Over the past several years, prospective families and students have become more and more interested in what our teen adventure camps can do for their academic development. When we founded Wilderness Ventures in 1973, we designed our teen adventure programs to focus on leadership development, fostering cooperative learning and a connection to the outdoors — knowing that becoming better leaders, better communicators and better stewards of our world are all skills that are invaluable for academic learning and life success.
We have dedicated our lives to creating the best teen adventure program opportunities for young people because we believe that the skills learned and developed on our teen adventure programs are essential tools for a successful life. Concretely, we’ve found in the past few years, that as more and more respected universities delve into the world of experienctial education (a concept that we pioneered in 1973), the leadership and cooperative learning goals of our teen adventure programs are not only respected, but sought after, on college applications.
In addition to our goals of emotional development for our teenage students, we place a strong emphasis on environmental and cultural stewardship on all of our teen adventure programs. Indeed, our first service learning program took place in 1974 when our teen adventure programs took on a much-needed service project — reclaiming the natural shoreline of Image Lake in the Glacier Peak Wilderness by planting essential shrubs and shore plants that help protect the shore from erosion. Over the past nearly four decades, our teen adventure programs have taken on more and more ambitious teen service projects, working in remote villages of the developing world, assisting the US forest service with much-needed environmental projects and working with our own American indigenous populations. We’ve found, more and more over the past decade, that universities not only value, but scrutinize, service learning projects that students list on their college applications. As a result, we are proud to state that our teen adventure programs have always offered the most substantive, most thoughtful teen community service programs.
For more information on our leadership and community service teen adventure programs (or to discuss how these teen adventure programs can help your children as they plan and prepare for post-secondary education), please call 800-533-2281.
