Glacier Raymond

Project Portfolio Description

Community Outreach Project: Creating A Space For At-Risk Youth To Grow, Navigate the World Around Them, And To Connect With Others Who Have Shared Experiences.

The Inner Roads mission is to provide disadvantaged youth with affordable outdoor therapeutic experiences that accelerate growth, healing, and empowerment. This is achieved by offering 2, 5-week excursions within the Bitterroot National Forest. These excursions help change the thought patterns of these at-risk youth, as well as teaching them how to live in the natural world around them. When these excursions end, these youth are sent back to their homes and left to navigate the world with the skills they just gained.

When transitioning from adolescence to adulthood, there is a lot of change that happens without your immediate control. Being part of a group or community can lessen the negative effects that come with these big life changes. Many of the youth who go through this program come from lower socioeconomic status areas, which results in less opportunities for youth to find where they belong.

By creating the framework of a community outlet program for these youth, it offers opportunities for social interaction, broadening their horizons of new interests and learning how to build relationships with people and businesses within the local community. The idea is to bring past, present and future participants of the program together to create a community where there is shared experiences and a sense of belonging.

Given that we are living in a pandemic, putting this framework into place has been much more challenging than expected. The manual outlines all the necessary steps for this program to be implemented when it seems fit.