We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Monica a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Monica, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Alright, so you had your idea and then what happened? Can you walk us through the story of how you went from just an idea to executing on the idea

Honestly? It started with a problem I lived with every single day.

I was a homeschool mom in Manatee County, and I kept running into this wall — my kids were curious, they were capable, and the kind of learning that actually lit them up, the hands-on, build-it, break-it, figure-it-out kind, just wasn’t accessible to us the way I wanted it to be. Not for free. Not in our community. Not consistently. And I knew we weren’t the only family feeling that.

So I had this idea. What if we just… built it? What if we created a free STEAM festival, right here, for families like ours?

The idea sat in my head for a bit, the way ideas do when you don’t yet have a container for them. And then the container showed up. In early 2024, I became a Tiny Fellow through 4.0 Schools — part of a national cohort of education entrepreneurs. And that program did something really important: it forced me to stop treating the idea like a dream and start treating it like a project. There was coaching, a virtual camp, pitch sessions, a lot of sleepless nights, and probably too much coffee. But what came out the other side was a real plan. My pilot would be a free, public STEAM festival for homeschool families. I called it Homeschool STEAM Fest.

Around that same time, a friend basically grabbed me by the shoulders and said, “You need to look into Suncoast Remake Learning Days.” And the moment I learned what SRLD was, I just knew. It was an alignment that doesn’t happen all the time. A regional celebration of innovative, hands-on learning, right here in Sarasota and Manatee County, backed by The Patterson Foundation? That was my people. I registered as an event host almost immediately.

Then came all the figuring-it-out. I needed a venue — somewhere that felt right for families, with outdoor space, connected to the kind of nature-meets-STEM energy I wanted. The Nest at Robinson Preserve in Bradenton became that place, thanks to a connection through The Patterson Foundation linking us with the Manatee County Department of Natural Resources. I needed equipment. I needed partners. I needed to get the word out to a community that didn’t yet fully know me. I was building trust and logistics simultaneously, which is just the nature of starting something from scratch.

That first event was in April 2024. We had robots, a First Tech Challenge team streaming the World Championship live from Texas, art projects, and engineering challenges. And 280 people showed up — more than 80 local families. For an event built with no building, no permanent space, and not much of a budget, just community and partnership and sheer belief that people would show up if we showed up first? It was extraordinary.

Honestly, that day changed everything. Because it proved the demand was real. It proved the community was hungry for exactly this. And it opened relationships — with The Patterson Foundation, SRLD, and partner organizations — that became the foundation for everything that came next. More events. A co-founded educators’ network. World Ocean Day. A second year of STEAM Fest. And eventually, in February 2026, the thing I hadn’t even let myself fully dream out loud yet: our own physical space. STEAMventure™ Learning Labs, a homeschool resource center for local families

The idea became a festival. The festival evolved into a movement. The movement became a place.

That’s the story. And we’re still writing it.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I wear a lot of hats. Mom. Educator. Founder. Community builder. Homeschooler. And honestly, the person who just really, really hates when kids are bored when they could be building something.

Let me back up.

I’ve been an educator of young children for over two decades, and my career has always been shaped by the belief that learning is most powerful when it’s hands-on, tech-integrated, and accessible to every child regardless of background. I started my career as a bilingual teacher — and that bilingual foundation has never left me, it’s woven into everything I do — but my passion for educational technology eventually pulled me in a new direction. I became a technology teacher and launched my school’s first technology program, developing and delivering standards-aligned technology curriculum for students in grades K-2. I was facilitating professional development for other teachers, helping them figure out how to actually integrate technology into their classrooms in meaningful ways. This wasn’t just about putting iPads in kids’ hands. It was about rethinking how learning could look and feel.

In 2012, my students and I entered ISTE’s Passion-Based Learning Contest. We didn’t win, but our project was selected as a featured favorite and included in ISTE’s publication. For a classroom teacher, that kind of recognition means everything — it told me we were onto something real.

That same summer, I received a City Gardens Club of New York scholarship and participated in Hog Island Educator’s Week in Maine — a once-in-a-lifetime experience that connected me with educators from across the country and gave me deeply practical tools for environmental education. That trip planted seeds in me about the power of place-based, experiential learning that I’m honestly still harvesting today.

