A year defined by rivers

This year at Adventure Crew is defined by rivers, maybe more than any year since our founding. They run through our programs, our partnerships and our biggest moments. That is fitting, because Adventure Crew began on a river. In 2013, founder Denny McFadden took a group of his Hughes High School students canoeing on the Little Miami, and that single day on the water grew into the year-round programs we run each year.

This summer gave us one of our proudest river moments. On August 1, Ohio River Paddlefest turned 25 (Adventure Crew took over the event in 2016). That is a quarter century of getting people onto our beloved, and too often maligned, Ohio River, and inviting the whole city to see it as a resource for recreation and a critical cause for conservation, worth celebrating and protecting. This year, we even set a new Guinness World Record for the Largest Paddle Craft Party: 1,440 paddlers who persevered through the rain, a pause for the storm to pass and rallied back to break the record by 335 people on the water at the same time.

The river teaches our teens the same lessons every time. You are responsible for showing up and getting yourself downstream, and you finish the day with the confidence to help the next person do the same. That thread runs through everything we do.

This fall, we carry that current forward. On Saturdays in September, teens in our entry-level Explorer program head back to the Little Miami, the very river where Adventure Crew began. And this fall, we come together to celebrate the year and fuel what comes next.

On Thursday, October 15, we gather at Memorial Hall for Summits and Horizons, our signature fundraising event. This year’s keynote is Neal Moore, a writer, canoeist and the first person to paddle solo and continuously across the United States, linking 22 rivers across 22 states over 7,500 miles from Oregon to New York City. The press called him a “modern-day Huckleberry Finn.” He is exactly the kind of storyteller our teens and our community should hear from.

The evening opens with a social hour, then our student presenters share their experiences in their own words. Neal takes the stage, and we close with a lively paddle raise to sustain the free programming that engages more than 900 youth this year. Every dollar keeps our programs free, so cost is never the reason a young person misses a first trip out on the water, a forest trail or a snowy slope.

I hope you will join us on October 15. Save the date, bring a friend and come ready to be inspired by the young people at the center of all of this.

Our rivers keep teaching the same thing: we go farther together.

See you on the water,

Libby