Who We Are

Sempervirens117 is an environmental consulting firm specializing in outdoor learning and group bonding opportunities in Northern California. We work with families, local businesses, non-profit organizations, and major corporations in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond to create viable foundations for a better, greener, more equitable, and sustainable world.

We teach our revolutionary new 17 Steps to Sustainability modular outdoor learning method during two highly interactive team-building retreats set in beautiful locations in the Pacific coastal redwoods near Santa Cruz and in Mendocino County. In late 2022, we will also be developing a new retreat located in Big Sur. Our longer term plans for 2023 also include a fourth retreat to take place in Humboldt County near Redwood National Park and the mighty Klamath River.

We also cover all 17 learning modules in smaller, 5-part clusters during a series of day-long workshops in various outdoor settings close to Silicon Valley. These learning sessions take place in open space preserves, parks, and beaches within short drives to San Francisco and San José and are followed by wrap-up analysis and casual conversation at highly rated local farm-to-table dining destinations.

Our new Earth-friendly family outings are exciting adventures for parents and children that teach our basic learning modules (thinking and literacy skills) in a fun and relaxing environment. They include a morning outdoor activity, an afternoon learning skill module, and a concluding family meal and discussion at a local restaurant.

Our Origin Story

In Latin, “semper virens” means “always green.” The scientific name of California’s majestic coastal redwoods is Sequoia sempervirens. Our company got its start in a rustic, redwood-shingled cottage in the sleepy Santa Cruz Mountains town of Woodside, near to the bustling city of San Francisco. What was that cottage’s street address? The answer is 117.

After many years of solo hiking in the surrounding redwood forests – during all seasons and weather conditions imaginable – our founder gradually began to formulate a compelling vision for how to Protect the Planet and Grow the Global Economy without one agenda interfering with the other. Only then would human society as a whole be able to survive and thrive for the next 100 years to come.

The essence of his vision was this: that the rugged and beautiful natural landscapes bordering Silicon Valley held virtually limitless and largely untapped potential as innovative outdoor classrooms rivaling those of classical Greece, where the knowledge base of Western civilization first emerged.

If Bay Area tech professionals could be persuaded to accompany them on open space journeys of external exploration and internal self-discovery, our founder would teach them a series of 17 simple lessons to unlock the entire 100% of their creative energies, so that they could help solve the enormously complex problem of accelerating climate change.

Once this high tech intellectual vanguard had mastered these valuable lessons in permanently sustainable living and augmented environmental awareness, they could transform such insights into greener products and Earth-friendly services that would earn their companies money while sharing them widely on the Internet through social media – far more effectively than our founder alone would ever be capable of doing.

These developments, in turn, could result in cascading net positive effects on a worldwide scale. This would increase the probability dramatically that global users of social media might respond more rapidly to climate change by implementing practical green economic solutions into their 24/7 patterns of daily living and incorporate them into their future buying decisions. By influencing the world’s most powerful online influencers headquartered in Silicon Valley, our founder could play a small part in changing the world, for the better.

Convinced in the merits of this mission, our founder then began to design team training workshops in specific natural settings in the surrounding area to be paired with farm-to-table meals and seminar discussions afterward. As an experienced university educator, he planned to offer every participant personalized online feedback with a detailed assessment of their individual performance during the team training exercise.

In this fashion, the learning experience would be unique for each client, since it emerged from Socratic-style dialogues that would never be reproduced in exactly the same fashion. The lessons could be absorbed more fully and enjoyably, compared with conventional leadership and team training methods that use one-size-fits-all lectures, fixed lesson plans, and online programs that are easily packaged, repurposed, and sold.

Inspired by this possibility, our founder invented a revolutionary new 17 step modular outdoor learning method to promote sustainable solutions and help build a greener economy. It would do so by improving team bonding, group leadership, and collaborative communication skills in the process. And this would result in immediate financial benefits for the companies who signed their employees up for our teaching and organizational services.

While our client base has expanded beyond the Bay Area since then, the incandescence of our original founding vision has remained exactly the same.

What We Do

All Sempervirens117 team training sessions include some combination of Farm-to-Table Meals, Seminar Discussions, tours and tastings at Local Organic Wineries, Craft Breweries, Farms, or Ranches as well as entertaining Group Bonding Activities. Collectively, they help establish the necessary team trust, morale, and forward momentum needed to supercharge a company’s or organization’s green economic growth path on to the road to Zero Carbon or Net Neutral GHG Emissions.

Our 2021-2022 offerings take place in some of the most beautiful and pristine parts of Northern California. All are within relatively short drives from SFO International Airport. We work closely with our clients to create unforgettable team learning experiences tailored to their needs so that they can become more effective in designing workable business models that benefit the bottom line while mitigating the harmful impacts of human activity on the health of the planet.

If you’ve read enough and are interested in finding out more, scroll to the bottom of the page and click the green Contact Us button. We’ll respond right away to your message.

