Since 2019, VELA has been building something remarkable: a national community of educational entrepreneurs who are reimagining what education can look like. To date, there are upwards of 5,000 founders, including microschool leaders, independent learning environments, educational technology providers, curriculum creators, and more, in what VELA is now describing as the Indie Education Movement.
In 2024, VELA held its first national convention, VELACon, in Washington, DC, where hundreds of founders gathered for three days to celebrate, connect, and equip themselves to further their impact in their communities. Last year, VELACon returned to the nation’s capital, with equally robust programming.
For the 2026 conference, VELA made the bold and brilliant decision to split VELACon into five regional events called VELA Connect 2026. Bold, because it would require VELA’s staff to create a condensed, replicable program that could also be tailored to complement each event’s unique geographical context. Brilliant, because it made VELA’s convention accessible to significantly more founders.
Instead of three days of programming across three separate tracks, VELA Connect offers a single track over a day and a half of programming. Although the speakers may differ at each location, the content presented at each event is effectively the same. Founders don’t have to wonder if they’ve missed the “best” content by attending one event over another. For founders who, over the last two years, may have found the national conference cost-prohibitive, both financially and in terms of time spent away from their businesses, programs, and families, bringing Connect events to different regions of the country makes participation far more accessible.
Having just participated in VELA Connect DC, the first of five VELA Connect events, I walked away with four reasons why every founder in the Indie Education Movement owes it to themselves and to the communities they serve to participate in an upcoming event.
First, VELA Connect is an equipping event, offering practical, actionable information and resources for founders. This year’s event included four sessions that, taken together, read like a guidebook for almost everything a founder needs to consider. Nothing was wasted, and every thought-provoking issue discussed was examined from multiple perspectives. Conversations were grounded in the realities founders face every day.
The governance session proved beneficial whether your program is a structured academy-like microschool or a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants creative dream space. With distinctly different perspectives on the panel, the discussion of AI and the future of education was relevant and relatable regardless of where you stood on the use of AI in education. We saw disagreement without disrespect, and we saw differing perspectives without the conversation becoming divisive.
The session on community involvement and advocacy addressed the role of founders in community engagement and educational policy, offering lessons that could be applied just as readily to basic parent engagement within a program as to state-level advocacy on behalf of the broader movement. That was the beauty of the programming: each session found relevance no matter where you live in the Indie Education landscape.
And that equipping is not just physical; it’s emotional. At every one of VELA’s events, there have been founders honest and vulnerable enough to share battles with “imposter syndrome” and feelings of isolation—beliefs that no one else could possibly understand the struggles of creating learning programs that are so outside of educational norms that they are having to defend themselves regularly despite having unmistakable evidence that their unorthodox approach to education works. I’ve seen enough founders crawl their way into these events, exhausted from the fight, barely hanging on.
Here, something tremendous happens. It’s at these events that they drink from a wellspring of life as they discover that they are not alone in their fight. It’s at these events that they’re able to glean wisdom and successful strategies from the experiences of other founders who have already walked the roads they are just beginning to navigate. These warriors leave with a renewed sense of purpose, armed with resources that can make a meaningful difference in their programs and in their lives. That kind of equipping is difficult to measure, but it is transformative.
Second, VELA Connect is also a connecting event where founders have the opportunity to meet others in their region who they may have never known were there. It also creates connections with founders in other parts of the country and opens the doors to collaboration around future goals, ideas, and visions. Here, kindred spirits find one another and build lasting relationships. For me, that person was Angel Sobrino, a senior contributor here at the Education Entrepreneurship Lab and my “brother from another mother.” While we have vastly different programs, we are united with so many other founders in the desire to change the world through education, impacting one family at a time, one village at a time.
That’s one of the many unexpected gifts of these gatherings. It’s at these events that founders find their people and, through connecting to a larger community, find much-needed perspective, solutions to challenges they may be facing, and ultimately find hope. Founders leave knowing they are not alone.
Third, VELA Connect is a renewing and refreshing event. Even if the nearest VELA Connect represents a quick ride into another part of town, the very fact that you are breaking from your everyday routine to participate in an event that will feed your soul matters and makes a difference. As founders, it is very easy to live on the activity treadmill, the seemingly endless grind of running an enterprise in the Indie Education ecosystem. For many of us, we rarely stop to take time for ourselves. Yet, VELA Connect represents an occasion for us to give ourselves permission to do just that and engage in physical and emotional self-care.
Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith’s book, Sacred Rest, identifies seven different types of rest, one of which is social rest. Social rest comes from being surrounded by positive, supportive people and engaging in relationships that emotionally revive us. VELA Connect represents a beautiful opportunity for founders to experience exactly that type of replenishment. At VELA Connect, we get to surround ourselves with others who understand why we started and why we keep going, who understand the weight of carrying a vision larger than ourselves and the responsibility that accompanies it, and who champion us, even as we champion others.
Finally, VELA Connect is an opportunity to join the collective voice of an educational movement that can no longer be ignored. Events such as VELA Connect do not go unnoticed. They bring attention to the very real movement, the groundswell, that is happening in Indie Education. Your participation in these events sends a message to policymakers, educators, funders, families, and anyone else watching that this disruption of the status quo by fearless educational entrepreneurs is not a one-off. It’s not a phase that will quickly fade into oblivion. Quite the opposite. As families demand better and entrepreneurs respond by creating unique and innovative educational choices for families, the momentum for changing education as we know it continues to grow. Our voices, once hidden in isolation or muffled by doubt, become an ever-increasing, unmistakable call for more and better for our children.
That’s the real reason to show up, not simply for what you’ll gain, but for what your presence adds to a movement that is still being written. Every founder who walks into a VELA Connect event and walks out equipped, connected, and renewed becomes one more voice that the status quo can no longer pretend not to hear. So find your nearest VELA Connect event; bring your questions, your battle scars, and your stubborn belief that children deserve better. The Indie Education Movement isn’t waiting for permission; it’s waiting for you.
