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Episode 323
ABOUT THE EPISODE:
Will White has been doing this work since last century, and he means that literally. Licensed since 1989, he has worked in group homes, boarding schools, mental health centers, and in 1996, co-founded Summit Achievement, a wilderness therapy program he ran for nearly 27 years. When he tells you the landscape of behavioral health for young people has shifted more in the last five years than in the previous three decades combined, he knows what he’s talking about.
The externalizers of a generation ago, the kids who broke things, slammed doors, and announced their pain loudly, have largely given way to a different kind of struggling young person. One who is anxious, inward, and frozen. Who won’t leave the room, won’t leave the house, and whose parents keep quietly rearranging life around them in an effort to keep the peace. Will has watched this pattern closely, including at Mountain Valley Treatment Center, where young residents had become so overwhelmed by anxiety that the outside world felt completely out of reach. The treatment models that worked before are not always the ones that work now, and the gap between what young people need and what is actually available to them is widening.
That gap is exactly what Will set out to address when he helped launch The Trade, a new nonprofit program in rural New Hampshire for young adults (all genders) ages 18 to 30. It’s not a therapy program in the traditional sense and if you have a young person stuck in that uncomfortable in-between of not ready for college, not ready for independence, but also not well-served by just being home, it may be exactly what you did not know to look for.
I wanted Will back on the show (he appears way back in episode 14) because his view of the bigger picture is one I trust. In this conversation, we talk about the seismic shifts in behavioral health, what is driving the rise in anxiety, and why less talk and more doing might be what this generation actually needs. If your young person is stuck and none of the usual paths seem to fit, this one is for you.
YOU’LL LEARN:
- The shift Will has watched from externalizing kids to anxious, frozen ones, and what he believes is behind it
- What The Trade is and who it’s built for
- Why apprentices get paid from day one, and what receiving a first paycheck does to a young person
- The over-accommodation pattern Will kept seeing in parents, and when caring starts to make things worse
- What Will leaves exhausted parents with, from someone who has been doing this work for four decades
EPISODE RESOURCES:
- The Trade website
- Will White on Hopestream episode #14
- Trish Ruggles, Therapeutic Consultant at Pathfinder Consulting
- Mountain Valley Treatment Center website
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Will White
[00:00:00] Hey, will so good to have you here. So grateful to be on your show, Brenda. I meant to go back and look at our first episode, which I want to say was in 2020 when I started the podcast, can’t remember how I got connected with you. I think it was, actually Jenny Wilder. I’d had her on and she said, well I of course you’ve got Will White scheduled, right? And I was like, uh, yes, who’s Will White? And since then, obviously we’ve talked a lot. We got to see each other actually not too long ago, maybe six months ago at a conference. Yeah. Yeah. And I’ve had you on my podcast and my son has been on your podcast. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It’s been great. So I think your, longevity in the field of mental health care, outdoor behavioral health, all the things is just vital.
[00:01:00] And I know that you are now doing something kind of new and cool, so I wanted to have you on to talk about that, but first, before we do that, can you just give us a background or not even a background, but a kind of like a 50,000 foot view of what you have seen, let’s call it in the last 10 years around behavioral health for young folks, mental health care, substance use, because I think you have a really good perspective on the bigger picture than some people do. Well, thank you for trusting me in answering this question, and at the same time, more recently, I really think I can word it correctly because in the last 10 years there’s been so much change. It’s hard to grasp it in so many different avenues.
[00:02:00] So I have been a practicing licensed mental health professional since 19, I got my graduate degree social work, clinical social work degree in 86. My license at 89. So since last century I’ve been doing this work in all sorts of things. I’ve worked in hospitals, I’ve worked in private practice, public schools. I’ve worked in boarding schools for a number of years. I helped start a now referred to a wilderness therapy hybrid program called Summit Achievement in 96 and I ran that for almost 27 years and now I do much more consulting and helping with other programs and leaders. So in the last, I think the last five years has been the most rapid shifts and as you reflected in your conversation with
[00:03:00] Trish Ruggles recently, there’s been a big shift in the wilderness therapy field, and there’s, it went from like 20 adolescent programs to five and a and almost like a two year period. Yeah. And so a lot of times when something like that happens, you say, well, it’s one thing, and they had some negative press and that’s why it was, but it, like anything, it was more than one thing. There was Covid there was increasing wages because when COVID happened and people started to, going to work was riskier, you had to pay people more. So profit margins got less. Behavioral healthcare, people saw how using Zoom and other communication devices that they didn’t necessarily have, we couldn’t go to offices for therapy, so people went online
[00:04:00] and so we moved, everybody started rethinking different ways to provide behavioral healthcare. And recently, I think it was in November, December Thomas Freeman, who writes for the New York Times, he preferred to this era as the poly scene that where a lot of traditional things, models are breaking apart. Mm-hmm. And we can see that. We can say that climate change is one aspect. We can see that AI is another aspect. We can see that functioning governments is another aspect. We can see that the, there’s much more expression of needs for mental health treatment 20 years ago or 10 years ago, or even five years ago. Very few people wouldn’t express it. Now it’s really out there and so there’s good and
[00:05:00] bad with these changes. What’s happening in behavioral healthcare is, and I was one who would judge years ago, it’s like, oh, coaching, you know, not, that’s not good and now I have my own coach, right? Because I see the value of it and one, we very much as people in the behavioral health. Industrial complex, which I’ve been part of for many years. Of course, you only want licensed people ’cause I’m a licensed clinician, so I want only licensed clinicians yeah to provide healthcare. But as I moved on in my career and access and use coaching for myself, I’m seeing the value of it and I promote it. So it’s really trying to find what works best for you or for your family and Trish Ruggles episode on
[00:06:00] your podcast. She really talks about the need for the right young person going to wilderness therapy, that’s a certain percentage of people or adults. Actually, there’s more and more. Actually baby boomers who are going to the outdoors for treatment. Yeah. Sometimes it’s through licensed professionals. Sometimes it’s coaching. All of that is a big change from a decade ago and everything was accelerated in the last five years. Yeah, that is, isn’t that interesting that some of these things that we traditionally think of for like adolescents or young adults that people in their forties and fifties are saying, well, I wanna go to wilderness therapy. Like, I would rather do that Yeah than sit in a, you know, office park in the middle of my city and sit in a pleather chair and talk to somebody for an hour. That sounds pretty good. So, yeah, I love that and we, yeah.
