One of our long term Board members, Alfred Berkeley, recently took the opportunity to talk to our Executive Director, Ginger Mihalik, about her path to Outward Bound and some of our school's most exciting work in the community.
The interview is a three part series created for Edwin Warfield's CEO Interviews, which are featured on citybizlist. You can also read each section of the interview on the citybizlist site here.
The excerpt below is from Part 1 of the interview, where Ginger unpacks what the challenges on course might look like for our students, and how that can manifest into transferable life skills and self-perspective.
AL BERKELEY: The struggle might be putting them one foot in front of the next on a long hike, or continuing to take those tired shoulder muscles with that canoe?
GINGER MIHALIK: Yep. It could be rock climbing, it could be paddling, it could be hiking. For some kids, walking a mile in the woods feels insurmountable, and helping them do that can really change the way they perceive all of their problems after that. For some kids, it’s not the physical—it has nothing to do with the mileage or the paddling or any of those things—it has to do with having to work with ten other people to get through something together. Sometimes, we will jokingly around here, hope for rain because that can be the thing sometimes that really causes struggle. If you’ve ever had to set up a tent in the rain, it will challenge you. It will stress any group of people out. So, it could be anything and that’s what makes our instructors so amazing: they have to be very dynamic and respond to what’s happening with the group of students they’re working with.