Cultivating leaders in city and in wild

Inner City Outings brings youth into leadership through nature

Inner City Outings (ICO) has two kinds of leaders. Of course, the adults who volunteer their time to lead the outings are leaders. But even more important are the young participants who increase their skills, raise their self-esteem, and discover their own potential for leadership.

ICO is the Sierra Club's all-volunteer outreach program which provides a wide variety of outdoor activities to urban youth and others who might otherwise not have such opportunities. These outings include hiking, backpacking, car camping, river rafting, and snow trips.

We seek out participants who show leadership, and we strive to promote these skills. It's more than just teaching them about a group commissary, the use of map and compass, crosscountry navigation, and clean camping. We endeavor to promote interpersonal skills and to improve self-esteem through active involvement with nature.

When a disadvantaged young person from an inner-city community, an alternative school, or a youth correctional facility dons a pack and struggles up a remote mountain path with ICO, it's often their first time sweating and straining and pushing against something that won't easily give. Overcoming this challenge, to discover new aspects of themselves, can motivate them in finding their way in life, and help them become leaders in other endeavors.

ICO volunteers, with their inspired devotion, are among the finest people on earth. There's Madelyn Pyeatt, now retired, who for close to 35 years taught at Oakland Technical High School. In the early '70s Madelyn started Oakland Tech's "Trails Club", today ICO's longest-running agency. She'd hand-pick boys and girls with leadership potential - and change their lives forever!

Ethan was one of hers. Since childhood he had lived in rundown hotels, rooming houses, and flophouses, surrounded by poverty, misery, drugs, gang violence, and death. At Tech, with Madelyn, his life changed. Under her gentle, loving, and inspired tutelage he became an outstanding backpack and river-raft trip leader. He went on to college and became a nurse. Erin was another of Madelyn's protégés, participating in many, many ICO backpacking and river trips. After graduating from Mills College, Erin came back to Tech - as a teacher - in Madelyn's old room on the second floor.

There's Chuck Ford, an active ICO leader for close to 25 years. For the last 15 years he has been a teacher in the Team Program, an alternative school within Tamiscal High in Marin. Many of his students have had trouble functioning in the regular high-school environment. "Every day in the classroom was often a struggle for them," Chuck tells me. But in the Team Program, much of the curriculum centers on outdoor education, backpacking, ropes courses, and river running. "Kids are literally transformed by this exposure," Chuck says. The walls of his classroom are adorned with photographs of happy teens smiling in the bright sunlight on backpack and river-rafting trips. Even as we spoke today, he was preparing his current class for its end-of-school-year climb of Mount Shasta.

Two of the paid staff on the Shasta trip will be former students. Many of Chuck's students go on to college - and even work in environmental education. "Many of them would have been challenged even to graduate with a high-school diploma, had it not been for their exposure to the outdoors," Chuck emphasizes.

Often the results are more immediate. For example, Angeline Kong, a junior in the "Outdoor Club" at Thurgood Marshall High in San Francisco's Bayview district, has been so inspired by what she learned on just one of our ICO weekend backpack trips that she now wants to pursue environmental-science courses at a community college this summer. "She's a very bright kid," Brian Martin, the physics teacher and our current ICO anchor at Thurgood, tells me. "She just marvels at everything in nature and how it all works. It's like this big bright light inside her head is always on!" When Angeline graduates from Thurgood, she wants to go to university and get advanced degrees in science.

Are these special kids who would have taken the right path anyway? We can never know, but we do know that when you take these kids out to the woods and ask them to keep going, against what might appear to be all odds, it's a new and different challenge. They can take this on without feeling that they're just signing up for the same old sense of defeat. When they get into camp sore and tired, they know that they have achieved something. The transformation has begun.

Once they've succeeded at one challenge, they're in a much better position for another. That's how ICO makes a difference.

Patrick Colgan