Program areas at Gateway Mountain Center
SIERRA EXPERIENCE: Sierra Experience Includes both Camps and Schools program services. Schools is more learning (academic based). Globally, Schools bring groups of kids, and Camps consist of individual childern signed up by their parents for a Summer program.Mission: We foster a sense of wonder, connection and inquiry. We connect youth with themselves, nature and community with Spirited and Transformative adventures. Gateway Mountain Center is where youth of all backgrounds learn, heal and thrive! Curriculum: Serving 4th - 12th grade students, our holistic curriculum is shaped by Common Core, Next Generation Science standards, STEM principles, and best practices in current wellness, ecology and mountain sports. We offer diverse curricula which can include HISTORY, GEOLOGY, our 3-part series on climate change which includes SNOW SCIENCE, FOREST ECOLOGY, and MEADOW ECOLOGY as well as Peak Experience Adventures. Well-rounded Program: In addition to science academics, our programs offer reflection and mindfulness activities, nature, art, take-home exercises for personal empowerment, evening programs with campfires, student skits, dance, music, yoga and environmental films. Using the Science of Awe and Systems Thinking, students connect the dots between the personal and the universal. Ultimately, each student will return home with a deeper sense of their relationship to the natural world and how this relationship can inform their personal choices, health and well-being.
WELLNESS:Wellness is a feeder program to whole heartsits our first point of contact with building relationships with all the youth we serve. We go into schools, and we do cool things. We work closely with the principles, teachers, counselors, and psychologists. We may do up to 5 sessions like a WHMB mentor situation, but call it wellness. It turns into whole hearts when it becomes long term. We are the crisis go-tos. immigration problems, they call us. medical support, they call us. Interfacing with a parent, they call us. If it goes long term, it becomes WHMB.
WHMB: Whole Hearts, Minds, and Bodies is a program for young people who want to approach their lives and well-being in a full and integrated way. We utilize an approach we call Nature Based therapeutic Mentoring, which combines modern therapeutic approaches with traditional mentoring to create relationships that are deliberate and nurturing. With nature as our backdrop we guide youth through multi hour activity based sessions where they learn skills and develop the capacities they need to face their challenges and meet life with confidence.