If you want to investigate more before you decide, feel free to browse the Retreats, Workshops, FAQ, and Gear pages using the embedded links, header list, or dropdown menu above. From there, you can visit the Learning Modules page or find out more about our Founding Vision and Core Principles.

Please check out our blog, Dispatches from the Bear Republic, and our Profiles in Green Power page, which showcases the amazing life stories of green economic entrepreneurs and visionaries who are making an impact on our world – right now. You can follow us on Twitter (@sempervirens117) and Instagram (@sempervirens117) or see our latest posts all in one place from our Social Media page. Or send us an email (sempervirens117@gmail.com).

We’ll respond in kind by visiting your own pages, reviewing your social media posts, and exploring ways to connect on matters of sustainability, renewables, and green technology. We’d love to know what your company or organization is already doing to reduce waste, protect vulnerable ecosystems, and slow down the breakneck pace of human-induced climate change.

Still not convinced? That’s fine. Scroll down past the beautiful San Mateo County beach picture below to continue reading. We think you’ll really like what you discover.

What Makes Us Unique?

What makes the Sempervirens117 team training model unique compared to the competition? Our founder is a summa cum laude graduate from top-ranked liberal arts Williams College who has a Master’s and Ph.D. in global history from Johns Hopkins University. During that time, he also completed additional research while studying at the prestigious Humboldt University in Germany. After graduating, he held an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation humanities postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University and then spent four years teaching in Montana while exploring remote and wild landscapes in the Pacific Northwest and Northern Rockies.

The 17-step, interactive outdoor learning system our founder invented is the only Sustainable Solutions Team Training method on the market today inspired by the schools of classical Athens. We have adapted this ancient model by adding new teaching techniques and contemporary topics designed to meet the dynamic challenges of the twenty-first century. We also have updated it to appeal to the diverse cultural and gender backgrounds of our clients. And instead of going all the way to Greece and wearing a toga all day, our clients get to spend quality time in California, dress however they feel like, and have an incredibly fun time learning how to be think greener, reduce energy consumption, and live more sustainably instead. Personally, we think it’s a pretty sweet deal.

In addition: we don’t deliver any lectures on the moral need to combat climate change or stress the political urgency to take action. We don’t talk about morality or politics, period. Neither do we overwhelm our clients with policy information or arcane scientific data on why their companies should become more sustainable. We recognize that the ones who come to us already have taken such messages to heart, in their own ways.

That’s why we prefer to let our clients decide for themselves how to respond to what’s going wrong with our planet. As Experienced Outdoor Educators, we seek to provide them with the exhilarating learning opportunities and captivating training grounds needed to strengthen their climate survival skills and augment their analytical tool kits, so that they can come up with the out-of-the-box solutions that the rest of humanity so desperately needs.

Our team training sessions are geared for all Business Professionals and Executive Level Managers interested in implementing sustainable solutions to reduce carbon emissions, save energy, and optimize their company’s use of declining natural and non-renewable resources. We offer hands-on, results-oriented learning modules guaranteed to deliver results. We provide an ultra-premium product, offer 20% discounts for first-time clients and 5% bounties for each successful referral they make that results in a new booking for our services. And we will return the entire teaching fee for their workshop or retreat if our clients are not 100% Satisfied by their experiences. That’s a money-back guarantee most other corporate team training leaders simply can’t afford to match.

Each one of our workshops and retreats are led exclusively by our company founder, who left a successful academic career behind to focus full-time on environmental entrepreneurship as as way to express his personal commitment to saving the planet.

Our training sessions focus on developing a Cross-Functional Set of 17 Advanced Learning Skills, including: first principles thinking and core logic training; mindfulness practices for the workplace; micro- and macro-level observational awareness; group-based decision making; alternative forms of leadership; and content-rich online communication strategies to help our clients connect more effectively with key market demographics.

Our overall goal is to unlock the hidden creative talents of our highly motivated clients, so that they will go on to invent the stuff humanity needs to survive this century’s challenges and make it still standing into the next. They are the Change-Makers of Their Generation – not us. Our mission is to offer them the opportunities for experimental learning that will help them catalyze a brighter future.

Concluding Thoughts

Finally: we at Sempervirens117 are pragmatic optimists with faith in the power of the collective human mind to combine creativity with common sense to respond quickly in times of impending crisis. We are personally committed to helping build the infrastructure for a Greener Global Economy that will be a win-win for the Biosphere and Humanity both. If this is a vision that you and your company or organization also share, then let’s connect and see what we can work out – together.

Please contact us using the green button below if you’d like to find out how your company can sign up for a retreat or workshop. We’ll work with your HR or PR Teams to customize an experience that is right for you, go over the last-minute details for planning your trip, and help prepare your team for the incredible experiences in store for them when they arrive on location in the Golden State.

We look forward to seeing and talking with you soon!

– Bradley @Sempervirens117

Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.

Steve Jobs, Apple co-Founder