A common question that I’m asked is “What is Outdoors for All’s largest program?” For many years, the answer was always our winter program. You see, each year we enrich the lives of 275 or more children and adults with disabilities in our winter activities at The Summit at Snoqualmie and Stevens Pass. Most of our participants enroll for seven weeks of cross country or downhill ski lessons, snowboarding lessons, or snowshoeing lessons.
Then, some years ago, our partnership custom events – where we collaborate with a school, military base, disability group or other organization to bring a targeted activity specifically for their clientele – overtook the winter program in the number of active participants. Last year we had over 2,000 individuals exercising their abilities with us in these partnership events. We offered cycling for teenage youth from New Horizon School, we coached rock climbing for kids with limb differences from Seattle Children’s Hospital, we delivered kayaking experiences and coaching for individuals with HeadStrong and we worked in partnership with more than 80 groups to deliver over 100 days of these partnership outdoor activities.
Then, this summer happened. And our registrations for our camp programs for kids, which have been growing for many years, just continued to grow and keep growing.
This summer, we had over 400 registrations for our kids camps – with each registration covering five days of camp. These registrations added to registrations earlier in the year for mid-winter break and spring break camps so that we now have had more than 2,000 experiences in our camp programs (one experience = a day of an activity)
So, while we still have a number of custom events to deliver this year, but it looks like our camp programs for kids may running close to overtaking our partnership events for being our largest program.
Regardless of which program may be largest, I know we’ll keep working to improve and expand each of our year round programs.
I’ll see you outdoors for the fun!
