Open Roads: Outdoors For All

In his younger years, Trevor Hall often found himself getting into trouble around the streets of Chicago. After one too many slip-ups, his father decided an Outward Bound program for troubled teens would help put him in the direction of positive change.

Photos courtesy of Open Roads

“I remember saying to him as I was getting on the plane ‘I’ll never forgive you for this.’ I was so against going — but once I got out there it just completely reshaped my values and belief systems,” Hall recalls. “All of a sudden, the outdoors became a source of improving my mental health, a source of adventure, a source of purpose. For me, I had this transformational experience that has set me on a trajectory for the rest of my life.”

This momentum propelled Hall toward his role as founder and executive director of Open Roads, established in 2001 as an organization that helps high-achieving young adults from lower-income communities throughout the United States develop a relationship with nature and the outdoors. Open Roads offers programs focused on building up the strengths, creativity and diversity of its students.

The mission of Open Roads is to not only immerse these youth community leaders in new experiences, but to help them learn from each other, the power of storytelling and the importance of a healthy planet for all of us to enjoy.
Today, Open Roads has facilitated one to two trips per year up until 2020, then three programs in 2022 and 2023, with five trips slated in 2024 — on the Yampa, Green and Colorado Rivers.

“We’ve found that over the years, between hiking, sea-kayaking and rock climbing, the time that was most intense for growth was the river trips. It’s an easy way for someone who has no outdoor experience to get into extreme wilderness areas, to have that awe inspiring experience,” explains Hall. “It’s a big push of your comfort zone, which is intentional.”

Impact Storytelling

Leading up to his work with Open Roads, Hall was pursuing his undergraduate and master’s degree in education from Harvard University, and he became friends with Pulitzer Prize-winning professor Dr. Robert Coles. During his education and after graduation, Hall worked closely with Dr. Coles on his project, DoubleTake Magazine. This was a magazine focused on documentary photography and literary work, featuring awe-inspiring and thought-provoking multipage spreads.

In early 2001, Hall pitched the idea of DoubleTake Academy, a summer program enabling inner-city students to create relationships in vast outdoor spaces, encouraging them to document their experiences through writing, film and photography along the way, all being showcased in DoubleTake Magazine. That first summer, eight kids from the greater-Boston area embarked on a six-week trip around the Pacific Northwest. The success of that first trip is still felt today as Hall joyously reflects on the relationships he was able to maintain with the students

“In many ways it all started just because of one seed planted inside of a magazine,” says Hall.
Life progressed and the cost of creating DoubleTake became too much for it to continue. Dr. Coles retired and Hall — while still taking students on at least one programmed trip a year — moved on to eventually being the leader of Creative Visions Foundation, established to “empower creative activists worldwide to raise awareness of critical issues and drive positive change through impact storytelling.” before his full-time role with Open Roads when he founded it later that same year.  

The creative results from the annual trips have not only transpired in photos and short films that can be found on the Open Roads website, but in spring of this year, Open Roads will be publishing a newly-redone version of their photo-focused magazine, bringing us back to the seed planted by DoubleTake.

The goal of Open Roads Magazine is to give students who have been traditionally excluded from the outdoors an example of what they can be in natural space and that their presence in the outdoor space is not only welcomed, but integral in breaking down barriers for those that come after them. The Open Roads publication will be distributed to youth organizations, schools and other similar programs, and also shared with outdoor lifestyle companies, photographers and change-makers in the outdoor space to bring light to these stories of impact and inspiration.

Onward with Open Roads

Many of the students that embark on trips with Open Roads do not have a relationship with nature due to geographic or socioeconomic barriers. The programmed trips are in conjunction with organizations, and now schools, that have a set of desired outcomes they would like the students to achieve.

Through fundraising efforts, generous donors and program partners, these immersive experiences are completely free to the students. Well above 400 scholarships have been provided to students to make these trips possible.

“Every one of our partners lets us know how much they can contribute and we raise the rest,” explains Hall.

Recently, New York’s Ossining School District has connected with Open Roads to expand the lives of their students and encourage their development through travel, personal reflection and creativity that comes along with these excursions. This ripple has been felt in two neighboring school districts that will be sending students on Open Roads excursions in 2024. The programs within the school districts bring a unique element into play — the ability for students to get credit for the work they do associated with Open Roads. These students spend months preparing for the trip as a part of their curriculum and also present a reflection of their experience after this trip. The structure of the program is very approachable, and a model has been developed that allows schools across the country to adopt this idea should they be interested.

The team at Open Roads knows how to dream big and they encourage their students to do the same. Their long-term goal is to find a piece of land to call home base and create an endowed summer camp and creative retreat center to carry on the program for years to come.

If you’d like to watch the films put together reflecting on these excursions, learn more about Open Roads or contribute to their program, head over to openroads.org.

Originally published in the Spring 2024 issue of Spoke+Blossom.