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© Wayfinder, 2024
Wayfinder was born out of Patrick’s experience teaching at a public high school in Oakland, CA. During his five years there, he taught character development courses aimed at helping students develop purpose and prepare themselves to lead personally meaningful lives. Unable to find a curriculum that engaged his students, he began developing his own.
In the fall of 2015, Patrick was awarded an education innovation fellowship at the Stanford Institute of Design K12 Lab (or d.school). Drawing on his teaching experience, he spent the next two years assembling and leading a team that piloted, prototyped, and developed Wayfinder’s first offering: a yearlong purpose learning curriculum for high schoolers. While at Stanford, he worked closely with Bill Damon’s Center on Adolescence, the leading national center on youth purpose development.
Since 2015, Patrick has guided Wayfinder from a small pilot program to the fastest-growing K-12 social-emotional and durable skills solution on the market. He remains involved in Wayfinder curriculum development around topics of leadership and entrepreneurship, mental health + resilience for athletes, and 21st century skills. Now serving over 1500 schools and nearly one million students, Wayfinder is committed to providing future-focused teaching and learning solutions for every student, educator, and school district across the country and globally.
Since his teenage years, Patrick has been interested in how people live purposeful lives. He grew up on the Chesapeake Bay in Annapolis, MD, and is a proud alumnus of Annapolis High School. With community connections to the Naval Academy, he decided to complete the Officers Candidate School for the Marines in Quantico, VA, while earning his bachelor’s degree at Brown University.
Inspired by his father’s work as a federal scientist and his great-grandfather’s work as a doctor for the Veterans Affairs, Patrick has always been interested in public service and spent years of his young adulthood as a human rights advocate. His advocacy work took him to Burma, where he worked on a bipartisan effort by bring the Burmese junta to the ICC and establish democratic leadership in the country. In subsequent work throughout his twenties in human rights advocacy, as a youth development program co-founder, and a classroom teacher, he remained driven by a personal sense of purpose grounded in service of local and global communities.
Patrick now has two decades of experience partnering with schools to bring leadership, character education, and future-ready skills programming to students across the world. He previously worked at Big Picture Learning School, led workshops at United World Colleges, taught at several public and independent schools, and presented at the Deeper Learning Network national conference. Patrick has spoken at more than 300 schools and K12 conferences including NAIS, AVID national conference, the Learning and the Brain conference, and the Oregon Annual SUP + administrators conference.
Patrick’s work has been featured in the Washington Post, Forbes, Boston Globe, NPR, and TechCrunch. He has written extensively on purpose development in adolescence, and his writing has appeared in Fast Company, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Edutopia, UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, in the book Purpose Rising, and more. Patrick is a Fulbright Scholar, All-American high school lacrosse player, and former lecturer at Stanford University and UC Berkeley. He currently lives in beautiful Central Oregon with his wife and two children, where he is an avid backcountry skier and cyclist.
