Meet our newest teammate: Christopher Edgerley. He’s joining our team as an Experiential Design Fellow. Be sure to welcome Christopher when you see him around at 1 Million Cups Fargo and other Emerging Prairie events!
Meet Christopher
Nickname: Everyone calls me Chris, except in the rare cases that someone prefers to call me by Christopher (which I am quite okay with)
Hometown: I grew up in southern Rhode Island. It was like growing up in Fargo: you may live in a specific town, but the towns around you blend together. My Fargo, Moorhead, and West Fargo were Westerly, Charlestown, Richmond, and Hopkinton.
Currently a student at: Well, I’m not a student in the traditional sense. I am building a self-directed learning portfolio in Ecosystem Design. It focuses on building cultures and communities with the question: how can we design new normals that empower our place in the human experience?
What has been the most influential technology innovation in your lifetime? I would have to say smartphones that are priced so well that there is little to no barrier to entry in having one. My generation spent our later teenage years exploring this incredibly strange device and learning how to incorporate it into our lives. For this reason, we live virtually inseparable from each other, a wealth of knowledge, and applications that bring simplicity to our lives. It has broken boundaries of space and time to have everyone and everything at our fingertips. While the potential is massive for these devices, we can have the conversation some other time on the pros and cons of this inseparable connectivity we all have and what it’s doing to our minds.
What do you do in your free time? I like to consider all of my time free, which was one of the reasons I dropped out of school. If the time I spend does not feel free and purposeful, I’ll find other ways to spend it. I wake up in the morning to cultivate happiness – a deep sense of joy and fulfillment – in myself and others, and thankfully that is my job here. Beyond my work with Emerging Prairie, I meditate to cultivate inner peace for myself, play music to express myself and allow others to feel, research and synthesize ideas into big concepts that empower our place in the human experience, and talk with others about why they get out of bed in the morning. I love meeting people that are actively making the world a better place to live and learning alongside them, adventuring with them, and dreaming of a future where our imaginations are materialized. I’m an advocate for well-being by being always willing to help others learn how to cook healthy, affordable, and tasty meals, and explore themselves to find the deep inner peace that can be cultivated within us all.
What’s your favorite hidden gem that you’ve discovered so far in Fargo? Jim Sweeney – a humble yet brilliant host of mine that is a big champion for this community.
How did you first hear of Emerging Prairie? About a year ago during my last job, we had a ceremony coming up for a community space that we’d be managing. Around that time, my mentor and boss came to me and mentioned that there will be this great guy coming from North Dakota to talk at the opening about how he has helped build community in Fargo and that I should take care of him. That Fargoan was Greg Tehven, and he let me know all about Emerging Prairie. I’ve been a huge fan ever since, and now I’m a team member.
What do you hope to learn as a fellow of Emerging Prairie? I hope to learn about how this community has rallied behind the entrepreneurial ecosystem and fostered this incredible space for innovative careers that are driving big impact. I’ve heard it has not always been this way, and that it’s been the effort of many incredible changemakers that have stepped up and decided to make Fargo the best place in the world for Entrepreneurs to live. I want to understand why they do it, how they do it, and what they imagine the future of Fargo to feel like. My fellowship focuses on Experiential Design, which gives me the opportunity to focus on how Emerging Prairie can build world-class experiences for the guest speakers, innovators, and entrepreneurs that come to Fargo. How can we make these guests champions and advocates for this community? I want to learn how we can inspire a deep love in our guests for the people and the entrepreneurial ecosystem that live and breathe here, further deepening the extended family of Fargo.