Then, in the summer of 2013, I became a National Summer Learning Association Teaching Fellow through Hive NYC. That experience was formative in ways I’m still processing. I collaborated with Maker Corps members and fellow NYC educators to plan and curate workshops for young people — workshops that ranged from project-based hands-on building to web-making, game design, and physical computing. We didn’t just run the workshops; we developed standards-aligned curriculum around them and built a website to make everything accessible to other educators. We called ourselves the Summer Maker Dream Team, and honestly? We were. That fellowship showed me what was possible when you put creative, mission-driven educators in a room together and trusted them to build something. It was the first time I truly understood the maker movement — not as a trend, but as a philosophy. Learning by doing. Building to understand. Creating to discover. I’ve never let go of that.

All of that — the bilingual classroom, the technology program, the maker workshops, the environmental education, the curriculum development — that’s the soil that Homeschool STEAM Fest grew out of.

My relationship with learning shifted again when I became a homeschool mom in the Sarasota/Manatee County area. Choosing to homeschool is a decision that comes with incredible joy and a lot of responsibility, and one of the things I kept running into was this gap. There was a whole world of incredible, hands-on, curiosity-driven STEAM learning out there, but so much of it was expensive, inaccessible, or not built with families like mine in mind. I’m a Latina mom. I’m bilingual. And I kept thinking: this shouldn’t be a luxury. Access to high-quality, innovative learning shouldn’t depend on your budget, your background, or your zip code.

That conviction became the foundation of everything I’ve built.

In early 2024, I became a Tiny Fellow through 4.0 Schools — a national program supporting early-stage education entrepreneurs. I was one of 128 fellows in the cohort, and that process of being coached, challenged, and pushed — does it work? Who does it serve? Why you, why now? — transformed my idea from something I believed in privately into something I was ready to put into the world publicly. My pilot project would be a free, public STEAM festival for homeschool families. I called it Homeschool STEAM Fest.

At its core, what I do is create free, high-quality STEAM learning experiences for children and families — experiences that don’t look like school, don’t feel like a test, and don’t cost anything to attend. We bring in real robots, drones, 3D printers, scientists, conservationists, First Tech Challenge robotics teams, engineers, and artists, and we create environments where kids of all ages can play their way into learning. Where a five-year-old drives a Sphero robot and feels like a genius. Where a twelve-year-old talks to a marine biologist and realizes that could be their future. That’s what we’re really offering — permission to learn on your own terms, in your own way, without a paywall in front of it.

And we speak Spanish. Hablamos español — and I want to say that louder than a footnote, because it matters. The homeschool community in this region is beautifully diverse, and bilingual families deserve to see themselves fully reflected in spaces like this. That has always been intentional, going all the way back to my very first classroom.

What started as a two-day pilot festival at The Nest at Robinson Preserve in 2024 has grown into a multi-event, multi-venue regional series spanning Sarasota and Manatee counties — partnering with The Patterson Foundation, the Suncoast Campaign for Grade-Level Reading, Suncoast Remake Learning Days, Girl Scouts of Gulfcoast Florida, State College of Florida, and more. In those first two years, we served hundreds of families, hosted hundreds of kids, and built a reputation as the team that shows up, does the work, and leaves communities better than they found them.

And then in February 2026, we opened STEAMventure™ Learning Labs — our own physical space at 2822 Proctor Rd in Sarasota. That was the dream made real. We now offer hands-on STEAM programming specifically for homeschoolers ages 5 to 12, with our STEAMventure™ Learning Labs curriculum built from the ground up based on what kids and families in this community actually need. It’s warm, it’s hands-on, it’s bilingual, and it was built by someone who has walked this exact road as a homeschool parent.

What sets us apart? A few things….

First, we are radically committed to access. Every community event we host is free. Not “free with a catch.” Not “free if you qualify.” Free, full stop. Because every child deserves to stand inside a giant bubble and have their mind blown by science, regardless of what their family’s bank account looks like.

Second, we are community-built, not top-down. Everything we’ve created has grown from real relationships — with partner organizations, families, educators, scientists, and engineers who volunteer their time because they believe in what we’re doing. Those relationships are woven into our DNA.

Third, I’m not an outside expert parachuting in to tell a community what it needs. I’m a homeschool mom, a former bilingual teacher, a maker educator, a technology integrationist — someone who has lived on both sides of this work for a long time. That depth of experience and that proximity to the families I serve mean I build things that actually work. Because these families are my people. They’re me.

