People depend on your decisions every day.
How are you preparing for the challenges you haven't encountered yet?
Putting Leadership Into Action
Most of us have worked on teams where we hesitated to speak up, worried about making mistakes, or felt like we were carrying the responsibility alone. Lighthouse & Campfire is designed to let people experience something different—what it feels like to belong to a team where trust grows quickly, conversations become honest, and people leave more connected than they arrived.
Lighthouse & Campfire exists because leadership in high-risk environments requires more than information. We cannot prepare people for every challenge they will face, but we can help them develop the judgment, awareness, and capacity to navigate uncertainty and lead when it matters most.
Inspired by the way people have learned in the fire service and other high-risk professions for generations, this experience combines real-world leadership lessons with modern principles of experiential learning, human performance, communication, and reflection.
What Will We Actually Be Doing?
Lighthouse & Campfire is built around shared experiences that challenge participants to communicate, collaborate, adapt, solve problems, and lead alongside others.
Throughout the experience, participants will work through a variety of activities designed to create meaningful opportunities for learning, reflection, and personal growth.
Work Through Challenges Together
Build camp. Solve problems. Adapt to changing conditions. Work alongside others where success depends on communication, trust, and the ability to work together.
The goal is not simply to complete the task. The goal is to understand how people work together when conditions change.
Lead, Support, and Learn
Leadership is not always about being in charge.
Throughout the experience, participants will have opportunities to lead, support others, make decisions, mentor teammates, and experience the responsibilities that come with each role.
Some activities place participants in leadership positions. Others ask them to support someone else.
Both experiences matter.
Navigate Uncertainty
Not every challenge has a clear answer.
Some experiences intentionally reveal incomplete information, changing conditions, assumptions, and hidden details that require participants to slow down, ask questions, verify information, and adapt.
Participants discover that uncertainty is often where judgment, awareness, and leadership develop.
Gather Around the Campfire
Some of the most important learning happens after the activity is over.
Guided campfire conversations create opportunities to share experiences, discuss leadership challenges, exchange perspectives, and learn from one another.
The fire becomes a place for reflection, conversation, and connection.
Learn Through Experience
Rather than relying solely on lectures or presentations, participants learn through shared experiences, practical activities, discussion, reflection, and personal discovery.
Some lessons can be taught.
Others must be experienced.
Disconnect to Reconnect
The experience takes place in a relaxed outdoor environment that encourages participants to slow down, be present, and step away from many of the distractions of everyday life.
Time for reflection, recreation, conversation, and quiet moments is intentionally built into the experience because growth often happens between the activities as much as during them.
People rarely remember the PowerPoint.
They remember the moment.
— Chuck Dornisch
“Some of the most important lessons I learned in safety and the fire service did not come from classrooms. They came from shared experiences, changing conditions, honest conversations, and learning to work together when it mattered most.”
— Chuck Dornisch
Founding Experience • September 14th-17th 2026
Four Days. Ten Participants. One Founding Group.
The Founding Experience is not a conference, a retreat, or a traditional training program.
Over four days, participants will build camp, work through challenges, share meals, gather around the fire, and explore leadership through shared experiences.
Every activity, conversation, and reflection has been intentionally designed to create meaningful opportunities for learning and growth.
There will only ever be one founding group.
Ten participants will help shape the beginning of Lighthouse & Campfire and become part of the story from the very beginning.
Responsibility Changes Everything
Where Experience Meets Purpose
Chuck Dornisch brings more than 25 years of construction safety leadership experience and over 30 years in the fire service, including leadership and Training Officer roles in high consequence environments where communication, adaptability, leadership, and decision making directly affected people and outcomes.
Leadership Looks Different Here
Most leadership development happens in classrooms, conference rooms, and lecture halls.
There is value in those environments. They can teach information, introduce ideas, and share knowledge.
But some lessons require something more.
Trust is built by working together.
Communication improves through shared challenges.
Judgment develops through experience.
Reflection happens when people have time to think.
At Lighthouse & Campfire, participants step away from many of the distractions of everyday work and gather in a relaxed outdoor environment where leadership is experienced rather than simply discussed.
Participants do not simply hear lessons.
They experience them.
Ready to Learn Differently?
Lighthouse & Campfire was created for people who understand that leadership is built through experience, trust, communication, reflection, and shared challenge.
If that resonates with you, we would love to hear from you.
What Makes This Different?
High-responsibility environments demand more than technical knowledge alone. They require communication, adaptability, trust, sound judgment, and the ability to lead when conditions change.
Most people already know this.
The challenge is that many of these skills are difficult to develop through presentations, policies, or classroom instruction alone.
Throughout my years in the fire service, construction, and safety leadership, some of the most valuable lessons were learned alongside other people. Working through challenges together. Sharing meals. Solving problems. Reflecting on successes, mistakes, and experiences.
Lighthouse & Campfire was created around that idea.
This experience brings together people from high-responsibility professions to learn through shared experiences, meaningful conversation, reflection, and practical challenges in a relaxed outdoor environment.
It may resonate especially with:
• Safety leaders
• Fire service professionals
• Field leadership
• Operational teams
• Emerging leaders
• Organizations seeking stronger workplace culture
• People looking for something more meaningful than traditional leadership training
Participants do not simply hear lessons. They discover them through experience.
What Does Leadership Look Like Around a Campfire?
There are no rows of tables.
There is no projector.
There are no name tents or conference rooms.
Instead, participants:
• Build camp together.
• Solve challenges as a team.
• Share meals.
• Walk the trails.
• Gather around the fire.
• Reflect on their experiences.
• Learn from one another.
Some of the most important conversations happen after the activity is over.
The campfire becomes a place to discuss leadership, share experiences, ask questions, and explore the challenges that people carry in high-responsibility roles.
The goal is not simply to teach leadership.
The goal is to experience it.
Contact us
Middletown, Delaware, United States
Operating hours
By appointment
Get in touch
Lighthouse & Campfire LLC
(267) 640-9092