COMMUNITY AND CONNECTION
Teen travel and service trips that give your child a community.
The mission of The Road Less Traveled is to facilitate life-changing experiences that foster personal growth in those who travel with us. Ultimately, we hope that the young people who join us on an RLT trip will have the chance to develop the skills they need to help make the world a better place. One component of the growth our travelers experience is learning what it means to be a positive, contributing member of a community.
The RLT experience is, by its very nature, a collective experience. Community is built into everything we do. Our travelers are a part of and contribute to a larger group with shared goals and linked outcomes. We plan, cook, and eat meals together. We work together on service projects. We struggle through difficult adventure activities, and we support each other through those struggles. We do pretty much everything together.
The communities in which we live are not only defined by their members, but also help us define who we are as individuals. Our goals are often a product of the normative frameworks that our communities give us. Our communities help us celebrate success and overcome setbacks. Community provides us with a network that makes us resilient to adversity. The importance of strong community in our lives is why we are committed to helping those who travel with us develop skills that they can take back home to their communities to apply to the pursuit of positive community development.
Now, more than ever, the importance of community has been brought to the forefront of our minds. Through the Covid-19 Pandemic, we have had to go without the benefits of community and have missed out on many of the connections on which we once relied. Many of those who travel with us have been deeply impacted by loss. The loss of family and community members, the loss of social interactions, suspension of extra-curricular activities, a lack of in-person scholastic instruction, and the growing presence of social media as their primary source of social interaction. The Covid-19 Pandemic was not the beginning of the reduction in community connection faced by young people, and its waning impact is not the end of it.
As a first step in eliminating the barriers to connection, our programs are unplugged experiences. We believe that time away from technology allows our participants to have deeper connections with the other travelers on the program and helps them stay present in the moment. The benefits that these experiences have on our travelers are possible, in part, because our programs are unplugged. We know this because our travelers tell us. Every summer we hear, unprompted, from the young people who join us in the field that they are glad they did not have their phones with them. They recognize that the quality of their experience and their ability to immerse in our program is a direct result of their separation from social media and technology,
Our programming is also intentionally designed to help our travelers build a community, both within the RLT group, and with other people we meet as part of our travels. Our trip leaders help facilitate this throughout the program. When we travel, we experience new things together. This collective exploration brings us together as we learn to better define our place in the world side by side with our peers and the strong communities of people with whom we interact.
What we do, however, is less important than the fact that we do it together. The meaning of it all comes from the face-to-face interactions we have with each other; and although it is certainly more fun to have those interactions while river rafting, caring for elephants, or restoring coral reefs, the benefits come from the community not the activity. The least dense moments, the ones in which we are doing nothing else but being together, are the moments in which we develop friendships and community bonds that last a lifetime.
