Access to Adventure for People with Disabilities

Support raised through GlobalGiving enabled Waypoint to include over 1,100 individuals with disabilities in adventure education programs in 2017. To increase capacity and include more individuals each year, Waypoint hired two additional staff members – one of which has been a Special Education Teacher for the last 5 years. She has added many strategies and supports to help include individuals with severe intellectual disabilities and autism in our programs. Waypoint also invested in more adaptive kayaks and a second vehicle, which has enabled multiple programs to take place in different locations on the same day. In short, your investment helped build Waypoint’s capacity to serve more youth and adults with disabilities through accessible adventure education. Most participants in Waypoint’s programs have no other access to this type of support.

Our goal of expanding programs for people with disabilities has been met over the past year. In addition to the progress mentioned above, Waypoint is facilitating a second year of the Leaders In Training Program and launched a new Inclusive Adventure Club to bring together people with and without disabilities to share in the costs and rewards of an adventure. Waypoint also partnered with multiple new organizations to provide programs including the Epilepsy Foundation of New England that recruited constituents and helped to organize programs in Lincoln, RI, Worcester, MA and Portland ME. Yet, Waypoint is only in year three of an ambitious strategic plan to double the yearly number of individuals served by 2020.

25% of Waypoint revenue comes from program fees. This means that the remaining 75% comes from community investments. Recognizing that nearly 80% of charitable giving in the United States comes from individuals, Waypoint is prioritizing individuals as the best place to invest time and energy going forward. In 2018 Waypoint added four new members to the Board of Directors to help with the task of networking with new individual donors. These members include Chris Keyes, Head of Publishers Clearing House Boston; Laura Malnight, Mom and Advocate; Tom Rollins, CFA at Fidelity Investments and Jan Wade, Director of Boston Ability Center. We are thrilled at the level of passion and expertise these individuals bring to the Waypoint team and confident that their support as well as that of the more than 350 other individual donors over the past year will help to sustain and grow the mission and vision of Waypoint Adventure. 

Thanks so much for the opportunity to partner with you to provide adventure education opportunities to youth and adults with disabilities.

Sincerely,

Dan Minnich, Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director

Links:

• Video Describing Program Impact