[00:07:00] I’ll link to the episode that you’re referring to with Trish, who’s a therapeutic consultant who helps families figure out that right mix of what is the right thing for us. So, yeah I agree. I think there’s been a significant shift, a lot of pluses to it because, and I know you’ve seen this, there’s a lot of kids unlike mine, who is a, you know a hooligan and like out there wrecking havoc in the world. There’s a lot of the isolation. The kids who won’t leave their room won’t leave the house and to have something for them and to have them be able to connect with somebody on of screen, even if that’s just an entree to something else, is just hugely valuable. I’ve talked to so many parents that say, oh my God, thank goodness for, you know, online therapy ’cause that was the only way we could start to make some change and get out there a little bit. Yeah, that’s another example of the poly
[00:08:00] scene, right? So we now have computers in our pockets and now we can connect with anything and information in our pocket 24 7, and it’s rewiring our brains. Yeah. And it’s rewired the young people I started working with. In my career many years ago are quite different than the young people of today and I speak from that personally and professionally. ’cause I had sons a little bit later in life and their high school experience was quite different than mine. Some for the much more positive and some are like for the negative and we have to recognize that a non-duality, like there’s good and bad in everything and I choose to look at the hope in life and the positive changes in life and how to keep ourselves
[00:09:00] healthy, mind, body, and spirit. And I think there’s just more options. That said, sometimes going back to educational consultants like Trishia Ruggles and others, it is like sometimes there’s too many choices and we need guidance and AI isn’t to the place, I thought it was gonna be there sooner to help people find programs and whatnot and resources. I think it’s really important to connect personally with people and have parts of the community, like the Hope Stream community is amazing ’cause people can talk and share their personal experiences and that is something we need more of ’cause communities, part of the negative about being online and all that is it creates kind of pseudo communities, but real communities face to face, there’s much more health benefits. Yeah, it is so crucial and you know, I told you I just got back from a week of vacation
[00:10:00] with five couples. So there were 10 of us, pretty much 99% unplugged for eight days, and it was amazing. Like, oh, here we are having meals together and talking, and nobody is glued to their phone and I think you’re right with the changes. And I would love to, if you wanna just dig a little deeper into what some of those changes are that you’re seeing in young people from, let’s say you had a young person at Summit, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, and now you have somebody that you’re working with maybe at the trade, which we’re gonna get into, what are you seeing as those differences from somebody who generally wasn’t, you know a digital nomad to somebody who now is, and we know that there, we have a hard time like actually disengaging that device from their hands, but what do you see just sort of anecdotally.
[00:11:00] Well, in the past, in my early years of my career, whether I was working in Group Homes in Boulder, Colorado for, called the Halon School, and that was a program specifically run by Boulder Mental Health and the Boulder School District and then working at boarding schools and then starting Summit much more in those days, in the nineties, early two thousands, much more of an externalizer, much more expressing themselves or like their anger, their frustration, even their depression. It was an externalizing type of person and they often would be using drugs, some sort of drug. Not always, but primarily they were expressing their dissatisfaction with
[00:12:00] their life, or maybe it was their way, they were expressing their depression or anger or reflecting what was going on in the family system. I mean, it’s hard to generalize, but to put it simply, a much more externalizer, much more expressive, much more likely to break things or just, I don’t want to be here. I’m walking away and you referred to your son. Yeah. He was more of that era. Mm-hmm. Right. That era and we can see that actually in the numbers. So as much as we know, there’s a very serious drug problem in America today and in the country. The actual numbers of drug, the usage is down overall to today, we see much more. So in those days, diagnostically, I’m not a big DSM three or four or five, whatever it is now, but it’s always, you had to do it because we had to do it because that’s how
[00:13:00] you can get insurance. And the bottom line is you diagnose pretty regularly this oppositional defiant disorder. Right? They weren’t listening to their parents, they weren’t doing what they’re told, they were telling teachers kiss off and pop ba pop and you know, it’s like and fast time and ridge on highs, which very much dates me, but I’m just telling you Right? It’s just like, yeah, I’m just ordering a pizza and just like, and that would be seen as oppositional and goodbye and now it’s much more of an anxiety. Much more internalized, not having as good of emotional intelligence to express what’s really going on for them. So there’s theories of why that is and there’s facts. We know one of the factually, and that was part of the lawsuit that just went against social media, thankfully, that they were
[00:14:00] found guilty of creating addictive, algorithms for young people that would help exacerbate mental health conditions, right, and spending time, well, correlation does not mean causality, but the research is showing causality that there is a, the higher usage of social medium screens. The higher likelihood of suicidality. I mean, that’s Jonathan Haidt’s book. Yeah. So that’s one piece of it. COVID was another piece of it. Another piece of it is, parents’ consumption of huge amounts of news. I am one of them. I’m much better at that than I had been in the past, but it’s a time where there’s a lot of anxiety. So the numbers of young people being diagnosed with anxiety is much higher, right? And yet spending time in the
[00:15:00] wilderness or being outdoors or doing things will actually lower anxiety. But it’s counterintuitive to a parent, and I am a parent. You are a parent with an anxious child to push them to do something and yet they need encouragement. They need to be pushed, they need to be told, you can do this and you need to do this. Yeah. So that is what we’re seeing and I helped out at a program called Mountain Valley Treatment Program center, which is in Plainfield, New Hampshire for a couple years doing some clinical supervision. The young residents there, a lot of them had became so overwhelmed with anxiety that they were no longer leaving their homes. Mm. And that parents would over accommodate in trying to be a caring parent. Yeah and at the same time it would backfire it because it
[00:16:00] would get worse and worse. Yeah. So we see more of that and the drug use, I mean, the thing about drugs today we can’t really keep our finger on what’s going on because there’s so many variations. The marijuana is so high toxicity or whatever. Yeah. The amount of THC and marijuana is so high, and then there’s all the other drugs that are easily accessible because it’s mainstream. Yeah. So although there is that, the percentage who are using drugs and adolescents is much lower and so some of what the treatment models. That it is about more and more talk therapy, and I’ve always been more into experiential therapy and I came to that through, I worked in the area where I am in Northern New Hampshire. After I was in
[00:17:00] Colorado, I moved back east to Northern New Hampshire and I started working in a mental health center with adolescents and in high school with adolescents. And I really didn’t feel like I was making real impact. I spent a year traveling around the world doing a lot of climbing and backpacking. I studied in a Buddhist monastery for a while, just living, you know how backpacker’s life I was in my thirties then it was during the Clinton administration, and they said they were gonna have universal healthcare. So I like, wow, I’m gonna come back and they’ll figure out healthcare and I’ll come back and open my private practice. Well, that didn’t happen but I learned a lot in a year and a friend of mine had been a headmaster at a boarding school and he said, Hey, we would like you to come to this boarding school, be a counselor and help run our outdoor program and I’m like, that’s great. ’cause I don’t have a job and I’m still trying to figure
[00:18:00] out what I’m doing. And so I started working at this boarding school. I’m like, oh, and this was before the era of therapeutic boarding schools, so it was a traditional boarding school and I realized the work I could do living in dorms and being a counselor and running outdoor programs much more effective than in outpatient work. Yeah and I helped start a outdoor program called Prep for Success, and it was taking young people who had finished wilderness programs and they would transition, they would do a 10 day trip with me and some other faculty in August and they would enter the school if they could do the 10 day trip, and then they would meet with us every other week for a group meeting. And that’s how I got in, like first exposed, this was in 93, 92 or three to
[00:19:00] wilderness, then adventure therapy and I saw the power of like, oh, this is really powerful and yet a lot of the young people who had been to Wilderness at that time, they didn’t, they weren’t ready for school yet, right? They weren’t ready to sit in the classroom. Some were undiagnosed learning disabilities, right? Many were undiagnosed some had been newly sober, had done, that was during the 28 day model of and they just weren’t ready. They needed a safer environment and so that’s how when I was approached by a couple people to start Summit Achievement, that’s how that started. And Summit was a hybrid. ’cause I was like, these wellness programs are great, but they don’t get them ready for school. Right. So at Summit, they go to school Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then they would go out on expedition Thursday, Friday, Saturday,
