Community School Alumni

Years in Community School:
September 2005 - June 2009

What does Community School mean to you and how did you benefit from your experience?

Community School has been one of the strongest, most positive influences on my life. For me, Community School was a place to forge and nurture connections with nature, other people, and myself. I learned how to quiet my mind and be still in the woods so that I could be aware of everything around me, whether it was a quacking duck, a young shoot of edible Miner's lettuce, or just the wind rustling the grass. I truly did feel that I had a strong community there. But most importantly, Community School is where I found myself.

For me, Community School was exactly what the name implied: a community. We spent an entire year making discoveries, confronting discomforts, exploring new places, cooking dinner, and singing songs with each other, and that really tied us together. I built healthy, genuine relationships with both students and teachers alike, and many have become my closest friends and mentors.  Having this strong community provided me with a place to grow and to discover myself. I feel like I developed everything from leadership and communication skills to a sense of humor to some of my most fundamental belief systems. Through Community School, I have found who I am and also determined who I want to be.

What are you doing now? (Dec 2010)

I am currently at Western Washington University, with the intention of majoring in Sociology.

Years in Community School: 
September 2003 - June 2008

What does Community School mean to you and how did you benefit from your experience?

Wilderness Awareness Community School gave me so much - it's hard to put it all into words.  One of the biggest things was a true knowledge of the natural world around me. The skills that I learned during my four years in Community School I use to this day - in a lot of my college classes and in planning for a job in the future.  It’s a true gift having grown up around such a supportive, well-rounded community as WACS.

What are you doing now? (Dec 2010)

I’m currently living in Missoula, Montana, studying Wildlife Biology at the University of Montana. I am planning on graduating in spring, 2013. Once I graduate, I’m either going to grad school in the nature resource field or going into environmental law.  I think my love for biology and the natural world was definitely fostered and helped by my time spent at WACS.

Years in Community School:
September 1999 - June 2001

What does Community School mean to you and how did you benefit from your experience? 

"Community School is so much more than environmental education. Its deep one-on-one mentoring, absence of peer judgment, and space to openly explore and pursue passions is unparalleled. The holistic approach to learning provides an incredible foundation for students. It’s a foundation that we build upon for the rest of our lives.

While it has been over 10 years since my time at Community School, I continue to use the skills and tools developed as a WAS student every day. Following graduation from Yale University, I now work in Los Angeles as strategic counsel for foundations, nonprofits, and corporations. From Intel’s corporate philanthropy to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, I help people doing good, do good better.

The robust understanding of mentoring, tracking, and following passion through adversity allows me to engage with my co-workers, bosses, clients, and community differently. WAS gave me the ability to approach situations with strength. Rely on independent personal initiative. Find solutions through collaboration and understanding. And generate positive outcomes through authentic engagement rather than personal gain.

Looking ahead, I am confident that my WAS background will continue to be a critical factor in generating a successful personal life and professional career."

What are you doing now? (Dec 2010)

Student at Yale University

Years in Community School:
September 2003 – June 2006

What does Community School mean to you and how did you benefit from your experience? 

I grew up as a homeschooler in Northwest Washington. My passions were always focused toward the deep cedar groves towering into the sky and the arches of moss-draped vine maple that made up the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. This passion for deep forest and all they had to offer inevitably led me to Wilderness Awareness School’s youth programs. I started out as a yearly participant in the summer camps then moved on to Youth School and later Community School. In total I spent the better part of 10 years in Wilderness Awareness school programs. Here I quickly became fascinated by stories of Tom Brown tracking ants across slick river rocks and determining the diet of a deer by a single track, along with stories of Ingwe growing up as an adopted member Akamba tribe of Kenya. The stories of various instructors, graduates, and current students of Wilderness Awareness School were also inspiring to me. Along with these stories I was presented a whole repertoire of skills that gave me the knowledge to work towards the astonishing accomplishments I had heard about in the tales that first sparked my curiosity. I learned how to start a fire with a simple hand or bow drill, track animals, make shelters wherever I needed to, identify edible and poisonous plants, become invisible in the forest, move quietly over rough terrain, navigate with no compass, and a variety of other skills that aided me in my woods adventurers.

When I was sixteen I moved away from the Seattle area and up to Bellingham W.A. I decided I would attend public high school for my junior year. This was my first time in school let alone any other form of structured education. Before the beginning of high school I met with a counselor to sort out credits. I brought her my completed Shikari and Kamana courses along with Wilderness Awareness Schools mission statement, numerous field journals, and contact information for all my instructors at Wilderness Awareness School. After explaining to her all the valuable skills I had learned from attending the Wilderness Awareness School for over half my life she decided to give me two credits: 1.5 credits for P.E and .5 elective credits. This astonished me since the total of 2 credits is not even equivalent to one class worth of credit, let alone the 10 years I had spent pursuing my passion for the natural world. Entering high school with the feeling that what I had dedicated a huge part of my life to was “worthless” in the eyes of the main stream education system did not lead to academically happy or productive years in high school. After two years of high school I graduated. Upon graduation I was unsure of what pathway I should take. I was uneasy to enroll in college because of the sour taste my high school education had left me with, but I knew that I was still a passionate learner of those things that interested me.

I am now in my sophomore year of college at The Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington. Here I have discovered that the skills I learned in Wilderness Awareness School are not only important in my own personal life, but are also skills that pertain directly to my academic studies. I am pursuing my bachelors of science in Animal behavior and zoology and have found that the skills I learned in Wilderness Awareness School are the foundation of many skills relating directly to this major. Last summer I spent my time in The Wrangell Saint Elias in Alaska studying the effects of climate change and receding glaciers on dall sheep. The skills of animal observations and how to live comfortably in the wilderness that had learned in Wilderness Awareness School became essential to my success in this project. I am now working on a field research project revolving around Harbor seals. Last week I stalked up, covered in mud, on a group of a hundred harbor seals and observed them for over an hour. Without the mentoring of Wilderness Awareness school I would not have been able to accomplish this. Two weeks ago I attended a mammal prep workshop (skinning) as part of my class and was able to draw upon my past experiences doing this to help me. The fact that Wilderness Awareness School has not only helped me in my personal life as a human being, but has also helped me achieve upper division science credits in college and put me on a track to graduate a year early speaks as a testament to its immensely valuable and absolutely necessary resource for anyone looking to develop their passion for the outdoors. I still stop on the side of the road for road kill, look in mud for tracks, start fires from friction, move quietly through the forest, and keep in present in my mind many of the teachings I learned from Wilderness Awareness School. I would not trade this experience or knowledge for anything; Wilderness Awareness School was the best preparation for my future that I could have hoped for.

What are you doing now? (Dec 2010)

Student at The Evergreen State College in Olympia Washington.