We reconnect marginalized youth to nature, inspiring a love of the outdoors and developing leadership skills, by facilitating team building and coaching exercises on public land. Born through a mutual desire to use our combined experience in youth outreach, coaching, and environmental conservation, DNTULimit has evolved over six years to create adventure and service learning programs with the intention of reconnecting youth to nature, while encouraging personal growth through our carefully developed coaching exercises, which we perform on public land. Each year, we serve hundreds of students participating in Massachusetts summer education programs with groups hailing from all demographics of socioeconomic privilege. At the beginning of our journey, in an effort to garner the necessary resources to provide sliding scale access to groups with less funding, we worked primarily with private schools and organizations that had the ability to seek out extracurricular enrichment for their students—but it wasn’t until we had successfully completed our first public education partner program that our mission truly crystallized. There was a moment before we launched our kayaks, when their summer program administrator took us aside to ask for water-bottles, after explaining that several of the students simply did not have access to the reusable bottles we listed on the supplies sheet. Another student showed up wearing his only pair of “outdoor” shoes— a brand new, gifted pair of Jordans— that he was expected to make last for the duration of the school year. Without those shoes he would have chosen to sit out of the exercise, missing a rare opportunity to access a state park and enjoy an outdoor adventure. We were only just beginning to truly understand the massive gap in funding between private and public education in Massachusetts, but it became clear that our work would be to help close the secondary gap in access to quality programming caused by this discrepancy in spending. A 2020 study by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (MBAE) found that the Commonwealth spends $4,642 more per student to educate students in wealthy towns than it does on students from low income districts. While The Student Opportunity Act (SOA) of 2019 was passed to lessen that inequality, the COVID-19 Pandemic has created a $5 billion deficit in the FY21 state budget, resulting in delayed implementation of the SOA— leaving low income districts high and dry-- disproportionately effecting black and latino students. At DNTULimit, we believe that each individual has the power to shift their mindset and behaviors to contribute to the collective human responsibility to take care of each other, and we’re proud to be doing our part to provide more equal opportunities for Massachusetts’ kids. Through the generous donations of our corporate and private sponsors, the efforts of our diligent grant writers, and partnerships with local businesses, we endeavor to provide access to all of our programs and necessary supplies for the most marginalized of the Commonwealth’s students.
