Gateway Mountain Center

Gateway Mountain Center

Our Mission

Our mission is to transform the lives of youth through nature-based learning and wellness adventures. By reconnecting to self and community, youth of all backgrounds learn, heal and thrive.

About Us

Founded in 2005, we operate in six local schools and on the spectacular crest of the Sierra Nevada at Donner Summit. Through therapeutic one-on-one mentoring, impactful wellness programming and hands-on environmental education experiences, we nurture self-awareness, resiliency and grit.  We have developed an innovative method, "Four Roots for Growing a Human" and are the first nature-based program of its kind to be certified by Medi-Cal and awarded behavior health contracts by two counties.  

We annually serve over 2,000 students, coming from our Truckee-Tahoe region and Northern California. See our website for our main program areas: www.sierraexperience.org

In 2020 alone we served:

• 65 mentees participating in our groundbreaking, therapeutic Whole Hearts, Minds and Bodies program 
• 427 participants connected to nature and each other in our COVID-safe summer camps or their school participated in our next-gen science based, leading-edge field studies with mountain adventure and wellness curricula. 
• 25 youth learned helpful coping skills in our Mindfulness Based Substance Abuse Treatment program.
• 15 youth joined us in the 4Roots Wellness Center after school (pre-COVID).
• Over 60 youth served in our On-Belay: Adventure Pods Program, where students climb, mountain bike and explore nature.
• More than a dozen high-need youth struggling to engage with online school received weekly academic, social and emotional support outdoors. 

Your support today will allow us to reach even more youth in need to help them learn, heal and thrive!

Why Support Gateway Mountain Center during Give Back Tahoe? 

At Gateway Mountain Center, we work with some of the highest-need youth in the region, from Tahoe to Truckee. Many of the kids we work with suffer from extreme disconnection, usually the result of early trauma exposure or abuse. But we also see that our current culture today devalues connection and as a result, many youths are suffering.  

In this year of the pandemic nature-based therapy has become highly valued for being a safe way to connect outdoors, and the need for our frontline safety-net supports for youth has increased dramatically.  We are meeting this need, growing our capacity, and continuing to provide careful, skilled in-person support for more and more youth.  

Today is your chance to change the lives of youth in our community!

Your donation supports our work to offer support and healing for both traumatized youth and for youth that are simply living in a culture that prioritizes doing over being. You can help them uncover who they really are- strong, resilient and powerful in their own hearts, minds and bodies.

Making a donation today also helps bring our unique and ground-breaking 4Roots Method to more youth in need. Through 1. Authentic Relationships, 2. Time in Nature, 3. Embodied Peak Experiences and 4. Helping Others, we see growth and healing for every kid we work with from the most traumatized to the least.

I hope you will donate to Gateway Mountain Center during Give Back Tahoe. Gateway is poised to bring our 4 Roots method into new regions, our programs are exponentially expanding and more than ever, our youth need your help right now! 

Thank you!