Volunteer and Train
Someone Has to Do the Teaching
The whole premise here is that you can take a person who has never had the opportunity and make them genuinely capable — not credentialed, capable. That doesn't happen because of a curriculum. It happens because somebody who actually knows how to do the work sits with them until they can do it too.
That's the ask on this page. Not a volunteer shift. Your actual craft.
Two Places Your Expertise Lands
Teaching the people coming through. If you're good at something a client will pay for — photo editing, marketing, sales conversations, bookkeeping — you can train the people entering our enterprises in it. This is the most direct line between what you know and someone's first real job.
Building the organization itself. Experiment Inc. needs professional work that a small nonprofit usually can't afford and shouldn't fake: legal, tax, accounting, financial modelling, systems and infrastructure. Doing that work — or building the process so we can keep doing it after you've finished — takes real weight off a small team and puts it back into the enterprises.
Do the Work, or Teach the Work
You can do either, and we'll take either gladly. But they aren't equal, and we'd rather say which one we're hoping for.
Doing the work solves this year's problem. Teaching it leaves something behind — inside a person who now carries a skill they didn't have, and in an organization that no longer has to ask. That's the same outcome this entire site argues for, turned inward. (Why we develop people rather than hiring them ready-made → Developing Leaders from Within.) If you can do both, do the second.
What This Actually Asks
Real time, across enough weeks to matter. Someone learning a skill from you will be slower than you, and will need you again after the first session. We would rather have four people who show up for three months than forty who attend once.
And a particular posture, which is harder to describe than the schedule and matters more. The people you would be teaching are not a project. They are adults acquiring something, from someone who has it. If you have ever been taught well by somebody who plainly respected you, you already know the difference we are asking for.
If You Are Not Sure You Have Anything
Most people who think that are wrong. The gap between what a working professional knows and what someone entering the workforce knows is enormous, and almost none of it feels like expertise from the inside. Tell us what you do. We will tell you honestly whether it helps.