What am I most proud of? The kids. Always the kids. The child who had never touched a circuit board, who built one, and looked up like wait — I can do this? The parent who emailed me after our first event to say her son had been talking about the robots for three weeks. The families who came to one festival and showed up at every single one after because they found something that finally felt like home.

I’m proud that we proved the demand was real. I’m proud that we said “everyone is welcome” and meant it in every language. I’m proud that we went from a pitch deck to a physical learning center in two years without losing the soul of what we set out to do.

And what do I want people to know? That this is just the beginning. STEAMventure™ Learning Labs is open, our 2026/27 programs are coming, and we are actively looking for the families, partners, sponsors, and community allies who want to be part of building something that will outlast any single event or school year. If you have a curious kid, a homeschool family, a business that cares about education equity, or simply a belief that children deserve better — find us. We have a seat for you.

Come on a STEAMventure™ with us. I promise it’ll be worth it.

Can you talk to us about how you funded your business?

I want to be honest about something upfront: I did not start this with a pile of savings, a business loan, or an investor writing me a check over coffee. I started this the way many education founders do — with a mission, a community that needed something, and a willingness to go find the people who believed in that kind of work enough to fund it. Every dollar that got us off the ground came through relationships, alignment, and a lot of applications written at my kitchen table after the kids went to bed.

The first piece of funding came through 4.0 Schools and the Tiny Fellowship. When I was accepted into the cohort in early 2024, the fellowship came with seed funding attached — and that initial capital was everything at that stage. It wasn’t a fortune, but it was enough to take the idea seriously. It said someone believes this is worth investing in. And when you’re just starting out, that validation is as important as the dollars themselves. The Tiny Fellowship gave me the resources to begin building the infrastructure of what would become Homeschool STEAM Fest — the early planning, the materials, the groundwork. It was the spark.

The second piece came through Suncoast Remake Learning Days. When I registered as an SRLD event host, I joined a regional framework that came with real support — not just a platform and community connections, but also funding that made it possible to actually execute the festival. That’s what allowed us to kick off our first STEAM Fest at The Nest at Robinson Preserve in April 2024 the way we did — with equipment, with experiences, with the kind of quality that drew 280 people in and made families feel like something genuinely special had been built for them. Without SRLD’s support structure, the first festival would have looked very different, or maybe wouldn’t have happened at all. They gave us the runway.

But the funding chapter that really changed the trajectory of our program’s work — not just the festival, but the Homeschool STEAM educational programming — was the VELA Education Fund.

VELA is unlike most funders I’d encountered before. They are a nationwide network specifically built to support education entrepreneurs who are reimagining how learning is delivered outside of conventional schooling. They understand, deeply, that a one-size-fits-all approach to education has never worked — and they put their money behind founders who are doing the hard, creative work of building alternatives. What drew me to VELA wasn’t just the grant opportunity. It was the philosophy. It was the community. When I attended VELA Con 2024 — the very first national convening of the VELA Founder Network — I walked into a room full of what I can only describe as education rockstars. Parents, educators, microschool founders, edtech builders, unschoolers, homeschoolers — all people who had looked at the existing system, decided it wasn’t enough, and built something better. I had spent years feeling like a bit of an outlier in education circles with my ideas about hands-on, nontraditional learning. In that room, I was finally among my people.

We received $10,000 in funding from the VELA Network, which was the catalyst for launching our Homeschool STEAM programs in a real and sustainable way. It allowed us to move beyond events and begin building the actual educational programming infrastructure — the curriculum framework, the learning experiences, the foundations of what would eventually become our STEAMventure™ Learning Labs at our own physical center. Ten thousand dollars sounds like a specific number, but what it really represents is the moment this went from “Monica runs cool free events” to “Homeschool STEAM is an education organization with a program model.”

So when people ask how I funded this, the honest answer is: strategically, patiently, and by finding funders who were genuinely aligned with the mission rather than just writing checks transactionally. 4.0 Schools believed in early-stage education entrepreneurs. SRLD believed in community-based, innovative learning. VELA believed in founders building alternatives to conventional schooling for underserved learners. Every one of those is exactly what we are. And I think that alignment — between what we’re building and who funds us — is a big part of why the money we’ve received has been able to go so far.

