LEADadventures Information

Leadership Experience And Development (LEAD) Adventures is committed to bettering the lives of youth in our community through meaningful outdoor adventure. Our purpose is to tactfully mentor the young adults to plan and lead their own whitewater rafting trips. This innovative lead-to-learn approach effectively puts the youth in 'the drivers seat' of leadership. Our mission is to empower youth to discover their leader within by equipping them with skills to lead, not only rafting trips, but their lives. LEAD’s goal is to strengthen our community within our service area (Glenn and Butte counties) by creating meaningful outdoor experiences that foster personal growth, leadership experience, and character development for the youth participant and adult leaders. LEADadventures addresses the need in the community of at-risk youth having too few options for positive outlets. LEAD directly combats this problem by providing character-building whitewater rafting trips that are designed to help the youth disconnect from the daily grind and reconnect with the deeper aspects of life. Ultimately, our aim is to help our youth choose a positive life path and build our community. LEAD’s outdoor program benefits the youth in multifaceted ways, both during the planning stage of an outdoor adventure and while experiencing it. We empower the youth to gain many durable skills as we tactfully coach them to plan meaningful outdoor adventures. These skills include effective communication within planning committees, logistical problem solving, food menu planning and shopping, risk management, conflict resolution, and teamwork. Empowering our youth directly strengthens our entire community. In LEAD's first five years, we provided more than 30 trips--weekend and weeklong--which touched the lives of more than 250 youth in our community. We provides these life enhancing trips at no cost to the youth.