[00:20:00] Sunday. So and that’s still running today. But it was that transition piece and working and living with young people that’s like, this is very powerful and I know I was much more effective because at a boarding school, not only did I run Prep for Success, but I had to run the outdoor program. ’cause you never had just one job at a boarding school. You have to have two or three. Yes, of course. And I ran outdoor programming and because of that, I knew I was much more therapeutically, quote unquote, therapeutically. Even though I wasn’t doing therapy, I was much more effective in helping young people in the outdoor program than I ever wasn’t sitting in office. So, interesting. Sometimes in the office, but you know what I’m saying? It’s like, and I’ve taught in different colleges around this area for years, and one of the questions I asked to my class and also in workshops, who most impacted you
[00:21:00] during your adolescent years, who wasn’t a family member? Mm-hmm. I’ve asked a thousand people this. I never had one say my therapist, but I’ve had many, say, a coach, a scout leader or spiritual leader, or English teacher or drummer. Yeah. So it’s really about the people who they’re around and a lot of that is the experiences they’re having. So Kurt Hahn, one of the founders or the founder of Outward Bound, he didn’t like therapists sitting in an office either. And I believe he coined the term, I could be incorrect, but experiential therapy. So working alongside doing things with people to help create change. So that’s part of how I got involved with the trade, which is a really cool young adult
[00:22:00] program. More like a gap year experience because we’re helping people get exposed and learning about the trades. There’s a lot of trades, people mentoring, and we have a lodge where, what we refer to as apprentices live there and they’re not doing a lot of individual therapy, but they’re doing, they’re being mentored 40 hours a week in a job in which they get paid for. So it’s the idea of experiences connecting community. And these are old ideas, right? People, wilderness therapy. It didn’t have therapists in it until the late nineties. Yeah. I was one of the earliest the licensed therapists in programs. I remember one time a program lead and another program came to me and she said,
[00:23:00] you therapists are ruining wilderness therapy. I was like, okay. Okay. Well no. I mean maybe we did, I don’t know. But you know the point being, it’s like changes happen and I mean for many years wilderness therapy was run by educators who felt that therapy, they weren’t as effective and now you see people doing wilderness therapy or outdoor therapy, licensed clinicians not doing just hour long sessions. They’re doing long retreats with families. Yeah, so all of it goes back to the poly scene. All these things are starting to change because we’re also identifying we’re all, people are so different and we can’t just say. Like in the early days of wilderness therapy, well, it’s a black box model. Everybody comes in, doesn’t matter their diagnosis. They’ll
[00:24:00] do 28 days and they’ll be great afterwards and that wasn’t the case. Right? Right, right. And so individualizing the models and really trying to meet people where they were at. So that’s a long answer to the question, how things have changed another thing that I’ve, in this conversation, or maybe it’s just me talking, is I don’t see, young people are not as mature. There’s a lot more immaturity of young people today, and I don’t mean it in a negative way. I mean it is, they have I think parents and I being one of them were probably too overprotective of the real world and definitely under protective of the online world. Yeah. And so people are very anxious about all outdoor programmings, outward bound,
[00:25:00] national outdoor leadership schools, it’s hard for them to enroll anything longer than like week long programs. ’cause people are afraid of something bad is going to happen to them. Mm-hmm I am so glad that you connected back to the anxiety of the parents because you know, as we see more and more horrific things happening around us and we get to see not just what’s happening in our community, in our neighborhood, in our city or state, but what’s happening all around the world, of course that’s gonna make you fearful for, oh wait, so I’m just gonna send my 11-year-old off for four weeks to a summer camp.Like, what? That seems crazy. Yeah. So of course that’s gonna trickle down. Yeah and they’re feeling that. So I think that was a really good introduction into what I would love to just dive into
[00:26:00] the trade and what you’re doing and what the sort of genesis for that was. As we’re seeing all these changes in the availability and like the different formats of quote unquote treatment, which I use that term very loosely because obviously there’s different degrees of that, but tell us a little bit about the trade and where did the idea come from and what do you guys do there? Yeah. Well the trade is, we opened our doors in the summer, last summer, so 2025 and it is a not for profit company or organization, not for profit. And the website is Trade for life.org. We are part of a larger not for profit called Moosilauke Visions. So that organization has been around for almost over 40 years
[00:27:00] and Moosilauke Visions runs a lot of different programs in the new Northeast area, and they’re expanding beyond the Northeast, but they have always believed in health and wellness and in behavioral healthcare. And so they have provided services not only to state funded people, but also to private pay and they actually started Mountain Valley Treatment Center and they are Moosilauke Lock visions also, summit Achievement is part of Moosilauke Lock Visions now, so that’s how I got connected with them a number of years ago, and I’ve known the family who started that in the, boy in the sixties is when it started. So it’s going to be over, before they created Moosilauke Visions, it was called the Pike School in Pike, New Hampshire. So Pike new Hampshire’s not
[00:28:00] too far from where I live. They have a large, like 2000 acre mountain, which has mountain biking and backcountry skiing and adjacent to that, they have an in, a boutiquey in that has cabins for rent and for people to have an outdoors experience, but very nice outdoors experience. And they also, this is where Mountain Valley originally was, and right near there is a school called the Oliverian School and so the trade is actually a program for young adults of all genders, 18 to 30 plus who are interested in learning about the trades, not just one trade, but all different trades. They’re gonna get exposed to a lot of different trades. It is not a primary treatment
[00:29:00] program, but a number of what we refer to as our clients are apprentices because they become employees, have been to treatment, primary treatment before, so they may have been in substance abuse program or a mental health program, dual diagnosis. And they don’t need necessarily more talk therapy, but they want more experiences. Mm-hmm. They want to work, they want to learn how to live independently in a world that is rapidly changing. So back to the poly scene where the traditional path of going to college it is not benefiting people as much as it has been in the past ’cause we know that like a lot of young people are graduating and not getting jobs anymore and yet we know that there
[00:30:00] is a dearth in trades people and that the value of being a trades person is going up. Oh, yes. And then, yes ’cause you tried to call a plumber this week or, right. So that, and we as a, I respond like that because we see like, yes, these are, this is great work. When I was in high school, possibly when you were in high school, we had shop class. Absolutely. And they had home ec. And I will say that I grew up, so I went to high school in the seventies. Home ec. We boys didn’t go to Home ec. Right, right. Yeah. It was weird. Yeah. And boys went to, we went to Wood Shop. Shop and the girls went. It was so like, looking back. I know. But anyways, all of that was, you know, taken apart, I think in the eighties and nineties and there wasn’t either of those programs. Yeah and the
[00:31:00] need for tradespeople is actually growing and with AI coming in and taking a lot of entry level jobs, so part of Moosilauke Vision be cause they’re not for-profit, they have to use any profits to further their mission. And their mission is like what are we missing for young people today? Mm-hmm. What can we provide for young people? That they can learn and help get on with their life. And so part of the modeling of the trade was like, we want people to learn lifelong skills. I don’t, unlike wilderness, I mean, when you do a wellness program, you do learn lifelong skills, how to survive. Oh, for sure or stay found, et cetera, et cetera but you’re not necessarily using them daily. Right? Yeah. You’re not necessarily, we had this whole era where a lot of
[00:32:00] people who went to wilderness could go back and work in wilderness, but there’s less wilderness programs, so that aspect is kind of drying off and yet a lifelong skill to being able to understand A, how a car works, how do we change the oil and how do we cut a grass right. How do we fix a small engine? How do we paint a house? So, at the trade, the company itself has full-time trades people always had, ’cause they have different buildings, say because where the Oliverian School is, where Mountain Valley, those are all different buildings that need to be taken care of interesting. And so we had the tradespeople to begin with and now they’re taking the apprentices on the job with them to show them the different trades they can and expose them to it. Right. So it’s not all,
[00:33:00] every day they’re at one thing. They go to a different trade each day. We literally have the company, because they’re really supportive of the area, which is rural New Hampshire up north. They bought a auto repair shop, public facing, so you know, right. We’re gonna start changing tires because this time of year, we start moving from our Snow tires to our regular tires because we can save a lot more if you have two sets and so we’re, you know, okay, we’re doing that today and every, so every Friday. We’re all doing this, and they work as a part of a community being exposed to now the trades, they’re being exposed to different trades. They get some certification, but if they’re really in, you don’t need certification to become a landscaper, right? You can probably find some certifications, right. But you need to know how to work hard and learn the skills. Mm-hmm.
