Expeditions at Home

Inspiring Girls Expeditions has cancelled our expeditions for 2020 due to COVID-19, but our mission to empower young women to lead and succeed is as important as ever.

 

We still want to encourage girls’ natural curiosities, connect their interests in science and art, and cultivate trust in their own physical, intellectual, and leadership abilities. 

 

What are Expeditions at Home?

Our community of experienced and motivated instructors is using their creativity to create engaging team-oriented experiences in science, art, and outdoor exploration that young women can access from their own homes. This curriculum will follow the same learning arc of our wilderness expeditions in that the team works together to observe the world, ask questions, and discover new ideas about the world right outside their door. Along the way they will challenge themselves and form meaningful relationships with mentors and peers. As always, we want to instill a sense of curiosity, creativity, and courage as these girls approach their transition to their life beyond high school.

What does this look like?

Can you help us reach more girls than ever before through Expeditions at Home?

If you’re excited about supporting Expeditions at Home, you can help us launch the program by giving a financial or in-kind gift today! We are fundraising for Expeditions at Home through Oregon State University.

This is not just a one-summer adventure! This new style of learning adventure has been a dream of ours for a while. COVID-2020 is giving us a unique opportunity to try something new - something that will allow us to take many (but not all!) aspects of our life-changing wilderness expeditions and offer it to more girls in a slightly different way. Our wilderness expeditions are still our most powerful for growth, learning, and self-discovery, but we always want the girls to take what they learn with us back home.

Help us in this new adventure.

Like our wilderness expeditions, we plan to offer these expeditions free of cost to girls; we want to make this experience accessible and inclusive to ALL girls. In this pilot year, spots in these expeditions will be open to a diverse selection of girls from our existing pool applicants of 2020 expeditions. Like our regular expeditions, we select girls who will gain the most from our expeditions. Our expeditions are designed to instill curiosity, creativity, and courage for future life challenges. We do not select based on past academic achievement.

We need funding to offer these innovative expeditions. This first summer, we need $10,000 to support the pilot program; every additional dollar allows us to expand the program to more girls in future years.

Questions? Contact Ryan Brown at ryan.brown@oregonstate.edu or (541) 231-1230.

Our costs for launching this pilot program include:

  • Salaries for instructors and staff (please note that many of our instructors have limited alternative income this summer with our normal expeditions cancelled)

  • Licensing for software to support social online learning and community building

  • Creation, printing, and distribution of a field journal with curriculum and activities 

  • Purchasing, building, and mailing kits for each participant with a small backpack, field journal, art supplies, and basic tools for exploration such as compasses, thermometer, measuring tape, ruler, hand lens, string, map protector (in-kind donations welcome ).

What does this look like?

Each team will have 9 girls and 2 instructors and have a guiding theme, such as “Water” or “Landscape Transitions.” Girls will learn new observational skills that draw from both art and science. They will make observations related to their theme (from the micro-scale of following a drop of water that falls on a rooftop to the macro-scale of where does water travel before it ends up in a nearby stream). They will share with each other (how are these answers different when observed by a girl in New York City, a girl in Tuscon, Arizona, and a girl in a small town along the Oregon coast?). We scaffold their learning by starting with guided inquiry-based lessons from artists and scientists that model exploration, then support the teams through their own research and discovery projects. In parallel, girls set personal goals for physical, intellectual, and leadership skill-building. The girls will finish the summer by presenting the results of their discovery project and their personal goals. We mentor girls through challenges that promote self-discovery and critical thinking.