Sessions were short by design, usually 30 minutes, and rotated so that each village could fit them around its work.
Session | Who teaches it | Format | Credential or outcome |
Incident Command System overview | National Guard and ODF | Day-one sessions; student leaders shadow daily planning meetings | ICS awareness |
Be 2 Weeks Ready, units 1–8 | Oregon Emergency Management and county partners | Eight 30-minute units: preparing to prepare, household emergency plan, food, water, waste and hygiene, shelter, first aid, emergency management and CERT | Household preparedness plan; go-bag |
CPR and AED | Albany Fire | Hands-on | Hands-only CPR and AED skills (not certification) |
Fire science, fire and life safety, fire booth | Albany Fire and Lebanon Fire District | Live burn demonstration; classroom session; turnouts and extinguisher practice | Fire awareness |
WiseMind “Navigating Stress” | School counselors with WiseMind training | Daily body-mapping and two-minute tools in the student journal | Micro-credential on completion of the journal’s verification page |
Oregon Employability Skills | OES partner and camp director | Short daily sessions, one skill a day | OES micro-credential |
Communicating Clearly Under Pressure | Knife River training staff | Classroom session | The CLEAR method, used on build teams |
Career conversations | Counselors | Small groups with ASCA-aligned prompts | Reflection on next steps |
ORVID | Oregon Volunteers in Disaster | Sign-up session (cut in 2026) | Invitation to register as a disaster volunteer |
Paxton/Patterson labs | Paxton/Patterson | Hands-on career labs | Career exposure |
Knife River showcase | Knife River | Facility tour and heavy equipment | Industry exposure |
A few sessions are worth describing.
Employability skills. Cherie Clark began by telling students where the framework came from. Oregon employers had said young workers arrived without the skills they wanted, and that they could more easily teach someone to weld than to show up on time. Her argument was that most students already had the skills but had never paused to name them. “So we don’t need any curriculum this week because you’re doing this all day, every day,” she said. “All we need to do is pause and reflect.” The skills ran one a day: communication and collaboration on Monday, adaptability Tuesday, problem-solving Wednesday, resilience Thursday, storytelling Friday. Her example of adaptability came from the adults: after a hot first night, staff debated bringing in generators and air conditioners for the tents, until someone checked the forecast and found the next night would be colder, with rain coming.
Communicating under pressure. Knife River’s training staff taught the CLEAR method: center yourself, listen first, explain simply, adjust to your audience, repeat the key message. Students took a short personality profile (lion, otter, golden retriever, beaver) to see how their style lands with others. They learned the center’s “rule of seven”: most people hold about seven items in their heads, so shorten instructions. And they practiced checking for understanding by asking the other person to say back what they heard. The method showed up on the build sites within a day, and Knife River’s staff suggested teaching it earlier next time.
Stress. WiseMind’s trainer, Jenifer Trivelli, taught counselors to have students rate their stress, map where they feel it in the body, and use a two-minute body-based tool when the number is four or higher. The eight tools are: breathe out, self-hug, movement, look around, heart breath, hand press, cross-body tapping and noticing a solid surface. She framed it as performance, not comfort: regulating stress “literally makes my brain work in the ways that it needs to in order to effectively respond and collaborate and problem solve.”
Fire. Albany Fire’s Kevin Vining lit a two-story burn prop on Tuesday night to show how smoke and heat move through a house, why firefighters stay low and cut holes in roofs, and why sleeping with the bedroom door closed matters. Afterward he took career questions for as long as students had them, including how resident volunteer programs at local fire districts trade room and board and some tuition for shifts.
Career exposure, unplanned. Some of the career exposure happened between sessions. Ari Nordquist of the Department of Emergency Management said a student told her, “I had no idea what emergency management was, and now I’m really curious.”