— To experience reponsibility and risk, is to feel the enormous riches of life
The Great Outdoors
We are a community interest company based in Colchester, in the beautiful coastal county of Essex in the South East of England. Our work provides young people with wilderness therapeutic programmes and adventurous Duke of Edinburgh’s Award expeditions that have a strong personal development aim at their core.
The adventure in your life will be found in responsibility. Meaning is derived in difficulty, risk and responsibility. Not in hedonist self-gratification. Jordan Peterson, Psychologist and Author
the young person epidemic that needs tackling:
The core of wilderness therapy and adventure learning involves intense
experiential, interpersonal problem‐solving which is absent in the lives of many youth‐at‐risk.
%
Anxiety and depression in UK 16-24yr olds (2017-18)*
Around half of young people living in the UK will have experienced at least one traumatic event or adverse childhood experience**
Experience of childhood trauma doubles a young person’s risk of experiencing mental health problems***
— The Challenge
Challenge & opportunity
There is a beautiful challenge and opportunity presented to us in society, in our communities and with the young people we work with.
We can not remove adverse childhood experiences, or mental health struggles. What we can do is focus on improving the outcomes of young people in our communities. Our projects shape and have a profoundly positive impact on the development of a young person.
We have made the intentional choice to focus on adventure learning, intense experiential and interpersonal problem‐solving. All are proven to improve outcomes for young people – a growth in their self esteem and reduce the likeliness of anti-social behaviour, violence and offending behaviours.
Wilderness interventions and expeditions aim to tap and foster the assets and resources of adolescents, the process could eventually capacitate them to develop pro
social behaviours. Ashima Mohan, Suchi Malhotra, Monisha Narayanan, Howard White, Hannah Gaffney, 2022.
Encouraging Risk taking
The optimal mode of being allows young people to explore in ways which could be potentially destructive. Could being the operative word. This is the best pathway for us as leaders to facilitate. Young people need to experiment with exploration, risk taking, rule breaking.
It is evident there is some kind of happy medium which moves along a spectrum and scale through childhood into adolescent into adult hood. A young person who is too inhibited and never breaks the rules has a higher deposition to develop dependent personality disorder, depression and anxiety. However, too far the other way, kids that break rules all the time, end up in prison.
A surprising or unexpected reward causes an extra dopamine release. So every time we do something with an uncertain outcome—taking a “risk”—increased dopamine is released while we are determining what happens. This release alerts other parts of the brain that the activity or situation is new and deserves attention. This is a kind of amplified learning that’s actively shaping the connections between neural systems in our brains. UCLA, Centre for the developing adolescent.
Developing self Responsibility
The state or fact of having a duty to deal with something or of having control over something – a thing, a project, a team. The state of being accountable. Self-responsibility is one of six key pillars in the development of self-esteem.
The adventure in your life will be found in responsibility. Meaning is derived in difficulty, risk and responsibility. Not in hedonist self-gratification. Jordan Peterson, Psychologist and Author
Existing studies suggest that outdoor and experiential education, wilderness therapy programs and challenge activities increase participants’ self‐esteem (Bowen & Neill, 2013; Wilson & Lipsey, 2000), and the belief that they have control over events that affect them (Hans, 2000; Wilson & Lipsey, 2000).
It’s our responsibility
Contact the great outdoors
rachel@thegreatoutdoors.org
07917766175