Open Circuit was started by Tiana and Thomas, a homeschooling family in Central Texas. Like a lot of parents, we spend our days thinking about how to give our kids room to explore, ask questions, and learn from the real world. Along the way, we kept running into the same wall, and we could not stop thinking about it.
It started with Tiana. As a homeschool mom, she saw something up close: homeschooling families often sit outside the systems that schools spend years building. Career exploration programs, guest speakers, industry mentorship, workplace visits, internships. When you homeschool, you become the guidance counselor, the field-trip coordinator, the career coach, and the community connector, usually without the network to make all of it happen.
The more we talked about it, the more we realized this was not only a homeschool problem. Public, private, charter, and microschool families are looking for the very same thing: real connections between young people and the adults who are building, creating, leading, and serving in our community.
Young people today have unlimited access to information. They can learn almost anything online. But information is not the same as connection. Many kids never meet an engineer, a nurse, a filmmaker, an electrician, or an entrepreneur before deciding whether that path is for them. The people who could change a young person's direction are often just a few miles away. They simply are not connected yet.
So we're building the connector
Open Circuit is not another program, and it is not trying to replace schools, clubs, or the great youth organizations that already exist. Our job is to connect them. We bring together businesses, professionals, nonprofits, schools, homeschool communities, and families to create opportunities that no single parent, school, or organization could build alone.
We are building this the way we do most things in our home: as a family, one real relationship at a time, starting right here in the Austin area and designed to grow. Open Circuit is an independent community nonprofit in formation. We are running real experiences first and formalizing as we go.
Co-founders of Open Circuit · a Central Texas family
