exhausted from working the night shift at a nursing home. Shed asked Jake to take care of an errand; hed left the job half finished, then gone into town. This, she said, was the last straw. She waited until he fell asleep that night and shot him in the head. She claimed that she disposed of his body on her own. The investigators pressed her on this point. How was this possible, considering how small and frail she was? Yankee ingenuity, Deb said. She had rolled his body in a plastic sheet, then used tow straps and a winch to maneuver it out of the lodge and onto an ATV. She insisted that Steph and Dave had known nothing.

When investigators told Steph that her mother had confessed to murdering Jake, she broke down. Oh my God, she said, sobbing. Are you fucking serious? I cant breathe.

But the officers suspected that she knew more than she was letting on. There was that Facebook post about awesome news once Jake was gone, and her apparent lack of concern for her brother. They kept pressing her.

Okay, Steph said eventually. Honestly I didnt know anything until a couple months ago. Dave had been digging in the manure pile when hed uncovered the body of what looked at first like a large animal, she said. It was partially mummified, and wrapped in plastic. Dave had encountered plenty of carcasses while living on the ranch, but this one unnerved him. He could see parts of a rib cage poking out. Hed called Steph over. Is that what you think it is? he asked.

Maybe, Steph replied. Im going to call Mom.

Deb told her daughter to stay away from the body, Steph said, claiming that it was a mountain lion or a bear Jake had shot. Its illegal game; thats all Im going to say, Deb said. She told her daughter to cover it back up with manure and leave it alone.

In the ensuing weeks, Steph and Dave made awkward jokes about what theyd found. They said they talked about calling the police but never did. Then the investigation ramped up again. With officers sniffing around the ranch, Steph insisted that the remains be reburied somewhere more secure. The family avoided articulating what they were really discussing. Sometimes they called the body it; sometimes they referred to it as the bear. But Steph eventually admitted that was a ruse. I knew in my heart it was Jake, she said. One afternoon, Dave used the backhoe to dig a hole inside the corral. A couple of days later, the bear was gone from the manure pile, and the hole was packed with fresh dirt.

There were reasons to doubt each of these accounts. According to Debs medical records, she weighed 97 pounds at the time of Jakes murder, and was still weak from the gallbladder surgery shed had nine days before. At work, shed been assigned to light duty; at the ranch, she wasnt able to lift a bale of hay. When her doctor examined her a few days after the murder, none of her stitches had torn. Jake had weighed at least 170 pounds. Would it have been physically possible for her to drag his body from the second story of the lodge all the way to the manure pile, even with a winch and straps?

Many of Jakes friends assumed that Deb, dying of cancer, was covering for her daughter, and perhaps also her son-in-law. Ray, Jake and Stephs dad, also resisted the idea that Deb had murdered Jake. No matter how bad it was, I just cant see her shooting her own boy, he told investigators. Cellphone records showed that Steph had been awake in the early-morning hours when Jake was killed. Deborah didnt gain anything by killing Jacob, a CBI agent later testified in a court hearing. But Steph, who would gain sole ownership of the ranch after Deborah passes, did have a motive.

One thing was clear. Whoever pulled the trigger, whoever helped bury the body, they were banking on the idea that everyone else would see Jake the way they didas insignificant, even disposable. That no one would raise a fuss over the disappearance of a quiet, working-class guy who lived with his mother off a rural county highway.

Our families are supposed to be the people who know us best, but that often isnt the case. Sometimes the hardest people to see clearly are the ones were closest to.

After the discovery of Jakes body, and the multiple and confusing confessions from his family members, what seemed to upset his friends most was how they mischaracterized Jake. According to Deb, her son was a drug addict and a drunk, a violent MMA fighter, someone who physically assaulted her and threatened to kill his sister and her family. According to Steph, Jake was a worthless waste of space, lazy and useless. No wonder Jake clung so strongly to his friends. His chosen family was perfectly aware of his flawshis stubbornness, his arrogancebut equally attuned to his loyalty, generosity, and dedication.

