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BoaterTalk: The International Information Site for the Whitewater Paddler
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 Here's my project New
- Forum: PaddleForYourLife
Date: Jun 04 2005, 18:51 GMT
From: Zombie
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A Truly Unique Program
“Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime”
During the Spring of 2005, an after school program was lead by a few talented individuals who have a passion for the outdoors, a passion for their hometown and community and a knack for getting students to step into the unknown. The purpose of the program was to teach the participants how to plan, organize and prepare for their own outdoor adventures.
Since we were only going to be in these students lives for less than 4 months, we had to plant a seed that could lead them back to the activities we were introducing.
The School selected for the Spring 2005 program was Howard High (http://www.thehowardschool.com/) located just on the outskirts of downtown Chattanooga. It was decided that we would work with freshmen boys since they would probably be open to new sports, activities, and challenges presented to them.
A Day in the Life
Participants start out determining what gear is necessary for different activities (mountain biking, kayaking, canoeing, repelling, and climbing). They must properly load their gear on trailers before transporting, attend safety briefings before taking off, break everything down once the activity is over and help reorganize it once back at the farm. Students were also shown how to inhabit these locations with respect so that their natural element was preserved and maintained for the next adventurer.
Skills Acquired and Developed
• Encouragement
• Planning
• Team Building
• Leadership
• Attitude - Positive thinking is expecting, talking and visualizing with certainty what you want to achieve, as an accomplished fact. During the activities the students were deterred from being negative. Only positive efforts and initiatives were welcomed in the field. Students were encouraged to help each other especially during challenging activities such as climbing. Some students were more afraid of heights than others so climbing and repelling were great for the group to work together and encouraging each other to tackle their fears and persevere.
Chattanooga
Chattanooga is a wonderful place for young adventurous souls to grow up. The area has so much to offer! Lookout, Signal, and Elder(Raccoon) Mountain all provide wonderful places to challenge the outdoors. This program teaches students how to take advantage of these surroundings. If football isn’t for you or you didn’t make the track team there are other options and opportunities to put your time and energy towards. Hopefully many other cities will show their residents this as well. Big cities such as Knoxville and Ashville are in excellent locations to begin similar programs. There are many towns located in the mountains of the Southeast that could host similar programs.
Conclusion:
The 2005 program is now over but we are certain that the participants left the program with a greater self-esteem, a strong sense of accomplishment, more physically fit and healthy, and with the confidence of being able to explore the world outside their physical, mental, and emotional boundaries
As you can see there are many benefits that result from this program. Students are learning about their surroundings and how to take advantage of them safely. They’re developing many skills such as leadership, listening, respect, knowledge, planning, and of course the various skills involved with the different outdoor activities themselves. Chattanooga is serving as a torch bearer to surrounding cities by providing this model program.
Looking Back:
First of all we were extremely fortunate and grateful to have received nearly all of our necessities from the city of Chattanooga. Requirements for the program included blanket coverage insurance, transportation, staff, a facility to serve as home base (Greenway Farms), gear, gear and more gear. With all that in place we were given a lot of time to work on the design of the program itself. Thank you Chattanooga.
One day a week was plenty of time to accomplish a lot with the students but next year we may consider having the students meet two days a week. One day will be in a classroom and the other will be in the field. With the added day we’ll have more time to prepare students for upcoming activities. This could also provide an opportunity to help the students with school work if we want to go in that direction.
We work hard to stage the various outdoor laboratories for our students and they work hard trying to communicate, problem solve and succeed within them. As a thank you for their hard work we would like to be able to offer them a reward incentive, such as a trip to the Everglades, Outerbanks, or maybe an extended backpacking or sea kayaking trip. This is just our way of saying thanks for your hard work, now do you want to put yourself to an even bigger test!
Lastly, another layer we may consider adding to the program is placing a high school senior from an area school to serve as a LIT(leader in training). This would be someone who has already demonstrated leadership qualities and could use another opportunity to work in a leadership role. The student would still be a participant like the freshmen, but they would carry responsibility in activities and would aid instructors.
Weather can’t always be on your side so it was always necessary to have a backup plan. With Greenway Farms as our home base we could still work with the students if the weather wasn’t in our favor. Greenway also has great places for Ultimate Frisbee and various team building exercises.
Timeline:
September and October 2004 – Numerous meetings with Outventure leaders and Chattanooga locals interested in seeing a program such as this take off. During this time there were discussions on what kind of program we wanted to offer, researched funding options, came up with a business plan, determined expenses, etc
October 2004 – Met with Rob Healy and presented the program. He was very supportive and said we could go ahead and plan on trying to make things happen in February of 2005. We did try and qualify for some grants but we were too late with our applications.
February 2005 – The program began…Each Thursday we drove to Howard, picked the students up, completed the planned activity, fed the students, and dropped them off at their homes at the end of the day.
May 2005 – The program ended…It was a huge success!
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