OUR VALUES:

A Social Enterprise:

Especially in these hard economic times children's access to active, outdoor experiences and learning is becoming more and more limited, we are a not for profit organisation and running as such we intend to make the outdoors and an active lifestyle more and more accessible to everyone.

Our Activities:

We provide two types of activities: developmental and experiential.

Developmental activities are mostly sports or arts. They are things that you can learn and progress in, things like Climbing or Taiko Drumming, where we can start you off but it would take a lifetime to become a master.

Experiential activities are one-off experiences, a challenge that you will remember forever. They are things like High Ropes or the Woodland Adventure that test you in body and mind. In doing these activities you can learn things about yourself, but if you repeated them again they would essentially be the same.

We believe in a mixture of both. Our schedules try and provide chances for people to develop in developmental activities, with multiple sessions where you can get better and better at the activity, intertwined with a schedule of one-off experiences that we make sure we don't repeat for the same child.

Competition:

We believe in friendly competition. The world we live in is competitive, people enjoy competition and we believe that through encouraging competition and good sportsmanship we can teach people how to deal with each other in a civil manner. Not everyone will be the winner every time but no-one will be the loser every time. We encourage teams to bond and look after each other; all our activities are designed so that points for each team can only be earned if the whole team has worked together.

We believe in celebrating people's merits and discussing where people struggle. Every child at the end of a holiday will receive a personalised award not from us but from his or her teammates for what they think they achieved best.

Letting people learn for themselves how it feels to struggle, fail and succeed with the support of others, and how to be a good winner and loser, prepares them for the real world and is a lesson we think is missing from school life.

Role Models:

We pay a higher wage to our group leaders than is average in the industry because we expect more of them; we expect our instructors to be able to inspire, challenge and intrigue the young people we look after. They all have a good deal of experience in youth work and are interesting people, they all possess or are studying for a degree and all have an active and on-going interest in the world around them. Our instructors are all specialists in their field, not multi-trained instructors as in the majority of schemes, and we pay a premium to ensure that your children are receiving the best tuition possible.

Encouraging on-going Interest:

As with most companies, we provide taster sessions of activities. However we do more than just that:- if someone shows an interest in an activity we get them in touch with a local club that do it regularly. With our climbing and canoeing sessions we are constantly working towards giving awards to allow your children to rent or utilise equipment long after they have left us behind. We want people to catch the bug; we want your children want to develop lifelong hobbies and obsessions from the time they spend with us.