[00:34:00] The interesting thing about this model, which is unique for any young adult program that I know of, they get paid, they’re paid in work. So’s huge day one. Yeah, day one. They’re getting paid to do the work and they’re getting paid to work and they’re expected to work 40 hours a week.And within that i’ve really become a big fan of occupational therapy, and that was through my experiences at Mountain Valley and watching their executive director there. His name is Zach Shafer’s, fantastic occupational therapist, and he helped educate me on how occupation, the history of occupational therapy and how it is really about helping people to live and live independently to help assess them on what their needs are, whether they need more social skills or
[00:35:00] they’re good with their social skills, but need more executive functioning skills, et cetera, et cetera. Mm-hmm. And you pinpoint and you work on those different things fine motor skills versus growth. Mm-hmm. Gross motor skills. The point of all of that is for people to learn to become independent and interdependent because we all need to learn to be independent and make a living ’cause we live in a capitalist society and yet we’re interdependent. We don’t wanna be fully dependent on our parents, but we’re interdependent. Yeah. Many years, as our parents get older, they become dependent on us. And we provided, and we were dependent on them and so learning interdependence, when is it a good time to ask for help? When are you feeling and being enabled? So the model is really about less talk and more
[00:36:00] doing. So the therapeutic aspect of it is you’re doing something and these trades people have incredible skills and incredible stories and we’ll be the people. People will say in the future, like, oh, I remember when John, the, you know, the HVAC guy was telling me about this. And those are the important lessons that we all need. And, you know, wilderness therapy, back in the day it was when people, you ask people what was the best thing about it and they, or best, who impacted you the most? Most of the time it was one of the field guys. Yes. The staff. Yeah wasn’t that often that right, your son. Yeah. Like, oh, this field guy, blah, blah, blah. He was ba, ba, ba or she was, yeah. So the trade’s really exciting ’cause it’s different. It’s meeting a need the organization did a thorough evaluation talking to a lot of different people ’cause there’s young
[00:37:00] adult programs, but there’s none like this that we’re hoping. And right now, I believe we we’re, we have capacity of 14 and we’re like eight, seven or eight and we have a number of slots for the summer for young people who are gonna graduate high school and really don’t know what they want to do, but they’re not ready for trade school and they’re not ready for independent living and they’re not ready for college, and yet being at home isn’t, yeah the best thing for them. Yeah. It’s that weird spot of like, oh, like they’re, I just, you’re in that zone of, and I see so many parents that have kids in this zone of, they’re like. They’re not quite ready for anything, so Yeah. Sounds like that’s filling a huge gap and is the, I think you said it’s meant to be like a one year program. They’re with you for about a year. Yeah. Yep. And
[00:38:00] they’re young adults, so we know it could be less ’cause they have the agency. Yeah. They can bolt if they want and we want. Right. And they have to I mean, we’re gonna where you, we talk everyone, do you wanna come here? You know, recognize when you’re working, you’re gonna be living in a house with other people. We have full-time staff who live in the house with the apprentices. Okay to help them with all the different aspects of their lives. So I mean, they’re onboarded for a new job that they get health insurance if they wanna sign on for, they have a 4 0 1 3 B matching IRA if they makes me, if they are retirement account, if they so choose. So it’s really exposing them to life as it is. Yeah and some of them will probably go on and say, yeah, I learned a lot of different trades. I thought I wanted to be a carpenter, but boy, I learned about of the electrical work and I know I
[00:39:00] need to get certification and now I feel confident enough to go to right school for it. And now I won’t walk into class and people laugh at me ’cause I don’t know which end is up on a pair of pliers. Yes. Right. Yeah. So they are able to. They have the confidence and some, we have one who’s almost graduating. He’s like, man, I learned enough about the trades that I don’t want to be in the trades. I’m thinking going back to college Right. And finishing up but I went to college and wasn’t ready for college. Right. But now has the confidence. So back to the idea of confidence and wilderness back in the day, it was like they build confidence by learning bo drill fires. They build confidence by being able to survive in the outdoors. Yes. Also, there’s nothing like building compass, like building something. Mm-hmm. That’s gonna stand the painting a room in a house that somebody else
[00:40:00] might be using, helping pulling down the walls of an old cabinet, putting up new ones and going like, wow, that is something somebody’s going to enjoy. And I did that work and I got paid for it. Yes. I was gonna say, getting a paycheck is, and I imagine for some of the folks that are with you, it could be their first time they’ve ever received a paycheck and I think it’s every one of ’em so far. Every one, yeah. So valuable, so, so empowering. Like I did that, first of all, I didn’t know how to do it. Then I learned how to do it. I did it and I got money for it. Yeah. That is a, I think we underestimate, right? ’cause we’re old and we’ve been doing this life thing Yeah. For a long time and we get it and we, but we forget that for a newly minted 18-year-old, or 19-year-old, or 20-year-old who’s never had those different roles in their life, they
[00:41:00] don’t have that experience. And it feels so good. It’s such a self-esteem builder. Yes. I get feel like, ’cause I have to be transparent. A lot of the apprentices, their skills when they first get there, like they, like, not a joke that don’t know which end of the hammer works or anything, but those are skills that if you scaffold the learning, that if you put everything in place. Once you learn those skills, they’re lifelong skills. Absolutely. And you can walk on a job site and get a job. We know the construction business is continuing to boom in America. We know that and we know a lot of that segment of the workforce is aging out. Yeah and so part of the trade, the whole concept was helping young people who
[00:42:00] may not go to college to become independent yeah and maybe work on their own and a few of our apprentices so far are neurodiverse, and so they’re anxious. They’re a little timid. They don’t have sequencing down as well. Not as good at forecasting. But let me tell you, every one of them now is just like they’ve got it down. Mm. And they’ve got the whole sequencing down, which is similar. Again, going back to the experiential, therapy model wilderness idea, it’s like once a person year learns the system, they become adept at it. It builds self-esteem and they know that they can work through challenges. Yeah. So, amazing. I love it. Well, we will make sure and get links in the show notes. What was the URL again? The trade. The Trade for life trade.org. Okay.
