For the radicals.
A full-time Christian coming-of-age year in Austin
Your life is becoming yours to carry.
Spend nine months in a small cohort. You’ll carry projects and commitments that affect other people, with coaches who know you well enough to be honest.
The goal is bigger than choosing a major. This is a year to practice taking responsibility for your own life.
- 9
- months
- Close-knit
- cohort by design
- 1:1
- a coach who knows your story
- Real work
- career design sprints
Deeply rooted.
Wide awake.
Ready to act.
More freedom is coming. So are decisions no one else can make for you.
For most of your life, somebody else has set the schedule, chosen the assignments, and told you what counts as success. That changes fast after high school.
LeapYear gives you a year to make choices while coaches and a cohort are close enough to help you learn from them. You’ll make commitments, live with the results, and decide what to do next.
Three questions we come back to all year.
They come up over dinner, in coaching, after work surprises you, and when a plan falls apart. By spring, they show up in how you spend your time and choose what to do next.
Question one
What story are you living in?
A hundred good options still cannot tell you which one is worth choosing.
You are already learning what to call success. Grades teach one answer. Money can teach another. So can your family, your church, your friends, and whatever gets your attention all day.
LeapYear gives you room to ask whether those answers are true.
We begin with the story of Jesus and return to it all year: his life, death, resurrection, and invitation to follow him.
That story changes how we think about success, ambition, relationships, and what to do with the life we’ve been given.
Questions worth carrying
- 01What makes the good life?
- 02What does success mean?
- 03What deserves my attention?
- 04What responsibility do I have for the people around me?
- 05How should my faith shape the work I choose?
The center of LeapYear
Abide in Christ. Live your whole life from there.
The gospel teaches us to see career, relationships, money, and rest as parts of one life with Jesus. Discipleship gets specific. It has to do with your history, your gifts, your limits, and the person in front of you.
We read Scripture, pray, practice Sabbath, serve, and share life around the table. These practices help us stay close to Jesus and learn how to follow him in an ordinary Tuesday or a hard decision.
“Discipleship is learning from Jesus Christ how to live my life as He would live it if He were me.”
Question two
What is your story?
Learn to steward the life you’ve been given.
Your story includes what you are good at, what you have lived through, what people trust you with, what you keep noticing, and the habits that are already forming you.
An assessment may give you a clue. A coach, a project, or a hard week can show you whether it is true.
Leadership begins before anyone gives you a title.
It shows up in how you direct your attention, keep your word, handle conflict, ask for help, and do your part when the work stops being exciting.
There are deadlines here. People expect you to show up prepared. Your decisions affect more than your own grade. (We don’t even have grades here.) Over time, you see where you make excuses, where you need help, and what it takes to keep your word.
“I realized I love it when people trust me with important things. That feeling of being relied upon—that’s when I come alive.”
Known well enough to be challenged.
The cohort stays small on purpose. You’ll work beside the same people, eat together, pray together, host dinners, disagree, repair, celebrate, and carry part of the group’s work.
People notice when you show up, and when you don’t. Over time, you become people who know what they can count on from each other.
How the year moves
A full-time year with real work in it.
- Work in the world
- During the week, you’ll do career design sprints, projects, service, outreach, spiritual practices, and focused work.
- Practice with your cohort
- Each week brings group coaching, Scripture, prayer, and time to work through what you’re learning together.
- A coach who knows you
- Every other week, you sit down one-to-one with a coach who knows your story and helps you choose your next move.
- New rooms, new people
- Across the year, you’ll join exemplar dinners, site visits, retreats, intensives, and a lot of shared meals.
“LeapYear is just automatically people who want to get better, who want to be better.”
Question three
What are you going to do about it?
Reflection matters. Then you have to move.
An insight only matters if it changes what you do. So you take the question outside the classroom, try something, and pay attention to what happens.
Your experiments begin with a picture of the good life and an honest understanding of yourself. Then experience pushes back. You make a choice, live with it, and see what kind of person it is making you. Eventually, something you learn should become useful to somebody else.
You will meet people doing work you are curious about. You will visit workplaces, serve, shadow professionals, try small projects, build with other students, and lead something of your own.
