We're building the preparedness company we couldn't find.

Ethan has spent three decades building organizations, leading people through uncertainty, and finding, every single time, that community is both the method and the point. Community Prep is the synthesis of everything he's learned and cares about. His credentials in risk management are unconventional and hard-won. As a wildland firefighter, he worked the fireline across the Western United States, learning firsthand how communities mobilize under pressure and how collaboration across every walk of life is what gets you through. He later earned his Wilderness EMT certification and trained alongside the experts who design risk protocols for Navy SEALs and international war correspondents; then took those frameworks into the field, leading young people through remote corners of Central America, India, Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, and East Africa. In 2006 he founded Carpe Diem Education, a gap year organization now celebrating its 20th anniversary. Six years later he co-founded the Gap Year Association, recognized today by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission as the standards development organization for gap year education. He has built nationally recognized safety and accreditation standards, hosted six national conferences, and led two organizations through a merger. His leadership has always rested on the belief that strong systems and genuine human connection aren't competing values; they're the same value. Ethan lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is, by his own account, one of approximately six people actually born there. He's a TEDx speaker, has lectured nationally on nonprofit founding and experiential education, and has twice spent ten days in Noble Silence meditating in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Jamil was raised in Chicago and on military bases around the world by a single father, alongside two sisters. He got to know the world by taking it apart. He got into his first fight at five and plenty more after, nearly every one of them in defense of someone else. Both instincts, the need to understand the machine and the reflex to step between people and harm, are still the center of who he is. He came up through the trades: landscaping, concrete, rough carpentry, welding, because he liked to see a thing finished and standing at the end of the day. He's an artist in nearly every medium: ink, paint, clay, music. He also spent a stretch of his life closer to the edge than most résumés admit, including a period without a home, and long solo trips into the Sonoran Desert and the Sandia Mountains. Resilience, for Jamil, has never been theoretical. The technology career started almost by accident: an entry-level IT job taken during the recession, two promotions inside a year, and then the credentials to match: a bachelor's in IT management, an MBA, a stack of process and technology certifications, and an intensive program at Harvard. What he turned out to be genuinely good at was designing processes and building the systems that let an organization actually do the thing it's trying to do. He built an entire device-provisioning operation from nothing for clients who couldn't afford a single mistake: scoped it, staffed it, ran it, and painted the empty room himself before the racks went in. Then he walked away from it, because the company's values weren't his. Today he's the one quietly building the machine behind everything at Community Prep. He's a father three times over, with a span wide enough that he's raising a middle-schooler and learning to answer to "grandpa" at the same time. Ask him what being prepared really means and he won't reach for gear or worst-case scenarios. He'll talk about paying attention, taking responsibility, and looking after the people around you. Then he'll get quiet and go back to building.

Born off the grid and raised by wolves in the forest, legend has it that Jenn has built communities on all six habitable continents while raising four (maybe six?) kids and worldschooling them. She's lived in a tent for a year, pedaled more than 10,000 kilometers by bicycle, walked 750 miles for fun, worked remotely from more coffee shops, ferries, picnic tables, and chicken buses than she can count, and learned that good gear earns its place by surviving rainstorms, toddlers, and questionable decisions. She's on track to graduate from Harvard University in February 2027 with a master's in Global Development Practice, where her studies have focused on climate change, natural hazards preparedness and response, community-level disaster management, sustainability, and regenerative economics. With more than twenty years leading diverse teams across the for-profit and nonprofit sectors, Jenn believes in building communities and businesses that create more for everyone. Based on an island in the St. Lawrence River, Jenn's version of preparedness looks a little different. It's camping trips with people you love, buying one and gifting one, block parties that fund mutual aid, shared ownership, and Burger Mondays so every neighbor has a seat at the table. Hope is the strategy, along with knowing who has jumper cables, who has soup, and who needs both. A proud steward of a multi-generational heritage of resilience, curiosity, and helping hands, Jenn believes the strongest communities are built long before they're needed. Her philosophy is simple: hope isn't something you wait for, it's something you practice. Usually with extra chairs, a meal in the freezer, and enough room for one more.

David is a solarpunk tinkerer to his core. Also known as Dr. Dirt, he trained in cob and natural building on the Oregon coast, then brought that hippie building into academia, earning his doctorate studying the material properties of earth that make buildings predictable and safe. He gets immense satisfaction from using every bit of the material available, whether that's the meager sunlight captured by solar panels on a rural farm in Mongolia or an e-bike built out of scrapyard parts. There's no engineering challenge so simple that he can't overcomplicate it, however. The solutions he gravitates toward might not be the standard ones, but they are the funniest, and they fit a lot of capability into small spaces and small budgets. He trained as a mechanical engineer but will happily develop your next electrical schematic, circuit board, or app. He has patents pending on medical devices we can't talk about yet. After a side quest through the oil and gas and AI data center cooling industries, David has been feeding his soul working to care for his local community and grow technologies that give more than they take. He'll talk your ear off about open source and right to repair if you let him. He's certified in Advanced Wilderness First Aid and has served as a medic at festivals and community events. He has practiced the slow work of community resilience with several networks: in Charlottesville, Virginia (yes, that Charlottesville) and on the island community where he spends most of his time now. Sometimes that work is flashy and fun, like DIY music shows and bike scavenger hunts. Mostly it's mundane: cleaning a kid's bike, dropping supplies off to friends, joining the group call to organize for everyone's benefit. Equally likely to be found racing a tuk-tuk the length of India, testing a robot in a Saudi desert, or coming out of the (3D printer) closet, he will almost never answer a question without an "it depends." Because it almost always does.