[00:43:00] And we’ll have links in the show notes there if you wanna check it out. It’s so encouraging to hear about different kinds of programs that are really setting young people up for two day’s world and the realities of today’s world. It’s just, it’s absolutely crucial and yeah, I wanna get out to New England so I can come see you and see this in amazing program. Yeah, please do. Would be amazing. Well, the world is changing so quickly, but some things aren’t gonna change for a while. Yeah. Like eventually they’ll, we will probably have robot carpenters, but I’m a little, who knows what’ll happen. Yeah. Between now and then. Yeah. My garbage disposal gets clogged up. I need help. Yeah, you need help. Yeah. Love it. Thank you so much Will, for taking the time and we will make sure and point people toward all the resources that you mentioned anything else you wanna leave folks with? If, you know, the parents that are listening are usually
[00:44:00] exhausted, right? They’re looking for something that is gonna help their young person and I’d love to pull from the vault of your mind and heart. Any words you’d like to leave them with? Well, I very cliche, but this too shall pass. Mm. Like you know it, you gotta hold on tight and you get through the storm and things will get better, they always do and really making sure you connect with others in a community that’s safe and collaborative and show the love, right? Give a lot of love and be outdoors. I’m a big, every day I get my outdoor dose for at least an hour and all of these things keep yourself healthy. ’cause it’s easy to not be healthy right now between our phones and our earbuds and our tVs
[00:45:00] and all that, and you know what you need to do, and just one day at a time, keep doing it. Love it. Thank you so much. We really appreciate having you here. Thank you, Brenda. I appreciate all that you do at the Hope Stream. Thanks.
[00:00:00] Hey, will so good to have you here. So grateful to be on your show, Brenda. I meant to go back and look at our first episode, which I want to say was in 2020 when I started the podcast, can’t remember how I got connected with you. I think it was, actually Jenny Wilder. I’d had her on and she said, well I of course you’ve got Will White scheduled, right? And I was like, uh, yes, who’s Will White? And since then, obviously we’ve talked a lot. We got to see each other actually not too long ago, maybe six months ago at a conference. Yeah. Yeah. And I’ve had you on my podcast and my son has been on your podcast. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It’s been great. So I think your, longevity in the field of mental health care, outdoor behavioral health, all the things is just vital.
[00:01:00] And I know that you are now doing something kind of new and cool, so I wanted to have you on to talk about that, but first, before we do that, can you just give us a background or not even a background, but a kind of like a 50,000 foot view of what you have seen, let’s call it in the last 10 years around behavioral health for young folks, mental health care, substance use, because I think you have a really good perspective on the bigger picture than some people do. Well, thank you for trusting me in answering this question, and at the same time, more recently, I really think I can word it correctly because in the last 10 years there’s been so much change. It’s hard to grasp it in so many different avenues.
[00:02:00] So I have been a practicing licensed mental health professional since 19, I got my graduate degree social work, clinical social work degree in 86. My license at 89. So since last century I’ve been doing this work in all sorts of things. I’ve worked in hospitals, I’ve worked in private practice, public schools. I’ve worked in boarding schools for a number of years. I helped start a now referred to a wilderness therapy hybrid program called Summit Achievement in 96 and I ran that for almost 27 years and now I do much more consulting and helping with other programs and leaders. So in the last, I think the last five years has been the most rapid shifts and as you reflected in your conversation with
[00:03:00] Trish Ruggles recently, there’s been a big shift in the wilderness therapy field, and there’s, it went from like 20 adolescent programs to five and a and almost like a two year period. Yeah. And so a lot of times when something like that happens, you say, well, it’s one thing, and they had some negative press and that’s why it was, but it, like anything, it was more than one thing. There was Covid there was increasing wages because when COVID happened and people started to, going to work was riskier, you had to pay people more. So profit margins got less. Behavioral healthcare, people saw how using Zoom and other communication devices that they didn’t necessarily have, we couldn’t go to offices for therapy, so people went online
[00:04:00] and so we moved, everybody started rethinking different ways to provide behavioral healthcare. And recently, I think it was in November, December Thomas Freeman, who writes for the New York Times, he preferred to this era as the poly scene that where a lot of traditional things, models are breaking apart. Mm-hmm. And we can see that. We can say that climate change is one aspect. We can see that AI is another aspect. We can see that functioning governments is another aspect. We can see that the, there’s much more expression of needs for mental health treatment 20 years ago or 10 years ago, or even five years ago. Very few people wouldn’t express it. Now it’s really out there and so there’s good and
[00:05:00] bad with these changes. What’s happening in behavioral healthcare is, and I was one who would judge years ago, it’s like, oh, coaching, you know, not, that’s not good and now I have my own coach, right? Because I see the value of it and one, we very much as people in the behavioral health. Industrial complex, which I’ve been part of for many years. Of course, you only want licensed people ’cause I’m a licensed clinician, so I want only licensed clinicians yeah to provide healthcare. But as I moved on in my career and access and use coaching for myself, I’m seeing the value of it and I promote it. So it’s really trying to find what works best for you or for your family and Trish Ruggles episode on
[00:06:00] your podcast. She really talks about the need for the right young person going to wilderness therapy, that’s a certain percentage of people or adults. Actually, there’s more and more. Actually baby boomers who are going to the outdoors for treatment. Yeah. Sometimes it’s through licensed professionals. Sometimes it’s coaching. All of that is a big change from a decade ago and everything was accelerated in the last five years. Yeah, that is, isn’t that interesting that some of these things that we traditionally think of for like adolescents or young adults that people in their forties and fifties are saying, well, I wanna go to wilderness therapy. Like, I would rather do that Yeah than sit in a, you know, office park in the middle of my city and sit in a pleather chair and talk to somebody for an hour. That sounds pretty good. So, yeah, I love that and we, yeah.
[00:07:00] I’ll link to the episode that you’re referring to with Trish, who’s a therapeutic consultant who helps families figure out that right mix of what is the right thing for us. So, yeah I agree. I think there’s been a significant shift, a lot of pluses to it because, and I know you’ve seen this, there’s a lot of kids unlike mine, who is a, you know a hooligan and like out there wrecking havoc in the world. There’s a lot of the isolation. The kids who won’t leave their room won’t leave the house and to have something for them and to have them be able to connect with somebody on of screen, even if that’s just an entree to something else, is just hugely valuable. I’ve talked to so many parents that say, oh my God, thank goodness for, you know, online therapy ’cause that was the only way we could start to make some change and get out there a little bit. Yeah, that’s another example of the poly
[00:08:00] scene, right? So we now have computers in our pockets and now we can connect with anything and information in our pocket 24 7, and it’s rewiring our brains. Yeah. And it’s rewired the young people I started working with. In my career many years ago are quite different than the young people of today and I speak from that personally and professionally. ’cause I had sons a little bit later in life and their high school experience was quite different than mine. Some for the much more positive and some are like for the negative and we have to recognize that a non-duality, like there’s good and bad in everything and I choose to look at the hope in life and the positive changes in life and how to keep ourselves
[00:09:00] healthy, mind, body, and spirit. And I think there’s just more options. That said, sometimes going back to educational consultants like Trishia Ruggles and others, it is like sometimes there’s too many choices and we need guidance and AI isn’t to the place, I thought it was gonna be there sooner to help people find programs and whatnot and resources. I think it’s really important to connect personally with people and have parts of the community, like the Hope Stream community is amazing ’cause people can talk and share their personal experiences and that is something we need more of ’cause communities, part of the negative about being online and all that is it creates kind of pseudo communities, but real communities face to face, there’s much more health benefits. Yeah, it is so crucial and you know, I told you I just got back from a week of vacation
[00:10:00] with five couples. So there were 10 of us, pretty much 99% unplugged for eight days, and it was amazing. Like, oh, here we are having meals together and talking, and nobody is glued to their phone and I think you’re right with the changes. And I would love to, if you wanna just dig a little deeper into what some of those changes are that you’re seeing in young people from, let’s say you had a young person at Summit, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, and now you have somebody that you’re working with maybe at the trade, which we’re gonna get into, what are you seeing as those differences from somebody who generally wasn’t, you know a digital nomad to somebody who now is, and we know that there, we have a hard time like actually disengaging that device from their hands, but what do you see just sort of anecdotally.
