Adventure Risk Challenge

Adventure Risk Challenge is an outdoor service nonprofit for high school students. Its mission is to challenge and empower young individuals through leadership, literacy, and wilderness experience.

On the first day of the year 2004, English Language Development teacher Katie Zanto felt it was time to use her wilderness skills and literacy instruction to launch a program that could serve underprivileged kids. While researching ways to make this idea come to life, Zanto found a program like what she wanted to start: the New York City Outward Bound Center, which offered a six-week writing and outdoor adventure camp in the Adirondacks for kids living in Queens and the Bronx.

Zanto spent a summer as an Outward Bound instructor on the East Coast immersing herself in the program, becoming fully convinced that she could implement the same model on the West Coast. Splitting her time between San Francisco and Lake Tahoe, she came back and shared the concept with staff members at the Truckee-Tahoe School District. They were excited about the idea and even threw in Title 1 funding and academic credit to the students.

Within 16 years after that first ARC summer camp was hosted at Sagehen Creek Field Station just outside of Truckee, the program had more than 2,500 participants and 300 summer graduates, and it is still going strong. Research shows that outdoor experiences elevate learning opportunities that cannot be acquired from a traditional classroom setting. Using the beautiful Lake Tahoe region as a backdrop allows students to succeed in school and beyond while having fun doing it.

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