steamHouse is promoting a universal mentoring model that emphasizes conscious thinking and decision-making.

The objective of the Club Ideal part of steamHouse is to design and promote a project and team based club structure (roughly akin to “Boy Scouts”) that includes training on using our ever present tools—head, heart and body—to decide well. Thinking, relationships and agency are tools used in every moment, by every human, regardless of context, social status or other available equipment. Yet no focused or comprehensive mentoring or educational program gives explicit training on these most basic of tools.

In an age of abundant and sometimes distracting, wrong or deceiving information, we all need to be active students of meaning-making. Social media, potentially deceptive artificial intelligence and our chosen news do not readily paint a fair and full picture of our world. We need curious, creative, critical thinkers, who decide from more conscious and purposeful perspectives, and less from unconscious animal defaults, psychological biases and triggered emotions.

As a fundamental skill, conscious thinking is a unique leverage point with magnifying effect as an instructional investment. Improved decision-making using conscious thought, relationship and practiced action improves every other tool training or lesson we might emphasize in our schools. Improved conscious decision-making impacts every decision a person makes, and that notably includes an improvement in all of life’s critical decision-making moments! As lessons on the most fundamental aspects of being a human, instructional assets developed will have relevance globally and timelessly!

steamHouse understands these skills (thinking, relationships and agency) as so important and underserved that their lesson should be conveyed in the most emotionally engaging ways—embedded in a story space of characters and events students might relate to.

steamHouse is producing a storyscape that includes a utopia of principled Aspiringly Effective, Reasonable and Fun (ERF) Folk, who make case for, and offer training in “Every Now Tools” for conscious and purposeful thinking. These Earth ERFers, or TeraTerraTribers as they are also called, cultivate cucurbita (squash, gourds, melons, cucumbers) for their purported curiosity inducing effects.

ERFers honor two kinds of tribes, or folks to whom they feel affinity and shared purpose. One’s “comfort tribe” is usually a smaller, safer, more familiar group of people with whom we share a lot in common. We often find these folks easiest to be with, and so we can more readily be ourselves and recharge.

And ERFers think of their TeraTerraTribe as a “supertribe” of a great many (diverse) people who champion a very few, very important powerful ideas which, for them, include: Personal Agency, Mutual Respect, Objective Reason, Reflective Thinking and having a “Gold Star Best” set of good ideas to live by.

In ten years time, steamHouse will create a physical clubhouse setting and online story for a

• web series sampling of core conscious thinking, relationship and agency lessons

• persuasive case for a steamHouse model

• feature length, low budget movie to entertain, engage, inspire and persuade

• professional proposals for follow on full curriculum build out, pilot or other projects

Over the next ten years, Club Real (the here and now activity of neighbor kids and families of Fairmount, Colorado, circa 2025) will be more and less connected to “Club Ideal” (our designation for the mentor model design part of the steamHouse project).

Club Real activities include a variety of monthly-ish activity with intent to create experiences and community for kids, families and friends. And, our four feature annual events—Bee & Seed Day, Snakes and Toed Beasts Day, SuperHarvest and Gourd Gala—will weave in Club Ideal storyline elements to give context and connection to those events. Club Real will also include project based activity—GoatRunner Robotics Team, and Story Team—that will “micro-pilot” ideas from Club Ideal.

In addition, Story Team will amount to a theater school training and movie-making project, coming in little bites over a number of years, through camps and one-off events. Participants may become contributors—perhaps as artists, actors, extras, animators, set creators, camera, sound and light people—to the Club Ideal’s production of a TeraTerraTribe storyscape, movie and lesson web series.

We are Think Big then Be Real. steamHouse offers compelling reason and example for a global curriculum and club design. We hope to inspire, or draw in better resourced and talented others to serve a cause worthy of more than our simple neighborhood home, and minimal resources, can support in real time. When you come to a steamHouse or Club Real event, you might witness both earnest, professional, purposeful activity, and simple, maybe quirky, real people as a potluck and game community that doesn’t take itself all that seriously—we’re doing all this kind of fun at the same time.