National Guard Adventure Camp Challenges City Youths

A group of about twenty Woonsocket youths participated last week in the Rhode Island National Guard’s Adventure Camp. The four-day camp held at Camp Fogarty in East Greenwich is designed to build confidence and develop leadership and teamwork concepts in at-risk youths between the ages of twelve and eighteen. Mental and physical training regimens challenged the young men and women to reach beyond their comfort zones by using their teammates and their own inner strength.

Applied to each of the four days of the camp was a drug and alcohol awareness theme: Alcohol on day one followed in order by Tobacco, Marijuana, and Club Drugs. On day one, participants were issued Battle Dress Uniforms, given instruction in first aid and compass reading, and paced through physical training. On  day two, they were given the coordinates of a “downed pilot” waiting to be recovered. By day three, they were mastering the low-ropes course in preparation for day four’s culminating high-ropes course, fifty feet in the air.

The Woonsocket youths were included through their involvement in ’s youth outreach initiative, Youth Residential Activities Program, or YouthRAP. YouthRap is a an after-school and summer program that reaches student residents of Constitution Hill and other Woonsocket neighborhoods by offering activities designed to meet their extracurricular and educational needs. Working with NeighborWorks professionals, YouthRAP participants strive to transcend racism, poverty, and violence by adopting civic engagement, healthy lifestyles, higher education and other values.

NeighborWorks has been including YouthRAP participants in the Adventure Camp since the program piloted six years ago. “We were invited by the National Guard,” said NeighborWorks’ Margaux Morisseau, “and it was an amazing experience. Kids stayed overnight for three nights, away from home for four days.” The benefits of the program, said Morisseau, were immediately tangible: “Parents were wondering why (the students) were doing so many chores. They really have to take care of themselves. They accomplish things they never thought they could do.” With the camp including group push-ups, tire swings, rock-climbing walls, daily physical training, obstacle courses, the simulated rescue of a downed pilot who must be reached by an improvised rope-bridge and carried to safety, a low-ropes course and a high-ropes course, it is perhaps better described in simpler terms.

“It was a really good work-out,” said fourteen year-old Seth Gifford.