Community Outreach: Serving Marginalized Youth

Post 58 partners with local non-profits to provide outdoor growth experiences to youth

The Post is proud to offer a variety of challenging outdoor experiences at no cost to youth from underserved and marginalized backgrounds in Portland. What makes these Post activities truly unique is the peer-to-peer learning and mentorship that occurs between Post student leaders and partner youth.  

In the wake of COVID-19 our partner organizations are more eager than ever to offer meaningful programming to their youth. We have worked hard to put on a total of 26 trips with our partners in 2022, including with the Oregon Department of Human Services, Urban Nature Partners, Betties 360, Vive NW, and HOLLA.  We have been able to serve approximately 200 marginalized youth over the course of 2022.

 One of the partnerships we are most proud of is with the Affinity Groups of Wells High School (the Black Student Union, Muslim Student Union, Asian/Pacific Islander affinity group, and the Native American Student Union). In March of 2020, mere days before the world changed, a group of 40 Wells students and several Post adult and student leaders made the trip up to Timberline Lodge for a quintessential Oregon day involving a rugged snowshoe adventure.  The event was such a success that when the opportunity presented itself in March of 2022, we did it again. In fact, several of the students that participated in the event as underclassmen were able to come back for a second time—a cathartic bookend after making it through the nightmare of two years of Zoom schooling. In 2022, a few of the students had recently immigrated from Somalia and commented that they had never in their lives seen that much snow before. Many of the students remarked that they had always seen the mountain from Portland but had never been able to make the trip to see it in person for themselves.  The sun was shining and after hiking for a while, one of our student leaders Alex had the idea to lead a series of snowshoe relays, culminating in the backwards snowshoe Olympics. Safe to say snowshoes were not designed to operate backwards at high speeds and it was a bit difficult to determine the winners of the relay what with the chaos that ensued. The adults faded into the background and watched as students that had only met two hours before became friends, laughing and rolling around in the snow.