Some experiments will open a door. Others will save you from spending years on work that never fit. Both can move you forward.
Career Design Flywheel
Get close enough to learn.
Career questions are too expensive to answer from a distance. The flywheel turns curiosity into a short sprint, so you can learn from people and real experience before you make a bigger commitment.
- 01 Know yourself
Start with your aptitudes, story, convictions, and patterns.
- 02 Get curious
Look beyond the paths you already know.
- 03 Focus
Choose one question you can test this month.
- 04 Talk to people
Learn from someone already doing the work.
- 05 Try things
Shadow the work, help on a project, or build a small prototype.
- 06 Reflect
Name what you learned and choose what to try next.
Career design sprints
Get closer before you commit years.
A sprint gives you a few weeks to investigate one direction through conversations and a small experiment. Then you bring what happened back to your coach, keep what you learned, and choose what to test next. The sprints build on one another across the year.
“LeapYear has made me someone with a much bigger bias to action because I’ve gotten to practice that skill multiple times.”
From exploration to contribution
By spring, the question changes.
At first, you are asking what might fit you.
As the year goes on, another question gets louder: What needs doing, and what can I take responsibility for?
Your capstone is your answer in public.
You choose a problem that matters to someone outside the program. You define the work, recruit help, lead it, and present what happened.
The project can change along the way. It still has a deadline, an audience, and people counting on you.
What you leave with
By the end, there is something on the table with your name on it.
- 01
A way of life with Jesus
A Rule of Life for prayer, rest, attention, relationships, work, and service that you can carry beyond LeapYear.
- 02
Work you can show
A capstone you led, plus a record of the conversations, experiments, and projects that brought you there.
- 03
Better judgment
You’ve had to make decisions about work and responsibility, live with the results, and revise your thinking.
- 04
People who know you
Coaches and peers who know you well, plus mentors and professionals you can keep learning from.
- 05
The courage to make the first move
You know how to write the email, walk into the room, ask a useful question, hear no, and keep going.
- 06
A next step you can explain
College, a trade, a job, a business, or another path. You can say why you chose it and what led you there.
- 07
A way to move when life changes again
When the next answer isn’t obvious, you know how to seek counsel, try something, and learn from what happens.
The point is to send you.
You leave with a next move and the ability to make another one when life changes.
The year ends with a capstone showcase and a commissioning. You present what you built. You name what changed. People who have known you through the year remind you what they have seen.
Then you go. Some students head to college. Others step into work, the trades, entrepreneurship, or another path. The standard is not how impressive the answer sounds. It is whether you know why you chose it and are ready to do the work.
You leave with a charge: use what you have been given for the good of others.
From LeapYear students
What changed over nine months.
Today I’m someone who’s confident in myself. I take action on things, and I embrace change and new opportunities.
LeapYear taught me to make great decisions for myself rather than waiting for answers. What I learned here will shape the rest of my life.
I’m ready to go to college. I would say I am where I wanted to be when I started this program.
Who thrives here
This year asks something of you.
LeapYear is built for students who are hungry to grow and ready to participate fully. The year works when you show up, let people challenge you, and follow through.
- 01
Let Jesus teach you how to live.
You want the gospel to shape what you love, how you work, and the way you treat people.
- 02
Enter unfamiliar rooms.
You are willing to ask for help and be new at something where other people can see you.
- 03
Let people challenge you.
You want coaches and friends who will encourage you and tell you the truth.
- 04
Care about something beyond yourself.
You want to use what you’re learning to solve a problem or carry responsibility for someone else.
- 05
Do what you said you would do.
You keep the meeting, send the second email, finish the project, and do your part for the cohort.
The agreement
We give you the structure. You have to use it.
We give you a clear schedule, coaches, projects, introductions, and a cohort that expects you. You still have to send the email, keep the meeting, and finish the work.
If you participate fully and follow through, we guarantee the outcomes above.
Start with a conversation
Tell us what you want this year to do in you.
A call is the best way to find out whether LeapYear fits. Bring your questions and whatever plan you have right now. We’ll explain how the year works and tell you honestly whether we think it fits.
Applications are open for the 2026–27 Austin cohort. There is no back row here.