As we begin 2022, so many of us yearn for a clear understanding of the future and the stability that we thought we’d have by this point of the pandemic. At NWOBS we don’t know how the year will unfold, but we know clearly where we are focused and how we’ll support students as we all continue to adapt and recover from the past two years.
We are driven by our three-year strategic plan (2021-2023), which was initiated prior to the pandemic but then was adapted and approved in March 2021. Our focus on four priority areas drives our work with certainty even as the world around us remains uncertain. These four priority areas are exceptional student outcomes, partnership & community, equity & inclusion, and organizational resilience.
I am excited to share just a few of the key initiatives that are central to our work this year and clearly knit together our priority areas from the strategic plan.
Partnerships & scholarships
We are focused on expanding and deepening partnerships with organizations in the communities we serve and across our region. This includes public school districts in the Portland area as well as our long-standing partnership with Methow Valley School District. We continue to build multi-year progressions with our partners where we can engage with students throughout their middle and high school years.
In 2021, over half of our student population received scholarships or participated in a tuition-free program, such as our school district partnerships. With the planned growth for our partnership programs, we anticipate this proportion to grow and for our fundraising to keep up! We also continue to work with external organizations who help coordinate and support scholarship students for our expedition-based programming.
Staff training
Our students have faced unprecedented challenges during the pandemic, and our staff need to be incredibly well equipped to support them in their healing and recovery. We are standardizing technical training across our three programs and building depth into the Mental Health First Aid and Trauma Informed Care trainings that we require of all staff.
For our sixth consecutive year, new staff will learn the fundamentals of equity and inclusion as part of our standard staff training. Return staff will have an opportunity to dive considerably deeper in the work of power, privilege and allyship. We’ve structured our staff training and advancement systems to require and incentivize these essential areas of learning and growth.
Evaluating our own work & curriculum
One of Outward Bound’s long-standing core principles is diversity & inclusion. What this means has evolved in society over the decades, and we continue to deconstruct the privilege and bias embedded in our many years of educational work and societal impact. While we’ve made considerable progress in many areas, this year we plan to comprehensively evaluate our programmatic structure and curriculum. The goal is to continue to identify and evolve areas of our work that prevent a more truly inclusive model. Our legacy work has tremendous value and our experience is unmatched, but we must also recognize that who we serve and how we teach matters now more than ever. We are proud to lead, learn and follow in this area of focus.
In the past year and throughout our programmatic restart, we have centered three key societal issues that both impact us directly and also provide us the opportunity to educate and inspire change. In our day to day work, in our curriculum, and in our partnerships, we will continue to focus on mental health, equity & inclusion, and climate change mitigation. We know that we have work to do internally as we embrace the opportunity to lead and inspire a generation of students to create the impactful change society needs.
Planning for a bigger future
The pandemic has shifted and created needs for youth that none of us would have anticipated a few years ago. Within this disruption and challenge are opportunities to rise to the needs of the times, as Outward Bound has done for decades. We plan to conduct a programmatic evaluation of our three locations with an eye for the next 20 years, evaluating external risks such as climate change and the emerging and evolving needs of the programming that today’s youth need.
The needs of this time are daunting, yet progress is necessary with an urgency never before felt. Our role in the future is clear even if we too have to adapt to the weekly changes of the pandemic and the evolving needs of our students. As Outward Bounders, we know challenge and embrace it, understanding that we thrive at the edge of change, transformation and impact.
by Marc Heisterkamp, Executive Director
Photo by Sandra Corso