City of Dreams is a San Francisco non-profit dedicated to helping youth living in low-income housing build brighter futures through mentorship and youth development. The organization works to ‘challenge young people to reach their highest potential through Experiential Learning. The events call for youth to solve problems, overcome fears, work as a team, try new things, explore creativity, embrace support, and identify their options,’ …which sounds a lot like climbing! On Saturday, October 11th, Berkeley Ironworks hosted a group of children and their mentors. Here is what they had to say about their experience rock climbing at BIW!
“City of Dreams’ visit to Berkeley Ironworks was one of our best experiential learning events of the year! Almost every Saturday of the year, we take our youth aged 9-17 on experiential learning events with our mentors. Each event is focused upon one of twelve life values and our lesson for our visit to Berkeley Ironworks was “trust.” It was a very powerful experience for our youth to push against their fears and limits to their self-confidence on the walls while also learning to trust their belayers.
Our mentors were able to belay the children thanks to the patient, passionate, and culturally competent staff at Berkeley Ironworks. This experience supports the argument that rock climbing can have a meaningful impact on our youths’ ability to develop self-confidence and trust in others. We will definitely do this trip again next year with Berkeley Ironworks.
Building trust with our belayers and with ourselves is something we all deal with while climbing. We’re so glad to be able to host City of Dreams so they could push their limits and find success on the rock wall! Thanks to the staff and mentors for creating such a positive environment!
