Trails to Tomorrow: Developing Community Outdoor Leadership
Brian Hurley, from Friends of Deckers Creek, speaks with OSI’s Peer Advising Cohort during a spring trip to Morgantown, WV.
Mike Smith | OSI Executive Director
Blended Spaces
Outdoor leadership is often defined by technical skills — climbing, paddling, wilderness medicine, navigation. Every year we deliver trainings across a variety of technical outdoor activities. It’s easy to equate outdoor leadership with these skill sets because they are such an obvious part of the work, but technical skills alone rarely get the job done.
Participants in river rescue training trying not to get tied in knots as they practice tying knots.
In our experience we believe the real magic is in the blended space of outdoor and community leadership. If we are going to empower active, resilient outdoor communities, we need multi-faceted leadership capable of navigating this evolving space. For close to a decade now we’ve been working to develop and support this type of capacity.
The Internship: Community Is Everything
This August we wrapped up the fifth summer of our Katahdin Region Internship Program. We launched it back in 2021 to fill a gap between traditional outdoor leadership training and the reality of outdoor leadership work in Maine’s rural communities. We felt traditional training did not address what is needed when leaders try to integrate the outdoors into the communities where they would eventually live and work.
The 2025 Intern team taking a break during while traversing Baxter State Park.
Our goal was simple: give young people passionate about the outdoors a chance to engage in real leadership experiences at the community level. Through this program we’ve found that focusing on the outdoors speaks to what drew these aspiring leaders to their work in the first place. When we add the focus on community, though, we’ve found these young leaders connect with a deeper meaning and purpose. As one intern said in reflecting on his summer experience: “Community is everything.”
The Peer Cohort: Support for Professionals
This year we tried something new for working professionals: a peer-advising cohort. The group met every other week online for 90 minutes from their respective communities around the state. The goal wasn’t to teach skills or direct work but rather to facilitate a space where leaders doing similar work could relate to and support one another. Participants took turns sharing important projects and seeking help. Topics ranges from workforce development to community engagement to collaborative network building.
The Peer Advising Cohort meets with Nico Zegre from WVU’s Mountain Hydrology Lab, where he’s focused on community resilience in West Virginia’s vast watersheds.
Halfway through the four-month program, the cohort took a trip to West Virginia to learn from other professionals doing similar work in a different rural landscape. It gave a group of already skilled and passionate outdoor leaders a chance to hike, bike, paddle, and camp together. The best lesson from this cohort experience? One participant nailed it:
“The thing that has stuck with me the most is asking questions. Knowing what those questions could be and how to ask them has really been a game changer.”
Someone new to outdoor leadership might not consider asking better questions as a skill that needs practice. An outdoor leader entering the community development space, though, won’t get much accomplished without it. This sort of evolution in leadership is what we want to cultivate. We see it happen when existing and emerging leaders engage in cohort settings. They are able to grapple with and apply learning in real time, figuring out how to be a part of communities at the same time they seek to strengthen them. There’s room to continue innovating here, to promote a different kind of outdoor leadership that our communities need.
Looking Ahead: OSI’s Commitment
Through our experiments in leadership development, like the internship and the recent peer advising cohort, we are striving to learn and build opportunities that are dynamic. Interns and professionals alike are hungry for growth. We need to keep feeding that energy with new avenues of support, guidance, and skill development to ensure they can be successful for the long haul.
If you’re a leader working at the intersection of community and the outdoors and would like to take part in our ongoing leadership development programs, like our next peer-advising cohort, reach out to us at hello@outdoorsi.org and you’ll be the first to hear about our 2026 offerings.