[00:11:00] Well, in the past, in my early years of my career, whether I was working in Group Homes in Boulder, Colorado for, called the Halon School, and that was a program specifically run by Boulder Mental Health and the Boulder School District and then working at boarding schools and then starting Summit much more in those days, in the nineties, early two thousands, much more of an externalizer, much more expressing themselves or like their anger, their frustration, even their depression. It was an externalizing type of person and they often would be using drugs, some sort of drug. Not always, but primarily they were expressing their dissatisfaction with
[00:12:00] their life, or maybe it was their way, they were expressing their depression or anger or reflecting what was going on in the family system. I mean, it’s hard to generalize, but to put it simply, a much more externalizer, much more expressive, much more likely to break things or just, I don’t want to be here. I’m walking away and you referred to your son. Yeah. He was more of that era. Mm-hmm. Right. That era and we can see that actually in the numbers. So as much as we know, there’s a very serious drug problem in America today and in the country. The actual numbers of drug, the usage is down overall to today, we see much more. So in those days, diagnostically, I’m not a big DSM three or four or five, whatever it is now, but it’s always, you had to do it because we had to do it because that’s how
[00:13:00] you can get insurance. And the bottom line is you diagnose pretty regularly this oppositional defiant disorder. Right? They weren’t listening to their parents, they weren’t doing what they’re told, they were telling teachers kiss off and pop ba pop and you know, it’s like and fast time and ridge on highs, which very much dates me, but I’m just telling you Right? It’s just like, yeah, I’m just ordering a pizza and just like, and that would be seen as oppositional and goodbye and now it’s much more of an anxiety. Much more internalized, not having as good of emotional intelligence to express what’s really going on for them. So there’s theories of why that is and there’s facts. We know one of the factually, and that was part of the lawsuit that just went against social media, thankfully, that they were
[00:14:00] found guilty of creating addictive, algorithms for young people that would help exacerbate mental health conditions, right, and spending time, well, correlation does not mean causality, but the research is showing causality that there is a, the higher usage of social medium screens. The higher likelihood of suicidality. I mean, that’s Jonathan Haidt’s book. Yeah. So that’s one piece of it. COVID was another piece of it. Another piece of it is, parents’ consumption of huge amounts of news. I am one of them. I’m much better at that than I had been in the past, but it’s a time where there’s a lot of anxiety. So the numbers of young people being diagnosed with anxiety is much higher, right? And yet spending time in the
[00:15:00] wilderness or being outdoors or doing things will actually lower anxiety. But it’s counterintuitive to a parent, and I am a parent. You are a parent with an anxious child to push them to do something and yet they need encouragement. They need to be pushed, they need to be told, you can do this and you need to do this. Yeah. So that is what we’re seeing and I helped out at a program called Mountain Valley Treatment Program center, which is in Plainfield, New Hampshire for a couple years doing some clinical supervision. The young residents there, a lot of them had became so overwhelmed with anxiety that they were no longer leaving their homes. Mm. And that parents would over accommodate in trying to be a caring parent. Yeah and at the same time it would backfire it because it
[00:16:00] would get worse and worse. Yeah. So we see more of that and the drug use, I mean, the thing about drugs today we can’t really keep our finger on what’s going on because there’s so many variations. The marijuana is so high toxicity or whatever. Yeah. The amount of THC and marijuana is so high, and then there’s all the other drugs that are easily accessible because it’s mainstream. Yeah. So although there is that, the percentage who are using drugs and adolescents is much lower and so some of what the treatment models. That it is about more and more talk therapy, and I’ve always been more into experiential therapy and I came to that through, I worked in the area where I am in Northern New Hampshire. After I was in
[00:17:00] Colorado, I moved back east to Northern New Hampshire and I started working in a mental health center with adolescents and in high school with adolescents. And I really didn’t feel like I was making real impact. I spent a year traveling around the world doing a lot of climbing and backpacking. I studied in a Buddhist monastery for a while, just living, you know how backpacker’s life I was in my thirties then it was during the Clinton administration, and they said they were gonna have universal healthcare. So I like, wow, I’m gonna come back and they’ll figure out healthcare and I’ll come back and open my private practice. Well, that didn’t happen but I learned a lot in a year and a friend of mine had been a headmaster at a boarding school and he said, Hey, we would like you to come to this boarding school, be a counselor and help run our outdoor program and I’m like, that’s great. ’cause I don’t have a job and I’m still trying to figure
[00:18:00] out what I’m doing. And so I started working at this boarding school. I’m like, oh, and this was before the era of therapeutic boarding schools, so it was a traditional boarding school and I realized the work I could do living in dorms and being a counselor and running outdoor programs much more effective than in outpatient work. Yeah and I helped start a outdoor program called Prep for Success, and it was taking young people who had finished wilderness programs and they would transition, they would do a 10 day trip with me and some other faculty in August and they would enter the school if they could do the 10 day trip, and then they would meet with us every other week for a group meeting. And that’s how I got in, like first exposed, this was in 93, 92 or three to
[00:19:00] wilderness, then adventure therapy and I saw the power of like, oh, this is really powerful and yet a lot of the young people who had been to Wilderness at that time, they didn’t, they weren’t ready for school yet, right? They weren’t ready to sit in the classroom. Some were undiagnosed learning disabilities, right? Many were undiagnosed some had been newly sober, had done, that was during the 28 day model of and they just weren’t ready. They needed a safer environment and so that’s how when I was approached by a couple people to start Summit Achievement, that’s how that started. And Summit was a hybrid. ’cause I was like, these wellness programs are great, but they don’t get them ready for school. Right. So at Summit, they go to school Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and then they would go out on expedition Thursday, Friday, Saturday,
[00:20:00] Sunday. So and that’s still running today. But it was that transition piece and working and living with young people that’s like, this is very powerful and I know I was much more effective because at a boarding school, not only did I run Prep for Success, but I had to run the outdoor program. ’cause you never had just one job at a boarding school. You have to have two or three. Yes, of course. And I ran outdoor programming and because of that, I knew I was much more therapeutically, quote unquote, therapeutically. Even though I wasn’t doing therapy, I was much more effective in helping young people in the outdoor program than I ever wasn’t sitting in office. So, interesting. Sometimes in the office, but you know what I’m saying? It’s like, and I’ve taught in different colleges around this area for years, and one of the questions I asked to my class and also in workshops, who most impacted you
[00:21:00] during your adolescent years, who wasn’t a family member? Mm-hmm. I’ve asked a thousand people this. I never had one say my therapist, but I’ve had many, say, a coach, a scout leader or spiritual leader, or English teacher or drummer. Yeah. So it’s really about the people who they’re around and a lot of that is the experiences they’re having. So Kurt Hahn, one of the founders or the founder of Outward Bound, he didn’t like therapists sitting in an office either. And I believe he coined the term, I could be incorrect, but experiential therapy. So working alongside doing things with people to help create change. So that’s part of how I got involved with the trade, which is a really cool young adult
