The facilitation of relationships 

As an organization, we devote significant time and attention (indeed, the vast majority of our time and attention) to developing our programs – thinking about our purpose and creating pedagogies and practices to get there. All of our programs are born from a purposeful philosophy, informed by research, and implemented with intentionality, down to the smallest detail. This is our promise to care deeply about facilitating meaningful wilderness experiences, and our commitment to seeing that promise through.

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We make this investment in our programs because doing so is an investment in our participants – in helping the youth and adults who come our way to know the world wholly and to live life fully. The enrollment cost of our programs reflects this investment, and nothing more.

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We also invest significantly in our staff, all of whom are professional educators deeply committed to their craft. We are immensely grateful for the opportunity to work with such devoted individuals whom have wonderful visions for the world. They are true masters of their trade. We are proud of the work they are doing – with and beyond Headwaters – and we want to help them continue this work.

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We recognize that the monetary system is not the ideal way by which to facilitate relationships, as it encourages interactions that are transactional and disposable. While we must engage the world as it is and partake in monetary exchange in order to run our programs, that does not mean we cannot work toward a better world. In dealing with the flaws of monetary transaction, we find it important to first acknowledge the power it holds over the way we are able to operate: desiring to run the best possible programs, we necessarily invest heavily in them; while we aren't here to make money, we do need to use it. As we are not presently in a position to run our programs free-of-charge to participants, the cost of each program recognizes the financial investment we have made, and nothing more. Our long-term work is to overcome the necessity for participants to fund our programs by building a financial endowment along with more just systems of exchange. In the short-term, we attempt to mitigate this transactionality as much as possible by keeping program costs reflective of program investment and by working to remedy economic barriers.