Polaris Education & Guidance - Adventure Mentor

Adventure Mentor provides a unique combination of adventure based activities and empowerment training for youth mentoring programs.

Polaris' Adventure Mentor project works in collaboration with you to fully achieve your organization's mission. Our innovative approach to developing leadership, communication, and relationship skills produces ongoing and meaningful results. Our goal is for your participants to look back on their mentoring relationship as one of the most powerful and positive experiences of their lives.

Polaris' innovative programs combine adventure based activities such as whitewater rafting with professional facilitation and skills training to:

Deepen and "Fast Forward" the Mentoring Relationship
Participation in a fun, positive weekend of shared adventure and self exploration creates comrades with a depth of relationship that generally takes much longer to establish.
Enhance Personal / Life Skills
As part of the weekend program, your mentors and mentees explore and appreciate their self-concept, strengthen their sense of community, and develop effective approaches to problem solving and goal setting.
Strengthen Mentor Effectiveness
Comprehensive training in problem solving, goal setting, active listening, and crisis communication provides mentors with confidence and skills to engage in meaningful relationships with youth.
Recruit, Retain, and Reward Mentors
Participation in a rich, fulfilling experience opens new possibilities and creates momentum that contributes to an added commitment to the mentoring experience.

Polaris Education & Guidance, Inc. is dedicated to creating life affirming educational experiences. Since 1994, Polaris' professional staff have worked to provide consulting, training, and direct services to "at risk" youth programs.

Polaris' Adventure Mentor (AM) is a team of professional educators, therapists, and outdoor guides, dedicated to providing a fun and constructive mentoring development curriculum. Our unique approach draws on extensive, hands-on experience with youth resiliency. AM's comprehensive program addresses key growth areas that serve to strengthen one’s ability to engage in meaningful relationships between youth and adults.

These growth areas include Leadership, Communication, Relationship Building, Personal Self, and the Experiential Environment.

AM’s communication development training is designed to foster and enrich the connection between individuals and to explore the art of interacting.

Being Present and Engaged
Eye contact, body language, voice intonation, and recognition cues.
Articulation of Ideas
Clarifying ideas for our selves facilitates our abilities to effectively share our ideas with others
Problem Solving and Conflict Resolution
Avoiding aggression and defensiveness
Constructive feedback
Non-judgemental communication

Recognizing the ability of adults to connect with youth and of youth to connect to adults

AM’s relationship building training draws attention to the critical elements that go into creating rich, rewarding, interpersonal connections between individuals. AM recognizes that mentoring relationships have the potential power to nurture and change the lives of all those involved.

AM recognizes the importance of the individual with respect to being a part of a powerful life-affirming relationship. To this end, AM’s programs focus attention on changing one’s personal expectations of what is possible. AM works to strengthen the personal skills of everyone involved in the programs.

AM acknowledges the impact that place and surroundings have on individuals and their experiences with themselves and their lives. AM is dedicated to using the natural environment in conjunction with participants’ daily environment to create experiences that are:

Life is to be lived now, not in the past, and lived in the future as a present challenge.
Trust between youth and adult (mentor - mentee) is essential, the foundation on which all other principles rest, the glue and beginning point.
Competence makes a difference; youth should be helped to be good at something, and especially at schoolwork.
Time is an ally - working on the side of growth in a period of development when life has a tremendous forward thrust.
Self-discipline and control can be taught.
The cognitive competence of youth can be enhanced; they can be taught skills and strategies for life management and coping with the complex array of demands placed on them by family, school, and community.
Feelings should be nurtured; shared spontaneously, controlled when necessary, expressed when too long repressed, and explored with trusted others.
The group is very important; it can be a major source of instruction in growing up.
Ceremony and ritual give order, stability, and competence to youth, whose lives often seem chaotic.
The body is the armature of the self, the physical self around which the psychological self is constructed.
Communities are important for youth, but the uses and benefits must be experienced to be learned.
In life, and particularly in growing up, a youth should know some joy in each day and look forward to some joyous event for tomorrow.

Youth are not broken and in need of fix, or diseased in need of surgery. Each has within them the capacity for healthy and optimal life experience. Often the very traits (in addition to environmental challenges) which may have led to problems are strengths with positive intentions at their core.

Learning & positively applying one's resources- with the support of a caring adult relationship- is the fundamental curriculum of a mentor - mentee relationship. This assumption of innate potential and attraction to "a successful & healthy life" is at the heart of the Polaris resiliency model.

The concept that a decent caring adult in a youth's life is of value is easy to accept, and appears to be overwhelmingly supported by more than a decade of resiliency research. TRUST is a fundamental principle upon which this relationship is developed. Polaris believes in supporting this relationship; through training in skill and personal development for mentors, as well as providing shared opportunities for life affirming experiences through adventure based curriculum (Adventure Mentor). This stated, we acknowledge that NO amount of professional training can make an adult worthy of the trust of a youth, or capable of generating it. This ability, this relationship potential, is prior to technique, to theory, to technical knowledge.