[00:22:00] program. More like a gap year experience because we’re helping people get exposed and learning about the trades. There’s a lot of trades, people mentoring, and we have a lodge where, what we refer to as apprentices live there and they’re not doing a lot of individual therapy, but they’re doing, they’re being mentored 40 hours a week in a job in which they get paid for. So it’s the idea of experiences connecting community. And these are old ideas, right? People, wilderness therapy. It didn’t have therapists in it until the late nineties. Yeah. I was one of the earliest the licensed therapists in programs. I remember one time a program lead and another program came to me and she said,
[00:23:00] you therapists are ruining wilderness therapy. I was like, okay. Okay. Well no. I mean maybe we did, I don’t know. But you know the point being, it’s like changes happen and I mean for many years wilderness therapy was run by educators who felt that therapy, they weren’t as effective and now you see people doing wilderness therapy or outdoor therapy, licensed clinicians not doing just hour long sessions. They’re doing long retreats with families. Yeah, so all of it goes back to the poly scene. All these things are starting to change because we’re also identifying we’re all, people are so different and we can’t just say. Like in the early days of wilderness therapy, well, it’s a black box model. Everybody comes in, doesn’t matter their diagnosis. They’ll
[00:24:00] do 28 days and they’ll be great afterwards and that wasn’t the case. Right? Right, right. And so individualizing the models and really trying to meet people where they were at. So that’s a long answer to the question, how things have changed another thing that I’ve, in this conversation, or maybe it’s just me talking, is I don’t see, young people are not as mature. There’s a lot more immaturity of young people today, and I don’t mean it in a negative way. I mean it is, they have I think parents and I being one of them were probably too overprotective of the real world and definitely under protective of the online world. Yeah. And so people are very anxious about all outdoor programmings, outward bound,
[00:25:00] national outdoor leadership schools, it’s hard for them to enroll anything longer than like week long programs. ’cause people are afraid of something bad is going to happen to them. Mm-hmm I am so glad that you connected back to the anxiety of the parents because you know, as we see more and more horrific things happening around us and we get to see not just what’s happening in our community, in our neighborhood, in our city or state, but what’s happening all around the world, of course that’s gonna make you fearful for, oh wait, so I’m just gonna send my 11-year-old off for four weeks to a summer camp.Like, what? That seems crazy. Yeah. So of course that’s gonna trickle down. Yeah and they’re feeling that. So I think that was a really good introduction into what I would love to just dive into
[00:26:00] the trade and what you’re doing and what the sort of genesis for that was. As we’re seeing all these changes in the availability and like the different formats of quote unquote treatment, which I use that term very loosely because obviously there’s different degrees of that, but tell us a little bit about the trade and where did the idea come from and what do you guys do there? Yeah. Well the trade is, we opened our doors in the summer, last summer, so 2025 and it is a not for profit company or organization, not for profit. And the website is Trade for life.org. We are part of a larger not for profit called Moosilauke Visions. So that organization has been around for almost over 40 years
[00:27:00] and Moosilauke Visions runs a lot of different programs in the new Northeast area, and they’re expanding beyond the Northeast, but they have always believed in health and wellness and in behavioral healthcare. And so they have provided services not only to state funded people, but also to private pay and they actually started Mountain Valley Treatment Center and they are Moosilauke Lock visions also, summit Achievement is part of Moosilauke Lock Visions now, so that’s how I got connected with them a number of years ago, and I’ve known the family who started that in the, boy in the sixties is when it started. So it’s going to be over, before they created Moosilauke Visions, it was called the Pike School in Pike, New Hampshire. So Pike new Hampshire’s not
[00:28:00] too far from where I live. They have a large, like 2000 acre mountain, which has mountain biking and backcountry skiing and adjacent to that, they have an in, a boutiquey in that has cabins for rent and for people to have an outdoors experience, but very nice outdoors experience. And they also, this is where Mountain Valley originally was, and right near there is a school called the Oliverian School and so the trade is actually a program for young adults of all genders, 18 to 30 plus who are interested in learning about the trades, not just one trade, but all different trades. They’re gonna get exposed to a lot of different trades. It is not a primary treatment
[00:29:00] program, but a number of what we refer to as our clients are apprentices because they become employees, have been to treatment, primary treatment before, so they may have been in substance abuse program or a mental health program, dual diagnosis. And they don’t need necessarily more talk therapy, but they want more experiences. Mm-hmm. They want to work, they want to learn how to live independently in a world that is rapidly changing. So back to the poly scene where the traditional path of going to college it is not benefiting people as much as it has been in the past ’cause we know that like a lot of young people are graduating and not getting jobs anymore and yet we know that there
[00:30:00] is a dearth in trades people and that the value of being a trades person is going up. Oh, yes. And then, yes ’cause you tried to call a plumber this week or, right. So that, and we as a, I respond like that because we see like, yes, these are, this is great work. When I was in high school, possibly when you were in high school, we had shop class. Absolutely. And they had home ec. And I will say that I grew up, so I went to high school in the seventies. Home ec. We boys didn’t go to Home ec. Right, right. Yeah. It was weird. Yeah. And boys went to, we went to Wood Shop. Shop and the girls went. It was so like, looking back. I know. But anyways, all of that was, you know, taken apart, I think in the eighties and nineties and there wasn’t either of those programs. Yeah and the
[00:31:00] need for tradespeople is actually growing and with AI coming in and taking a lot of entry level jobs, so part of Moosilauke Vision be cause they’re not for-profit, they have to use any profits to further their mission. And their mission is like what are we missing for young people today? Mm-hmm. What can we provide for young people? That they can learn and help get on with their life. And so part of the modeling of the trade was like, we want people to learn lifelong skills. I don’t, unlike wilderness, I mean, when you do a wellness program, you do learn lifelong skills, how to survive. Oh, for sure or stay found, et cetera, et cetera but you’re not necessarily using them daily. Right? Yeah. You’re not necessarily, we had this whole era where a lot of
[00:32:00] people who went to wilderness could go back and work in wilderness, but there’s less wilderness programs, so that aspect is kind of drying off and yet a lifelong skill to being able to understand A, how a car works, how do we change the oil and how do we cut a grass right. How do we fix a small engine? How do we paint a house? So, at the trade, the company itself has full-time trades people always had, ’cause they have different buildings, say because where the Oliverian School is, where Mountain Valley, those are all different buildings that need to be taken care of interesting. And so we had the tradespeople to begin with and now they’re taking the apprentices on the job with them to show them the different trades they can and expose them to it. Right. So it’s not all,
[00:33:00] every day they’re at one thing. They go to a different trade each day. We literally have the company, because they’re really supportive of the area, which is rural New Hampshire up north. They bought a auto repair shop, public facing, so you know, right. We’re gonna start changing tires because this time of year, we start moving from our Snow tires to our regular tires because we can save a lot more if you have two sets and so we’re, you know, okay, we’re doing that today and every, so every Friday. We’re all doing this, and they work as a part of a community being exposed to now the trades, they’re being exposed to different trades. They get some certification, but if they’re really in, you don’t need certification to become a landscaper, right? You can probably find some certifications, right. But you need to know how to work hard and learn the skills. Mm-hmm.
