Trekkers, Inc.

Trekkers is a non-profit, outdoor-based mentoring program that connects young people to caring adults through expeditionary learning, community service and adventure-based education.

With community adult volunteers working throughout the year, Trekkers provides myriad educational, experiential, and cross-cultural opportunities for young people, with an emphasis on relationship building and an appreciation of the earth as “educator”.

Our goal is to be a part of students’ lives from grade to grade and year to year. Trekkers follows students as they “graduate” from one program into the next along a six year journey that starts when they are in 7th grade and continues until they graduate.

In so doing, Trekkers

• Collaborates with teachers and parents to foster personal and educational development in the lives of students.
• Recruits, trains, and encourages local adults to take a leadership role in meeting the critical needs of students.
• Provides students with alternative learning communities which cultivate responsibility to self, others, and the planet.

Trekkers has developed “Six Hallmarks” to help develop programs that best meet the needs of youth in our community. Our programs seek to:

• Create meaningful connections between students and caring adults.
• Collaborate with the larger community acting on behalf of its youth.
• Offer safe places for young people to be heard, trusted, respected and loved.
• Allow the earth to be the educator through outdoor experience.
• Expose students to the diversity of cultures that lie outside the focus of their everyday lives.
• Teach the discipline of self-determination and active responsibility and other life skills.

Our program model is designed to turn students on to learning by first turning them on to life. With multifaceted grade-specific programs, we provide a variety of "hooks" to inspire young people to show up for their lives. 

Through a combination of expeditionary learning, outdoors experience, and community service, we work to engage students while simultaneously connecting each one of them with a network of caring adults from the community. These mentoring relationships provide a “safety net” of support as students make the often tumultuous transition from adolescence to adulthood.

Trekkers is designed to be a long-term presence in students’ lives from grade to grade and year to year. We follow  and support them as they “graduate” from one program into the next along a six year journey that starts when they are in 7th grade and continues until they graduate. We begin working with and creating a relationship with students before the challenges of adolescence arise. Through the use of travel, self-directed learning, authentic experience, and learning communities, we help focus them on the future and ignite personal change.