CatRock Youth Leadership Academy

The CatRock Youth Leadership Academy is the program at the heart of CatRock Ventures. The program is a multi-year and certification program that supports the growth and development of students through experiential learning in multiple contexts: outdoor adventure, leadership, and environmental education.

Outdoor adventure is a powerful hook that energizes and engages youth. Adventure-based challenges encourage students to get outside of their comfort zone and develop a sense of their own potential through the mastery of difficult outdoor experiences. Expeditions may include but are not limited to hiking, camping, backpacking, rock climbing, rafting, and snowboarding.
Leadership development is at the heart of everything CatRock sets out to do. CatRock’s programming builds upon best practices in promoting social and emotional and incorporates activities that enable students to acquire knowledge and develop skills to prepare them for youth leadership roles.
Environmental education is an essential part of the program, focused on empowering youth to address community and environmental issues within their local communities. Social entrepreneurship and service-learning projects are examples of ways students actively engage in problem-solving.

Program Structure

Base Camp

Base Camp lays the foundation for development through outdoor adventure activities. This phase focuses on relationship-building between students and program staff, students and their peers.

Program staff members focus on laying the groundwork for social emotional growth and fostering the development of communication and leadership skills.

Ascent

The Ascent targets youth’s social and emotional development through incremental outdoors-based challenges and major outdoor expeditions including: three overnight trips, a six-day trip, and a three-day urban backpacking experience in NYC.

These types of outdoor adventures provide a space where meaningful experiences occur and enable CatRock to build a context for environmental education and advocacy workshops and community service projects

Summit

The Summit provides opportunities for capstone projects that allow students to apply their knowledge and skills in hands-on projects that benefit the community.

Students help design and create products that address social and environmental issues in CatRock’s Maker Space and Design Lab; serve as youth leaders on trips; and apply their leadership skills to school-based opportunities such as student council membership.

“CatRock has done so much for me and my family. They have changed my life and I feel so beyond grateful for them”

~Gabby J.

“I was going through a lot of insecurities. At CatRock they treated me like everybody else wouldn't. It wasn’t like school, walking down the hall, people staring at you or not talking to you. At CatRock they don't care about how you look or your culture or nationality. They just care about you.”

~Destyny G.

“What you learn at CatRock is different from what you learn in high school. Educators at school teach you core subjects like mathematics. Educators at CatRock teach you how to become a better person. It sounds weird to call them educators, but that’s what they are.”

“Doing things that I never thought I’d do, like skiing in Vermont and leading younger students on hiking trips in Hook Mountain Park, has been such an empowering experience. But my experience at CatRock has also helped me become a less self-absorbed person.”

~ Corey R.

“CatRock teaches kids who have challenging backgrounds to step out of that and become more than society has deemed them to be. Many kids in New York City don’t have access to the outdoors or even a backyard. CatRock is pioneering the way to get teens get outdoors and developing them as leaders. I feel like CatRock is an experience that every New York City kid should experience. It is just really a life changing.”

~ Richard O.