Send 30 Children to Afterschool Nature Program

While planning our upcoming year for our Earth Connectors program, our education team at Piedmont Wildlife Center takes time to reflect on our past year. When we asked each other what student was most positively affected by our program, all of us immediately thought of Chance, a scholarship recipient thanks to your support. With gentle mentoring, encouragement and tweaks we made to our program, Chance transformed from a young man who did not trust himself or many others and was difficult to reach, to someone who became a leader to his peers and a steady role model to new students joining our program. It really solidified the fact that time in nature and patient mentoring benefits the whole person; positively affecting their physical, mental and emotional well-being.

When we began our program in the Fall of 2013 and met our students, we were not surprised to find that many of our Earth Connectors students said they spent little time outdoors. Many of our students said their neighborhoods were unsafe and that their parents or guardians did not approve of them playing outside unsupervised. Our program was really the only chance many of our students were allowed to benefit from time in nature. We began slowly, taking gentle walks around the school’s property and playing nature based games to build trust in each other and their surroundings. We quickly discovered that if Chance was not engaged, or having fun during our planned activity, he could become disruptive and take the focus off of our activity. If you’ve spent any time around children or young adults, you know that there are special kids who have magnetic personalities. Chance was one of these students and we knew that if we could get him excited about what we were doing, we’d hit a home run with the rest of the group.

My co-worker and I took some time to get to know Chance before we began asking him his interests and started to bring him books from our personal collections. We learned that Chance used to camp but had not been able to go in quite some time. He showed a great interest in primitive skills such as; shelter building, primitive fire making and way-finding. We decided that our 4 paths program, which is a challenge and skills based program with a step-by-step process of learning the skills from four paths: fire-making, hunting, plants, and animal tracking would best fit the needs of our students. This program allows young people to progress through challenges of increasing difficulty and provides opportunities for them to mentor each other.

When Chance was challenged, like he was in the 4 paths program, he was focused and determined. He was especially gifted with fire making and mentored other students in the paths he was proficient in. During one session, Chance was mentoring a classmate on fire making and said, "Fire making is really hard.  You must be prepared, and have a positive mindset.  You have to believe you will get a fire."

By the end of our year with Chance, he was a gentle leader, a focused student, comfortable with himself and more trusting of others and his surroundings. I am so grateful that Chance was able to participate in this program because of your donations, and that he stayed with us for the entire year and made the lives of his peers and mine, a better one for knowing him.  How many people do you think he will positively influence?   With your donations, how many more students can we have this kind of impact on?

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