If I have any advice for founders at the beginning of this road, it’s this: find the funders whose values align with yours. Not the ones with the biggest check, but the ones who will still be cheering for you after the money is spent. That’s the kind of funding that actually builds something lasting.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

The lesson I had to unlearn was one I didn’t even realize I had learned in the first place — and that’s what made it so hard to let go of.

I spent over a decade in public school classrooms. I was a bilingual teacher. I became a technology teacher. I built curriculum, facilitated professional development, and cared deeply about my students. And I was good at it. But the system I operate in runs on a very specific set of assumptions — that learning looks a certain way, happens at a certain pace, is measured in certain ways, and that if you design a solid enough lesson and deliver it well enough, it works for the group. That’s the architecture of a traditional school. Standards, pacing guides, benchmarks, assessments. Structure on top of structure. And for a long time, I genuinely believed that structure was good teaching. That rigor meant sameness. If the system were well-designed, the kids would fit into it.

What I had to unlearn was that belief entirely.

The unlearning didn’t happen in a workshop or a conference. It happened at home, with my own kids, when I decided to homeschool. And let me tell you — nothing humbles a career educator faster than trying to bring your classroom instincts into your living room and watching them fall completely flat.

I remember early on trying to run our home learning like a school day. Scheduled blocks. Structured lessons. Sit down, pay attention, here’s the objective. And my kids — my own children, who I know better than anyone — were miserable. Not because they didn’t want to learn. Because the format I was using had nothing to do with how they actually learned, one of my kids needed to move to think. One needed to come at a topic sideways, through a story or a question, not a direct lesson. Neither of them needed a desk and a worksheet to access their curiosity. They needed space, time, and the freedom to discover things at their own angle.

That was the moment something professionally cracked open in me.

Because if the one-size-fits-all model wasn’t working for my own kids, in my own home, with me — a trained educator who loved them — then how many kids in classrooms everywhere were sitting in that same frustration, being quietly told through every structure around them that the problem was them and not the system? How many kids had been labeled as struggling, as distracted, as behind — when really they were just square pegs being forced into round holes, day after day?

That realization changed everything about how I approach education now.

When I built Homeschool STEAM Fest and when we developed the programming at STEAMventure™ Learning Labs, I made a conscious decision that we were not going to replicate school. We were not going to take the public school model, strip out the building, and call it education. We were going to actually do the harder, more creative work of designing for the full range of learners — for the kid who absorbs everything through hands-on making, for the kid who needs to talk through ideas out loud, for the kid who is three years ahead in one area and needs more time in another, for the bilingual family who has spent years navigating systems that weren’t built with them in mind.

In practice, that means our programs are project-based and experiential, not lecture-driven. It means we design activities with multiple entry points — a five-year-old and a twelve-year-old can both engage with the same challenge at their own level, and neither feels they’re doing it wrong. It means we don’t move at a single pace. It means we follow curiosity when it shows up, even if that means the day goes somewhere we didn’t plan. It means we evaluate success by engagement, by the light in a kid’s eyes, by whether they’re asking more questions at the end than they were at the beginning — not by whether they filled in the right answer on a rubric.

And it means we listen. Constantly. To kids and to families. Because homeschool families are not a monolith. Some are structured and school-at-home. Some are fully unschooling. Some are somewhere in the middle, figuring it out as they go, which honestly describes most of us. Our job is not to tell them what education should look like for their child. Our job is to offer experiences that are rich and flexible enough that every family can find something that genuinely serves their learner.

The public school system gave me a tremendous foundation. I genuinely believe that. It taught me curriculum design, pedagogy, and how to build a learning environment from scratch. I don’t regret a single year of it. But the most important thing I’ve done as an educator is question the assumptions that came with it — and give myself permission to build something different.

There is so much freedom on the other side of that unlearning. More creativity than I ever had inside a pacing guide. More joy than I ever found in a standardized benchmark. And most importantly, more kids who actually feel seen — who walk into our space and realize, maybe for the first time, that there is a version of learning that was made for exactly the way their brain works.

That’s what we’re building. And I’ll keep building it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.homeschoolsteamfest.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/homeschoolsteamfest
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/STEAMVENTURE/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/monica-encarnacion/