One of our vendors lives and works out of an ocean-view condo in Laguna Beach, California, where taking long walks throughout that quaint Southern California “Art Colony” is an added bonus for many of its residents. A far cry from our wooded headquarters of Wilmington, North Carolina, our vendor’s office is set squarely between reality and the Pacific Ocean.

Laguna Beach, California

During one such salt-air stroll, he came across an affable homeless man who sets up shop most days in front of Laguna’s historic movie theatre. Sporting a neatly trimmed grey beard and a big smile, the open-air entrepreneur sells colorful, custom-designed patches for application to denim jackets and trousers. As you can see from the image below, these unique patches are, as their creator says, “perfect for Deadheads.” And anyone else with a taste for whimsy.

The pair struck up a conversation and our vendor found Keith Sanderson to be a friendly, upbeat man who enjoys selling his patches and chatting up the locals — whom fondly refer to each other as “Lagunatics” — in that free-spirit community. He also caters to the hordes of tourists who frequent the town’s nearby boardwalk on any given day.

During one such friendly exchange, our vendor noticed a new sign next to Keith’s patches that read, “Will work for a new backpack.” Spotting his frayed and forlorn North Face backpack lying on the ground nearby, our vendor made a call to our North Carolina headquarters and asked if we might be interested in digging up a used pack from our gear shed and donating it to Keith.

Famed 19th century self-promoter Phineas T. Barnum often opined that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. And while that philosophy certainly worked well for the American circus owner, we here at The National Center for Outdoor and Adventure Education (NCOAE) have discovered that a little promotion for a genuinely good cause can go even further.

We scored some valuable press coverage recently, and we weren’t a bit shy about our self-promoting efforts. The result was a seven-minute video-enhanced piece of journalism titled Beyond the Classroom, beautifully produced by EducationNC, an independent source of news, data, and analysis about education for the people of North Carolina. EdNC’s content encourages the public’s participation and leadership on behalf of school children in this state.

With kids’ education top of mind, we reached out to EdNC, suggesting the news organization might want to send a reporter or two to investigate our Education Without Walls program. Education Without Walls is NCOAE’s not-for-profit subsidiary. It is a wilderness-based outdoor education program for teenagers, many of whom — through no fault of their own — live at or below the federal poverty level.

Following a number of phone conversations between our administrators

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We here at The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE) are very proud of the Education Without Walls program and its students! Education Without Walls is a wilderness-based outdoor education program that engages 13 to 18 year old students in a variety of adventure activities, including backpacking, rock climbing, surfing, kayaking, and camping.  This non-profit program, established by the The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE), provides scholarships for motivated students in financial need, to participate in outdoor adventure programming.

By using Wilderness as a classroom, Education Without Walls offers an exceptional learning environment — one where instructors foster curiosity, students apply critical thinking, and memories are constructed and not soon forgotten. Instructors use NCOAE’s Core Curriculum to guide lesson planning and the facilitation of experiential education activities that focus on personal development, community building and the acquisition and mastery of technical outdoor skills. As a result, Education Without Walls students make close friends and learn incredible skills, all while having a blast on adventures of a lifetime.

Joaly participating in an Education Without Walls trip in 2013.

We’d like to introduce you to one of the many success stories that has come out of Education Without Walls — Joaly Canseco — and tell you a little about her background and thoughts about her own life-changing experience with Education Without Walls.

Joaly, who is now 19 years old, first started participating in Education Without Walls back when she was 13. We sat her down for a brief Q&A, and here is what she had to say:

A North Carolina television news station has run a colorful three-minute segment called “Extraordinary People,” that highlights our very own co-founder and executive director, Zac Adair (video footage from the segment appears at the end of today’s post).

Daniel Seamans, evening anchor correspondent for WWAY TV3, put the cameras on Zac and The National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education in the Extraordinary Person of the Week portion of the network affiliate’s evening news. WWAY TV3 is the ABC, CBS and CW-affiliated television station in Wilmington, owned by Morris Network, Inc.

Entitled “Blind Ambition,” the veteran correspondent interviewed Zac as well as a half-dozen students in our Education Without Walls (EWW) program, NCOAE’s year-round adventure education program for highly motivated and ambitious youth who have significant financial needs.

The news station called the segment ‘Blind Ambition” because Zac lost the majority of his sight when the bicycle he was riding was struck by a car back in 2003. The accident did little to slow this veteran surfer, whitewater rafting guide, rock climber, and outdoor program visionary and business manager. Today he is totally blind in one eye and has less than 2 percent vision remaining in his other eye.

Nonetheless, on a near-daily basis, you can find Zac in the

Thanks to a $25,000 grant from the National Park Service (NPS), 10 students enrolled in our Education Without Walls program will participate in a 21-day summer 2017 backcountry adventure in southeast Alaska. The funding for the trip, which is designated as an NPS Challenge Cost Share Program Grant, covers nearly all the costs associated with taking the students to our northernmost state for what amounts to the trip of their young lives.

The only catch is, the five boys and five girls selected for this outdoor education and service learning adventure are still a bit shy of having enough funds to make the trip, which will be guided by a trio of National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE) instructors, as well as two National Park Service archeologists.

Specifically, each of the students pictured above will need about $1,000 to pay for round- trip commercial airfare from Wilmington, NC, and bush flights throughout the Alaskan interior.

Once there, in addition to a rash of breathtaking day hikes and exploratory treks, the 10 students be working alongside a National Park Service archeologist to clear brush and debris within the Chititu Historic Mining Landscape. This historic area features more than 30 structures and features exemplifying a

It probably goes without saying that most of us here at the National Center for Outdoor & Adventure Education (NCOAE) are big fans — and loyal customers — of our local Whole Foods Market.

Since we put such an emphasis on doing good things for our bodies, it only makes sense that we purchase those items we put in our bodies from markets that sell only healthy, organic and fresh fare.

So when the good folks at our local Whole Foods Market in Wilmington, N.C., said they wanted to help us raise money for NCOAE’s Education Without Walls program, we just shook our heads and asked, “Where do we sign up?”

What that means is this: You do your grocery shopping at the Wilmington Whole Foods Market on March 23, 2016 — also known as Community Giving Day and 5% Day — and 5 percent of Whole Foods’ net sales on that day are donated to the Education Without Walls program, allowing us to continue our important work of educating local youth through unique wilderness-based experiences just miles from home.

Taking a step back for a moment, what we do here at NCOAE is plan, facilitate and guide teen and adult adventurers all around the globe. Locally, we offer youngsters in grades 7-9 and 10-12 the opportunity to