[00:34:00] The interesting thing about this model, which is unique for any young adult program that I know of, they get paid, they’re paid in work. So’s huge day one. Yeah, day one. They’re getting paid to do the work and they’re getting paid to work and they’re expected to work 40 hours a week.And within that i’ve really become a big fan of occupational therapy, and that was through my experiences at Mountain Valley and watching their executive director there. His name is Zach Shafer’s, fantastic occupational therapist, and he helped educate me on how occupation, the history of occupational therapy and how it is really about helping people to live and live independently to help assess them on what their needs are, whether they need more social skills or
[00:35:00] they’re good with their social skills, but need more executive functioning skills, et cetera, et cetera. Mm-hmm. And you pinpoint and you work on those different things fine motor skills versus growth. Mm-hmm. Gross motor skills. The point of all of that is for people to learn to become independent and interdependent because we all need to learn to be independent and make a living ’cause we live in a capitalist society and yet we’re interdependent. We don’t wanna be fully dependent on our parents, but we’re interdependent. Yeah. Many years, as our parents get older, they become dependent on us. And we provided, and we were dependent on them and so learning interdependence, when is it a good time to ask for help? When are you feeling and being enabled? So the model is really about less talk and more
[00:36:00] doing. So the therapeutic aspect of it is you’re doing something and these trades people have incredible skills and incredible stories and we’ll be the people. People will say in the future, like, oh, I remember when John, the, you know, the HVAC guy was telling me about this. And those are the important lessons that we all need. And, you know, wilderness therapy, back in the day it was when people, you ask people what was the best thing about it and they, or best, who impacted you the most? Most of the time it was one of the field guys. Yes. The staff. Yeah wasn’t that often that right, your son. Yeah. Like, oh, this field guy, blah, blah, blah. He was ba, ba, ba or she was, yeah. So the trade’s really exciting ’cause it’s different. It’s meeting a need the organization did a thorough evaluation talking to a lot of different people ’cause there’s young
[00:37:00] adult programs, but there’s none like this that we’re hoping. And right now, I believe we we’re, we have capacity of 14 and we’re like eight, seven or eight and we have a number of slots for the summer for young people who are gonna graduate high school and really don’t know what they want to do, but they’re not ready for trade school and they’re not ready for independent living and they’re not ready for college, and yet being at home isn’t, yeah the best thing for them. Yeah. It’s that weird spot of like, oh, like they’re, I just, you’re in that zone of, and I see so many parents that have kids in this zone of, they’re like. They’re not quite ready for anything, so Yeah. Sounds like that’s filling a huge gap and is the, I think you said it’s meant to be like a one year program. They’re with you for about a year. Yeah. Yep. And
[00:38:00] they’re young adults, so we know it could be less ’cause they have the agency. Yeah. They can bolt if they want and we want. Right. And they have to I mean, we’re gonna where you, we talk everyone, do you wanna come here? You know, recognize when you’re working, you’re gonna be living in a house with other people. We have full-time staff who live in the house with the apprentices. Okay to help them with all the different aspects of their lives. So I mean, they’re onboarded for a new job that they get health insurance if they wanna sign on for, they have a 4 0 1 3 B matching IRA if they makes me, if they are retirement account, if they so choose. So it’s really exposing them to life as it is. Yeah and some of them will probably go on and say, yeah, I learned a lot of different trades. I thought I wanted to be a carpenter, but boy, I learned about of the electrical work and I know I
[00:39:00] need to get certification and now I feel confident enough to go to right school for it. And now I won’t walk into class and people laugh at me ’cause I don’t know which end is up on a pair of pliers. Yes. Right. Yeah. So they are able to. They have the confidence and some, we have one who’s almost graduating. He’s like, man, I learned enough about the trades that I don’t want to be in the trades. I’m thinking going back to college Right. And finishing up but I went to college and wasn’t ready for college. Right. But now has the confidence. So back to the idea of confidence and wilderness back in the day, it was like they build confidence by learning bo drill fires. They build confidence by being able to survive in the outdoors. Yes. Also, there’s nothing like building compass, like building something. Mm-hmm. That’s gonna stand the painting a room in a house that somebody else
[00:40:00] might be using, helping pulling down the walls of an old cabinet, putting up new ones and going like, wow, that is something somebody’s going to enjoy. And I did that work and I got paid for it. Yes. I was gonna say, getting a paycheck is, and I imagine for some of the folks that are with you, it could be their first time they’ve ever received a paycheck and I think it’s every one of ’em so far. Every one, yeah. So valuable, so, so empowering. Like I did that, first of all, I didn’t know how to do it. Then I learned how to do it. I did it and I got money for it. Yeah. That is a, I think we underestimate, right? ’cause we’re old and we’ve been doing this life thing Yeah. For a long time and we get it and we, but we forget that for a newly minted 18-year-old, or 19-year-old, or 20-year-old who’s never had those different roles in their life, they
[00:41:00] don’t have that experience. And it feels so good. It’s such a self-esteem builder. Yes. I get feel like, ’cause I have to be transparent. A lot of the apprentices, their skills when they first get there, like they, like, not a joke that don’t know which end of the hammer works or anything, but those are skills that if you scaffold the learning, that if you put everything in place. Once you learn those skills, they’re lifelong skills. Absolutely. And you can walk on a job site and get a job. We know the construction business is continuing to boom in America. We know that and we know a lot of that segment of the workforce is aging out. Yeah and so part of the trade, the whole concept was helping young people who
[00:42:00] may not go to college to become independent yeah and maybe work on their own and a few of our apprentices so far are neurodiverse, and so they’re anxious. They’re a little timid. They don’t have sequencing down as well. Not as good at forecasting. But let me tell you, every one of them now is just like they’ve got it down. Mm. And they’ve got the whole sequencing down, which is similar. Again, going back to the experiential, therapy model wilderness idea, it’s like once a person year learns the system, they become adept at it. It builds self-esteem and they know that they can work through challenges. Yeah. So, amazing. I love it. Well, we will make sure and get links in the show notes. What was the URL again? The trade. The Trade for life trade.org. Okay.
[00:43:00] And we’ll have links in the show notes there if you wanna check it out. It’s so encouraging to hear about different kinds of programs that are really setting young people up for two day’s world and the realities of today’s world. It’s just, it’s absolutely crucial and yeah, I wanna get out to New England so I can come see you and see this in amazing program. Yeah, please do. Would be amazing. Well, the world is changing so quickly, but some things aren’t gonna change for a while. Yeah. Like eventually they’ll, we will probably have robot carpenters, but I’m a little, who knows what’ll happen. Yeah. Between now and then. Yeah. My garbage disposal gets clogged up. I need help. Yeah, you need help. Yeah. Love it. Thank you so much Will, for taking the time and we will make sure and point people toward all the resources that you mentioned anything else you wanna leave folks with? If, you know, the parents that are listening are usually
[00:44:00] exhausted, right? They’re looking for something that is gonna help their young person and I’d love to pull from the vault of your mind and heart. Any words you’d like to leave them with? Well, I very cliche, but this too shall pass. Mm. Like you know it, you gotta hold on tight and you get through the storm and things will get better, they always do and really making sure you connect with others in a community that’s safe and collaborative and show the love, right? Give a lot of love and be outdoors. I’m a big, every day I get my outdoor dose for at least an hour and all of these things keep yourself healthy. ’cause it’s easy to not be healthy right now between our phones and our earbuds and our tVs
[00:45:00] and all that, and you know what you need to do, and just one day at a time, keep doing it. Love it. Thank you so much. We really appreciate having you here. Thank you, Brenda. I appreciate all that you do at the Hope Stream. Thanks.
