WiserEarth Editors

MISSION

Wilderness Youth Project is a community-building 501 (c)(3) non-profit organization that inspires and guides youth, adults, and families toward finding, expressing, and manifesting their inherent gifts through mentoring and creative nature experiences.

VISION

We strive to create a compassionate and loving community through our work, our play, and our existence. All of our adventures are steeped in our unique mentoring culture which employs creative wilderness experience to teach self-reliance, empathy, and caretaking as the building blocks of community.

APPROACH

We seek to honor the flow of learning that mimics the natural world and couple that with nurturing the multiple intelligences of the youth in a holistic and playful fashion. There are three key components to our methods of curriculum delivery:

1. Sensory Stimulation: Offering their senses healthy stimulation in a natural setting along with challenges that spawn their growth
2. Mind Focus: The youth are offered the opportunity to focus on positive outcomes in the moment and in their life through circle work and positive adult role modeling
3. Cultural Mentoring: This is where we weave a “cultural basket” around the kids so that they are stimulated to learn in the most natural methods known and for a long term. This system has been developed out of research based on how the human child has learned for thousands of years.

Our curriculum innovatively involves the art of questioning, tracking — pattern recognition, storytelling, honoring and thanksgiving circles, surrender and confidence building activities, journaling, primitive survival skills training, conservation service projects, family involvement, constructive adult modeling and mentoring, and lots of imaginative expression and play.

One of our key philosophical successes is in that we ask all of our volunteers to cross a line of commitment in personally striving to grow their own life skills, awareness, personal gifts, and empathy as they work with us. The youth sense this congruency in the adult mentors and open up to undertaking the process themselves by watching the example of the adults. It creates a community of people who are growing together genuinely. Youth pick up on this quicker than a lightning strike and open up in ways that their families have never seen before.