Connecting With Ourselves, Each Other, and The Earth
Spark Your Child's Connection to Nature, Themselves, and Others
Wayfinders Base Camp ignites a love for nature and fosters social-emotional learning through:
Weekly Fire Circles & Nature Games: Deepen connections with the outdoors and each other through engaging activities.
Social-Emotional Learning & Leadership Development: Build confidence, communication skills, and empathy in a supportive environment.
Community Building: Create lasting friendships and a sense of belonging within a caring group.
Flexible Scheduling & Growth for All Ages:
Choose Your Day: Weekly after-school sessions on Tuesdays or Thursdays.
Same-Age & Mixed-Age Groups: Cater to individual preferences while fostering mentorship and village building. In mixed-age groups, younger children find role models in older kids, while older ones develop leadership skills by mentoring their peers.
Our Mission
The mission of Wayfinders is to foster experiential nature-connection and social emotional learning to develop future sustainability leaders, bolster mental health, and provide equitable access to experiences in nature.
Our core values focus on disconnecting from technology to reconnect with nature. Through this cultural repair work, Wayfinders' strives to build stronger communities and next generation leaders who are connected to themselves, each other, and the earth.
What is Wayfinders?
Wayfinders offers nature connection and social emotional learning programs that provide participants with opportunities to disconnect (from technology) to reconnect with the natural world, to remember that we are all part of the web of life.
Wayfinders’ programs include community and team building activities, mindfulness and social emotional learning, and exploring the natural world.
With the core practice of returning to nature to rediscover our connections with ourselves, each other, and the earth; away from the hustle and noise of life, we begin to repair the culture and create a more sustainable community today and for future generations.
By developing a positive relationship with the environment, participants become sustainability advocates, and time in nature during childhood and role models who care for nature are known to be the two biggest factors that contribute to environmental stewardship in adulthood.
Wayfinders creates a fun & safe space to build awareness of interconnectedness through nature guided experiences and social & emotional mentoring. The program explores leadership development and community building, and inspires youth to connect with the natural world and their passions. The program provides leadership opportunities to become Junior Mentors or Mentors-in-Training, and for those interested - to experience a Rite of Passage.
Wayfinders experiential opportunities with nature connection and social emotional learning result in positive impacts including:
shaping future sustainability advocates
addressing mental health challenges
increasing opportunities for diverse and underserved participants.
Why Wayfinders?
Why did climate activist - Gwen Merkin, and School Counselor - Leah Gozhansky create Wayfinders on the Hudson? After 30 years of combined experience, the evidence of a need for this program is very clear! Click on the below sections to learn more about the call to action.
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Participants are encouraged to see themselves as part of the web of life
Practice gratitude, land acknowledgement, and sit spot
Explore self-awareness
Build relationships and community
Connect with the earth
Become more mindful of where things come from and where things go
Cultivate leadership skills
Be called to social action
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Identifying the challenges that our world and communities face is the easy part. Learning how to take steps to address issues like climate change and structural racism takes grit and guts. Developing small and measurable group goals, we learn to move from identifying a problem to forming and implementing a solution. Wayfinders participants bring these skills to their communities to make a larger impact.
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How do we create the community we want to be part of? The Wayfinders community is a microcosm of our larger community and a playground for defining the values that we want to live by. Exploring how our family and personal values align (or don’t align) with the kind of community we want to live in helps participants find their way to taking the steps to transform their communities.
We look at our community with fresh eyes, trying to understand the systems and structures all around us that have led to profound inequality. And we consider organizing and leadership opportunities to overcome these barriers.
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The adolescent stage is where the term “identity crisis” originated. Adolescents stop looking to their parents/guardians for guidance and instead look toward their peers and other adults. The “social brain” activates as they start orienting towards the bigger world. Individuation is front and center during this developmental time.
Wayfinders are surrounded by skilled mentors and a supportive peer group, where genuine and positive identities have a chance to evolve. Participants at Wayfinders will find relevance and meaning through self-driven experiences and project based learning.
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Humans are social beings, wired for membership in a group. When children are consumed by monitoring their environment for cues of rejection, they can’t take in new information. Social media is a cesspool for rejection - kids feel left out when they see gatherings that they are not included in and are subjected to constant comparison as they scroll through their feeds. This onslaught of rejection impacts self-confidence and creates vulnerability to mental illness.
Wayfinders are encouraged to be their most authentic selves as they explore the big questions of who they are, how they relate to people, and what they want to contribute to the world. Participants will thrive in a culture of kindness, where they feel safe and a sense of belonging.
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Our children spend more time indoors and on screens and are more isolated than they have ever been. Children spend 3-7 hours a day on screens and miss out on childhood experiences necessary for healthy development. Depression, anxiety, and suicide rates are on the rise and scientific evidence makes it clear that there are long-tem detrimental impacts on the brain. The climate crisis is real, and our kids (and all of us) are unclear about the inevitable shifts. Children today may need a different skill set to succeed in the new world than those that we were prepared for.
The scientific evidence is clear- spending time outdoors, in nature, improves overall mental health. Therapists are prescribing time in nature rather than medication. Wayfinders gather in the woods and spend time bonding and sharing around fire circles where we slow down and feel the beauty of connecting with ourselves, each other, and the natural world. We practice survival skills that build our relationship with the elements as we explore animal tracking, shelter and fire building, plant, tree, and mushroom identification, and earth crafts.
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Transformative experiences during this stage of life, sets the stage for the future. EQ (Emotional Quotient) is now understood as a better indicator of success than IQ (Intelligence Quotient) and is used to identify leaders, good team players, and people who work well independently.
Wayfinders experiences sharpen EQ through social emotional learning, team building, nature connection, leadership development, and exercise. Wayfinders infuses soft and hard skills necessary to help navigate the social world and increase resilience. Learning to self-monitor and regulate emotions will have positive lifelong impacts.
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In today’s busy world, we find that we are often rushing from one activity to the next. In this scenario, life starts to feel like a run on sentence, without punctuation or time for breath. Between school, extracurriculars, busy weekends, and non-stop technology, we are running ragged and often failing to pause for reflection, celebration, or re-calibration.
Rites of passage serve as a way of pausing and honoring significant milestones as we transition from one stage into another. Ceremonies allow us to hold space for these moments and make them stand out as special, beautiful, meaningful, and memorable. Wayfinders experience rites of passage in group and individual ceremonies and recognize the significance of their personal growth and their impact on the larger community.
Our children are disconnecting from themselves, their families, communities, and the earth as they enter their teenage years.
Wayfinders carves out time for youth to step away from the daily, to connect with purpose.
