About EDSN
Who We Are
The Education for Development and Support Network (EDSN) is an association of Plexlearning academies. We are dedicated to advancing mindfulness-centered, Research-to-Practice neighborhood community engagement for all in support of sustainability and desired quality of life.
We are rooted in sustainable development of rural and urban neighborhood communities. Grounded in the Plexlearning framework, EDSN understands learning as an ecological, distributed, and recursive process --one that integrates local knowledge, disciplinary perspectives, continuous learning, and thinking with emerging technologies.
We foster trust through respect for all local community members, hard work, and collective accountability in governance. We are supporters of intellectual and financial empowerment that cultivates Research-to-Practice partnerships and translate shared understanding into tangible desired quality of life benefits for everyone.
We owners and managers of neighborhood academies which function as makerspace laboratories, offices, and classrooms. We are supporters of meaningful, accessible, long-term experiential learning, career management, and workforce retooling aligned with evolving community ambitions.
Through intentional collaboration, we collectively perceive, interpret, and respond to quality-of-life opportunities or challenges as they are experienced in real-world contexts. Rather than treating knowledge as something produced in isolation and later applied, EDSN emphasizes co-learning and the co-construction of knowledge, where insight, practice, and action evolve together through lived experience.
We use PlexLearning to empower groups of individuals to co-learn and act collaboratively with human and non-human technological agents in perceiving, interpreting, and responding to quality-of-life’s opportunities and challenges. It extends beyond schooling to education -- a purposeful sense of being framed by life-long curiosity that involve the politics of knowledge creation, reflective self-study, accountable peer-reviews, and continuous learning about life itself.
We affirm that the sanctity of human life is inseparable from desired quality of life, inalienable personal freedoms, shared participatory responsibility, and accountable governance.
EDSN exists to support small neighborhood communities in building adaptive capacities for purposeful living --strengthening their ability to navigate social, economic, technological, and political realities with agency, dignity, and care.
Ultimately, we are ordinary people who aim to combine the strengths of human and non-human technological agents to advance mindfulness -- peaceful communities of continuous co-learning, co-caring, co-creating, and sharing. We are stewards of ecosystems that offer groups of individuals far greater opportunities to achieve desired sustainable and fulfilling lifestyle than would be possible working alone.
What We Do
EDSN brings together small groups of individuals with diverse life experiences, skills, and aspirations but who share a commitment to meaningful, place-based engagement around what they themselves identify as important within the neighborhood communities in which they live and work.
We design and facilitate long-term, collaborative initiatives that help communities articulate what matters most to them and develop adaptive responses to real-world opportunities and challenges as they arise. We provision and provide stewardship of specialized digital library services to support Plexlearning-informed Research-to-Practice (R2P) partnerships.
Our neighborhood academies connect educators, researchers, technologists, and practitioners directly with small, trust-based life-long learning groups. Within these groups, participants engage in co-learning processes that integrate storytelling, inquiry, experimentation, entrepreneurship, and reflection. Knowledge is treated not as a fixed product to be delivered, but as a living resource -- continuously refined through dialogue, experience, application, and shared ambition.
EDSN develops and supports resident neighborhood fellows and other community-centered programs situated in trusted and familiar local spaces. These initiatives include experiential journalism and storytelling, simulation-based engineering, financial and technology education, biography and local history research, and hands-on digital-tool exploration. Together, these programs and digital library services emphasize accessible intellectual and financial pathways, enabling participants to build practical skill sets, shared knowledge artifacts, and career-relevant competencies grounded in their own communities.
We translate research into practice by working alongside local organizations, institutions, and government agencies to pilot, evaluate, and refine approaches in authentic, real-world contexts. Insights generated through Plexlearning community engagement inform both immediate local action and broader scholarship, ensuring that learning remains rooted in lived realities while contributing to transferable knowledge and scalable models.
Above all, EDSN builds adaptive capacity within neighborhood communities. We support the cultivation of skills, relationships, and participatory governance practices needed to navigate social, economic, technological, and political change. By centering respect, accountability, and shared responsibility, EDSN advances purposeful living and sustainable quality of life across the neighborhoods we serve.