βThe aim of education is to impel young people into value forming experiences.β
Kurt Hahn, Founder of Outward Bound
The youth of South Africa come from very diverse and often difficult circumstances. Increasing large numbers of them are being raised in homes without parents or are living on the streets. Millions of young South Africans are growing up with little or no positive parental guidance. Life becomes a matter of survival and crime, drugs and prostitution become the means to an end.
Outward Bound has been transforming lives around the world for over 60 years and in South Africa for the past 15 years. They equip people with the character, will, values and self belief to help them to make the right choices. They work on transforming communities through transformed individuals.
Breaking with traditional classroom based training, they use adventure and challenge to produce deep insight and lasting change through experiential learning. The courses are expeditionary in nature β using the outdoors as the classroom. Combining challenging activities with skilled facilitation, they use the latest thinking from around the world to maximise the learning experience. Outward Bound creates learning opportunities and helps the participants to seize them.
Through challenges such as rock climbing, abseiling and river rafting, students are taught to face and overcome their fears. They then relate this back to their lives at home and realise that it is the same β they face a similar fear when sitting down to write a maths exam. If they can manage to abseil down a rock face, they can certainly manage to perform at school!
Outward Bound South Africa is a non-profit organisation that raises funds in order to include the disadvantaged youth of this country on their programmes thus giving them the opportunity to improve their lives.