When Katie Zanto moved to Lake Tahoe in 2003, she came with a dream of integrating wilderness leadership and education. She just wasn’t sure how it was going to happen. The light bulb came on when she taught an English Language Learner (ESL) class at Sierra Mountain Middle School.
Katie Zanto enjoys all that Tahoe has to offer with her family including her husband, Aaron, who is an engineer at Northstar Fire Department.
“I saw right away the gaps between the outcome for ESL and native speakers. It was powerful for me to see,” Zanto says.
The next year, she founded the now 11-year-old Adventure Risk Challenge Program, whose mission is “to empower underserved youth through integrated literacy and wilderness experiences.”
“Everything I had done before led to ARC,” Zanto says. She worked for 10 years with Outward Bound, was awarded an English degree, and then followed that up with a master in education at Stanford. Next, she obtained a teaching credential, spent time in an urban school, and then “drove our van down to Guatemala and Mexico to take Spanish class so I could reach out to others,” she says.
She founded ARC in 2004 after teaching at Sierra Mountain for one year. “We ran by the skin of my teeth and were totally understaffed,” she said.
Fortunately, the program provided high school credit to students who attended, and the school district was a key supporter. While doing a program at UC Berkeley’s Sagehen Research Center, she was approached by director Jeff Brown, who said that her program was one of the most impactful things he’d seen and would like to consider making it part of UC Berkeley. ARC then became affiliated with the university until recently when it formed its own nonprofit.
ARC’s goal is to empower students past their expectations.
“We allow students to experience the power of nature, combined with reading and writing and public speaking about their experiences,” Zanto says. “Students have incredible revelations, things change their lives, but if they are not written down they lose their potency. To recite it and speak it to a larger audience makes them passionate about writing something good.”
To make ends meet, Zanto taught at Sierra Nevada College. First, just a few courses, but then she kept adding more until she realized in 2008 she had two, full-time jobs, and also wanted to start a family. And, then of course, why live in Lake Tahoe if you do not take advantage of what Tahoe has to offer? For Zanto that means back-country skiing in the winter and climbing and getting out on the water with a paddle in the summer.
Zanto took a leave of absence from the college, but then decided that Adventure Risk Challenge could survive with less involvement from her. She remains on the ARC board, having made the decision that “my strength was being visionary. I was less interested in day-to-day work as an executive director,” she said.
Now, while still helping ARC, she serves as the Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies at Sierra Nevada College. About a fifth of the undergraduates at the college belong to this program, which allows students to combine majors and departments. An example would be including outdoor leadership and entrepreneurship.
Near and dear to her heart is the service-learning requirement of the Interdisciplinary Studies program. All students need to reach out to the community with a project that hopefully provides a need. She feels that service learning has helped the students in two distinct ways: First, some students while creating a project discover what there passion is, and what they can possibly pursue as a career. While for other students, the time spent on the project helps them to discover that what they thought they were interested in as a career, they are not.
One student in the program started a music festival in Graeagle, called the Lost Sierra Hoedown, which has gone on for several years now and is providing funding for the reopening of the Johnsville Ski Area; the next Hoedown is from Sept. 24 to 27. Students have created videos for arts programs, and assisted a number of local partners in the community such as the Boys & Girls Club and Kindred Arts.
“I think what is exciting is linking college students to real opportunities to make a difference in the community,” says Zanto.
Between her passions for helping students, her 5-year-old daughter, Ellery, and husband, Aaron, and the joys of the Tahoe outdoor lifestyle, Zanto’s life is full. She wouldn’t have it any other way.
For more information on Adventure Risk Challenge, visit arcprogram.org.
