Breakwater’s Family Adventure Programs enrich the innate wellness of families.
Our expeditions provide an inspiring, fun and supportive backdrop for a once in a lifetime opportunity for whole families or subsets. Our voyages are a true bonding experience for families. Breakwater Expeditions creates an environment where the strengths of each individual are celebrated and where family members use their individual strengths to help form a stronger and better functioning system. In the atmosphere of wilderness settings, families are able to suspend the myriad distractions of daily life and rediscover the often forgotten gifts of play, humor, gratitude, and understanding. Part or whole family expeditions focus on breaking down barriers and building relationships. Breakwater Expeditions’ team of highly skilled professionals and wilderness guides carefully develop exciting adventures to meet the needs of its participant.
Three types of Family Adventure trips:
1.
Family Passage:
Celebrating a transition
For families celebrating and marking significant milestones, Breakwater Expeditions provides safe, fun, and supportive adventures. These adventures include honoring a rite of passage, launching into a new stage of life, and significant transitions, like a child beginning high school or leaving home for college. Our Family Mentors are gifted in meeting families where they are, supporting developing greater connection or individuation, as needed. This time offers the opportunity for a family to grow strengths, including: love, trust, and respect through the experience of transition.
2.
Family Integration:
Involved in treatment
For families coming together with a family member that is in a rehabilitation or residential program or after wilderness, rehabilitation, or residential treatment, Breakwater Expeditions offers mindful and supportive adventures that enhance a family’s strengths and support the development of new skills. This may include bringing a family together during a “break week” from an in-patient treatment, reintegrating a family member back into day to day life, or creating new ways of being and practicing for living apart. Families use this opportunity adventuring together to build a platform to integrate and sustain the changes gained during treatment to facilitate reentry or post treatment.
3.
Family Action:
Taking proactive steps
For families taking a proactive and preventative step who recognize a need for support in developing skills to better see their way through the adolescent or young adult years, an adventure with Breakwater Expeditions interrupts existing patterns that could potentially develop into family dysfunction, disruption, and disconnection. Decide on your personal family goals and engage in a positive intervention to get everyone on board and strengthen relationships. This allows you to move forward as a healthier, more intentional family.
Interested in a customized private family experience?
Call 208. 263. 0277
Family Mentors
We are a team of educators, psychologists, social workers, coaches, and family counselors who have years of experience working with families in and out of wilderness settings. Just as Breakwater runs expeditions in a variety of locations, our Family Mentors live throughout the country. This makes for an exciting opportunity to either meet families in their neck of the woods or in a new environment such as the Green River in Utah or the San Juan Islands in Washington.
Wilderness adventures naturally support growth. Our Family Actions Program and Family Integration Program are staffed with therapeutic support. These take place within the states where our Family Mentors are licensed or registered. Family Passages honor normal family events and are non-clinical in nature. Family Mentors can support your family anywhere Breakwater Expeditions offers adventures. We team with you to determine which program best fits your needs.
Heather Menzie, Family Program Director
Heather has been leading family trips in the wilderness since 2007. She developed, directed, and implemented the Family Quest Program at Open Sky Wilderness, which has served over two hundred families. Heather’s expertise, comfort in the wilderness, and sense of humor help set families at ease. She provides a creative, safe, and fun environment for families to explore the wilderness and have a rich adventure together. Heather works in the field with families and brings her creativity and experience to the development of our Family Program at Breakwater Expeditions.
Custom Family Adventures
Breakwater offers custom family adventure programing in all of our destination locations.
We schedule both multi-family and private single family trips.
Upcoming Summer & Fall Trip Locations:
Our years of experience have taught us to:
Set up the best team for your trip.
We pair the right group of professionals to best support each group.
Make the right calls at the right time.
The details matter. We value in-the-moment creativity, flexibility, and inventiveness.
Prioritize logistics & safety
We set up. We frame. Beginning, middle and end, safety is always first.
Prevent burnout
We place a cap on the number of trips we take each year so that we can stay genuinely enthusiastic about what we do.
