Your Guide
I didn't build Halfway Brave because I love the outdoors. I built it because I've watched what happens to young people when someone gives them real work, real tools, and real trust. Something lights up that nothing else touches.
Photo of Alex in the field
Applied ecological systems thinking
Water systems & landscape hydrology
Current wilderness first aid training
Studied under a world-leading mycologist
I've spent seventeen years in outdoor construction — landscapes, hardscapes, irrigation systems, outdoor living spaces across Texas. I've run crews, operated heavy equipment, and taken raw land through to finished properties. I know soil, stone, water, wood, and weather the way you know the back roads near home. I've worked alongside my hands my entire adult life.
I've also been teaching kids to swim for over twenty years and coaching competitive swim team for fifteen. I've taught hundreds of kids something they were convinced they couldn't do. That never gets old. There is a particular kind of confidence that comes from doing a hard physical thing for the first time — and once a kid has it, you can see it in everything they do after.
A few years ago I left a $60,000 salary to take a $15/hour job at a residential treatment center for kids in serious trauma. Boys and girls who'd been through more than most adults. I worked night shifts, held kids through crisis, and helped them rebuild trust in the world one interaction at a time. That work changed me. It also confirmed something I'd suspected my whole life:
I'm a certified permaculture designer and a certified irrigation specialist. I once got to study mushroom cultivation under the world's leading mycologist. I'm endlessly curious about how natural systems work and how humans fit inside them — and I've never found a better way to share that curiosity than by taking people outside and letting the land do the teaching.
Not a straight line. But every piece is in the room.
Early Career
Started in outdoor construction at the beginning — learning soil, plants, stone, and water systems from the ground up. Built landscapes, hardscapes, and outdoor living spaces across Central Texas. Eventually co-founded a company with my sisters that we grew together for seven years.
Parallel Thread
While building outdoors by day, I spent evenings and summers teaching swim lessons and coaching competitive swim team. Hundreds of kids over twenty years. Every one of them taught me something about how kids learn, what stops them, and what breaks through. Fear of water turned out to be one of the best classrooms for building real confidence.
The Turn
Left a $60K salary to take $15/hour at Helping Hand Home for Children — a residential treatment center for kids in serious trauma. Night shifts. Crisis intervention. Rebuilding trust one interaction at a time. The work was hard in ways that were good for me. It confirmed everything I believed about what young people need and almost none of what conventional support systems provide.
Now
All of it — the land skills, the youth work, the coaching, the construction, the permaculture, the fires and the water and the mud — became the foundation for something I'd been building toward without knowing it. A place where fathers and kids can do real things together. Halfway Brave is that place.
Comfort is overrated and challenge is underused. Not hardship for its own sake — but the experience of attempting something uncertain with your own hands, failing, adjusting, and succeeding. That's the oldest curriculum there is. We've been systematically removing it from kids' lives and wondering why they seem lost.
The best thing I've ever watched a father do for his kid is not know how to do something and try anyway. When a dad learns alongside his child — when the kid sees him uncertain, trying, laughing at himself, persisting — something changes between them. That's not a byproduct of Halfway Brave. That's the whole point.
A permaculture perspective on everything: observe first. The land has logic. Weather has patterns. Animals have reasons. When you teach a kid to read the land instead of just walk through it, you give them a relationship with the natural world that will last the rest of their life. That's not hiking. That's literacy.
There's a particular dignity that comes from knowing how to do things with your hands. Make fire. Catch food. Build shelter. Navigate. These aren't survivalist fantasies — they're the baseline competencies that human beings had for 200,000 years and lost in one generation. Reclaiming even a fraction of that is quietly transformative.
You don't need experience. You don't need to know what you're doing. You just need to show up with your kid and be willing to try. I'll handle the rest.
Register Your InterestOr reach out directly: alex@halfwaybrave.com