On May 13, 2019, almost four years after her sons death, Deb pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received a 40-year sentence. Dave Jackson had already been sentenced to a decade in prison for his role in moving Jakes body. When I visited Gunnison last fall, the question on everyones mind was what would happen to Stephaine. She was scheduled to go on trial for first-degree murder the next fall, but Ajarian worried that she, like her mother, would end up getting a plea deal. The official version of Jakes death, codified in plea agreements and court filings, didnt strike him as the full story; without a trial, he feared hed never know what had really happened to his friend, or why. Sure enough, several months after my visit, Steph pleaded guilty to tampering with a dead body. In November, Deb Rudibaugh died in jail; two days later, Steph was sentenced to 24 years in prison.

Ultimately the system had worked: Law enforcement had located the body, elicited a confession, and secured convictions. But even after the case was legally closed, it still felt unsettled, incomplete.

One evening, I met Ajarian at a pizza place. Under his mechanics uniform, he wore a T-shirt that said punker than you, and his dark hair was styled in messy spikes. His grief over his friends death expressed itself as a kind of grasping for purpose. When Jake had first disappeared, when his friends were searching for clues and urging the sheriffs department to act, theyd been of use. Now there was nothing left to doexcept maybe hold a memorial service for Jake. Perhaps that would help him feel as though his friend had finally been put to rest. But where would he host such an event? Gunnison was too full of bitter memoriesbut it was also Jakes only home.

The next day, I met Katheiser in his tidy basement apartment in Colorado Springs. He, too, was plagued with thoughts of what might have been. A lot of mornings when I wake up, I think about Jake, what his life would have been, he told me. I like to think that he couldve sold the ranch for quite a bit of money and maybe just gone and worked a regular job somewhere. Bought a house. Maybe he wouldve met a girl and whatever. And he doesnt get that opportunity. Thats what I would have hoped for him. Just that he couldve gotten into a life that he wasnt frustrated at every day.

This article appears in the April 2020 print edition with the headline What Happened to Jake Millison?

Continued here:
The Killing of a Colorado Rancher - The Atlantic

What gets CISOs out of bed in the morning is knowing that they are keeping their organizations safe, according to a new study from privileged access management company Thycotic.

The study of more than 550 IT security decision-makers globally finds being the 'business bodyguard' and the knowledge that they are keeping their organization safe is the top motivator (29 percent), closely followed by being the upholder of ethics (25 percent).

On the negative side when asked about the most stressful aspect of the job, more people (42 percent) cited meeting the growing number of compliance and regulatory demands than lengthy shifts and the need for out of hours availability (33 percent).

"CISOs are on call 24 hours a day seven days a week so they don't have time when they get extra rest, and most cyber attacks, when they do occur aren't at 11am on a Monday morning when you're all sorted after two cups of coffee," says Joseph Carson, chief security scientist and advisory CISO at Thycotic. "They occur typically on Friday night at midnight or on the weekends. The criminals tend to operate from different time zones so they don't really facilitate your time and your attack can happen any time of day, most likely when you're asleep. So, it becomes a very high pressure, very high focused position. One of the things that CISOs can do is strive to find a balance, your mind is always on the job, and doesn't get a break, which definitely is one of the areas of leads to mental health challenges."

The biggest issues surrounding retaining security team members are seen as burnout and stress from long hours and pressures at work (45 percent), lack of support from senior leaders in how to train, appraise and develop staff (40 percent) and lack of opportunity to express themselves in challenging/interesting projects (28 percent).

Carson believes that to address this the industry needs to develop a more positive image, "We tend to focus on threats and fear because that's what that's what drives us for what we do. But sometimes we do have to think about how do we target talent and how do we market to them, how do we make the industry much more attractive for them to decide that this is a career that they want to do? We have to somewhat change the message to talk more about the positive areas talk more about the good things and successes and the people in order to try and change perceptions."

The full report is available from the Thycotic site.

Photo Credit:pryzmat/Shutterstock

See the rest here:
CISOs motivated by being guardians of their businesses - BetaNews