Meet Chandra Brown

We had the good fortune of connecting with Chandra Brown and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
Freeflow Institute was born of a love of rivers, art, and education. After years of guiding commercial river trips, freelance writing, and teaching high school, I merged all of those professional trajectories into one. Freeflow Institute curates creative outdoor learning opportunities for established and emerging writers, artists, leaders, educators, and students of all backgrounds.

Freeflow began in 2018, when I built two pilot programs – two unique 6-day writing workshops that took place on Idaho’s Salmon River and Montana’s Missouri River. I was teaching high school Spanish at the time, and had finished a Master’s program in Environmental Studies two years earlier. During my time in grad school, I developed friendships with some revered and beloved writers. I enjoyed wonderful connections within the literary world and called on those connections to help me get Freeflow off the ground. I contracted two brilliant writers to teach these pilot programs. We essentially crafted college-level workshop curricula and overlaid them on top of multi-day river trips. With the support of some wonderful colleagues, students, friends, and mentors, we I brought those two 2018 programs to fruition. In the years that followed, I built more and more courses and broadened Freeflow’s scope to incorporate more organizational partnerships, participant demographics, and instructors from different backgrounds. In 2020 I retired my teaching position to work on Freeflow full-time.

Between the pandemic, economic inflation, beginner business mistakes, and the myriad challenges of entrepreneurial life, building Freeflow has not always been easy. I’ve enjoyed tremendous support from my community. I’ve never felt wholly alone in this endeavor, and I’ve sought out opportunities to work with and around other people, and to call upon mentors and friends who could help “unstick” me when I was floundering. I’m very proud of the way in which we’ve worked to build a network of voices and minds from many different backgrounds: these people are now the heart of our organization.

In 2020 I founded a non-profit appendage to Freeflow Institute, The Freeflow Foundation, which works to support Freeflow participants from lower-income and marginalized demographics with scholarships, gear, guidance, and creative mentorship. Now around 30% of our participants receive scholarship funds from The Foundation. I’m very proud of this piece, as well.

What role has risk played in your life/career?
The most compelling rewards seem to emerge from a space where at least some risk is present. However, as a fairly risk-averse human, instinctively I want to take chances only under the best of circumstances. As that’s not always possible (in entrepreneurship, as in running whitewater, as in making art, etc.), I try to learn and observe as much as I can, using knowledge and intuition to make informed, calculated choices.

A calculated risk involves awareness of potential consequences, acknowledgment of one’s own capacities and limitations, and wholehearted visualization of best-case outcomes. If I cannot visualize a favorable outcome, I won’t take the risk. That lack of vision either means that I’m in my head and mentally unprepared to make the move – or that I actually don’t have the knowledge or skills necessary to get past the point of fear and vacillation. I truly don’t know how to do the thing. Sometimes it’s hard to know the difference between those two situations.

With my career, I’ve spent a lot of time in liminal spaces, assessing and analyzing to the point of paralysis. As I grow older and more confident, as I learn more and expand my skill set, I would like to spend less time calculating and more time experimenting. I’d like to become braver, bolder, and more decisive as I move forward in my career.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I’d like to dedicate my Shoutout to Dan Spencer and Rick Potts – two teachers and friends who have supported my vision and work since the very beginning.

Website: www.freeflowinstitute.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/freeflowinstitute/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/89559767/admin/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FreeflowInstitute

Image Credits
Nancy Bluestein-Johnson, Tom Spatig, West Howland, and Chandra Brown