CREATIVE AND NATURAL OUTDOOR EXPERIENCE INC
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Mission Statement
We partner with youth facing barriers to create experiences rooted in the outdoors. Our programs foster learning, confidence and transformation.
About This Cause
Project Canoe provides youth facing barriers with opportunities to build self-esteem, self-awareness, and resilience through the power of educational and therapeutic outdoor programming. Leveraging the inherently therapeutic power of outdoor spaces, our programs are intentionally designed to support youth in recognizing and building on their own unique strengths, forming meaningful social connections, and raising their perceived limits of what they are capable of. Project Canoe is a Registered Charity established in 1977 and has served over 4000 youth. Most Canadians are lucky enough to have access to vast expanses of gorgeous wilderness. Camp and canoeing experiences in these spaces are considered formative in Canada, and many credit their trips with making them the person they are today. Unfortunately, many youth do not have the privilege to take part. At Project Canoe we believe that every youth in Canada should be able to access these experience regardless of the barriers they face in life. We take our role in identifying youth who would most benefit from outdoor activity very seriously. Youth are restricted access to the outdoors by two major factors. Firstly, and more obviously, financial barriers restrict access. Secondly, and often overlooked, are behavioural and mental health challenges. Most organizations are unable to accommodate such challenges, or worse, send a youth home early because their staff are unprepared to manage challenging behaviours. The sense of rejection resulting from this risks creating a negative association between the young person and the outdoors, and can add to the self-told narrative of rejection and failure that may be present in their lives. To overcome the first factor, we never turn away a youth due to financial barriers. To overcome the second factor, we work incredibly hard to ensure that our staff are ready to deal with a huge range of behavioural and mental health needs. Our staff receive 4-weeks of training and learn skills including Therapeutic Crisis Intervention, Suicide Intervention and Conflict Resolution. Our staff:youth ratio is 1:2, allowing us to focus on each individual. Finally, our intake process is exhaustive, ensuring a good fit for the program, and to make sure we are accommodating youth’s specific and unique needs. Each youth group is thoughtfully created in order to make a positive group dynamic, and our staff are prepared with detailed profiles of each youth so that they create the best possible outdoor experience. We believe that the canoe trip setting provides not just an escape from the day-to-day pressures of adolescent life, but also a powerful opportunity for transformative impact. Our trips are shown to increase our participants' confidence, self-esteem, empathy and environmental stewardship. The majority of our youth tell us that their trip helped them discover traits within themselves they were not aware of before.