What I'm Doing Now

Wood Badge is the flagship adult leadership course in Scouting, and I completed the field experience last year. Right now I'm working through my ticket, which is the five-goal capstone project you design yourself and carry back into your community. It's the part where the course becomes real work.

I'm also serving as District Commissioner for the Old Dominion District of the Colonial Virginia Council, which means I spend a lot of time focused on unit health — visiting packs and troops, placing commissioners where they're needed, and trying to make sure we're actually useful to the units we serve.

I've been doing project management work for most of my career — in the Navy, in contracting, in nonprofit and civic roles. The PMP puts a formal credential behind experience I already have, and it's one that carries across sectors. I'm in active prep right now and have the exam scheduled.

I command the Smithfield Flotilla of the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary in Hampton Roads. The Auxiliary is the all-volunteer civilian component of the Coast Guard — we do vessel safety exams, public boating education, patrols, and support for Coast Guard operations including search and rescue. A lot of the job is personnel work: making sure people are trained, billets are filled, and the unit can actually do what it's supposed to do when it matters.

I launched The Adam Hinds Show earlier this year — a monthly podcast about service, leadership, and community. New episodes come out on the third Tuesday of each month, and Episode 1 is live on Spotify, YouTube, and RSS. The conversations I want to have are with people who have actually done this kind of work — in uniform, in nonprofits, in volunteer organizations, in their communities.

Most of my writing right now is at The Chaos Section and on Substack. I've been narrowing my focus toward nonprofit and civic work, voluntary association, and a framework I call Civic Mutualism — the idea that people and communities who govern themselves well don't need as much governing from the outside. I've been writing around these themes for years. I'm getting more deliberate about it now.

I'm building a part-time consulting practice through ahinds.org focused on nonprofit operations, governance, and strategy. I've spent a decade working in and around the nonprofit sector and I genuinely believe in what these organizations do. A lot of them are doing important work without the operational infrastructure to sustain it, and that's where I want to help.

I'm taking the Human Consciousness and Survival Studies course through the Rhine Research Center in Durham. The Rhine has been conducting scientific research into consciousness and parapsychology since 1930, and this course is the academic side of work I've been doing on my own through Hampton Roads Paranormal. I've always approached this subject empirically, and having a structured framework for that inquiry is something I've wanted for a while.