Adventure Education
Outdoor adventure education has long been recognized as a powerful vehicle for achieving a multitude of positive goals in young people.
Imagine an American Adventure Service Corps member on a 10-day mountaineering trip in the Sierra Nevada mountain range of California or a 170-mile canoe trip through South Carolina to reach the Atlantic Ocean. These types of trips create opportunities for members to learn lifelong lessons about themselves and how to work in a group. Weekend trips and extended trips are often quite adventurous with tough challenges. Participants feel a strong sense of satisfaction after completing the goal. This feeling, along with a sense of accomplishment after each day, provides ongoing injections of self-esteem. Members learn valuable lessons about being self-sufficient as a team and about working together to achieve an objective by cooperating, listening, following and leading.
Personal discipline is developed from tasks such as waking up early, cooking breakfast, packing up, and putting in the mileage to reach that day’s goal. Confidence is gained from personal skill mastery. Many outdoor skills are learned in order to safely complete specific trips. These skills can be used later in life for that member and for his/her future friends and family. Other American
Adventure Service Corps adventures that foster the previously mentioned values include underground Caving exploration, climbing multi-pitch rock routes, bivouacking partway up on a ledge, learning how to roll a kayak, Whitewater kayaking and canoeing, whitewater safety and technical rescue, wilderness first aid, slacklining, juggling, navigation and orienteering, backpacking and climbing trips to interesting areas, and winter camping and mountaineering.
Adventure education is a valuable methodology for instilling self-esteem, teamwork, and acquisition of new skills, which provide members with the tools to work with others and advance to more challenging expeditions.
Service To Others
The development of a positive service ethic is one of the major objectives of The American Adventure Service Corps. By engaging in creative service projects, members foster a greater willingness to help others different from themselves. Immediately after the devastating January 1998 flood in the mountains of western North Carolina, The American Adventure Service Corps assisted in clean-up and recovery efforts in various communities. After the September 1999 flood in eastern North Carolina, The American Adventure Service Corps members and parents helped distribute clothing and food to the families who lost their homes. Service projects like these provide The American Adventure Service
Corps members opportunities to directly interface with victims of natural disasters and lend a hand. Compassion for others is one of the results of the service activities. Working together with climbers with disabilities, abandoning a wheel chair, and teaching them to rock climb by utilizing special techniques has been an ongoing theme with the original American Adventure Service Corps unit. One trip resulted in climbers with disabilities from all over the United States scaling a 600-foot rock face.
Past fundraisers have included a 400-mile canoe trip, in stages, from the mountains to the sea to raise awareness and money for Habitat for Humanity. Another one raised funds for the Nature Conservancy to save a wilderness area. The American Adventure Service Corps youth members obtained pledges and staged a 75,000-foot climb-a-thon, with some members climbing 6,000 feet in one day.
Many other service projects like river clean-up days, helping mountain families with farm chores, and teaching people with disabilities how to kayak, add up to a long list of annual, dynamic opportunities for youth to develop strong service ethics.