Accessible Arts

1100 State Avenue
Kansas City, KS 66102
phone: 913-281-1133
website: www.accessiblearts.org

The Discovery Trails Program is an outdoor adventure in history--experienced, interpreted and shared through the arts. The Program is “one of the top arts- and humanities-based programs in the country serving youth beyond the school hours”, receiving the Coming Up Taller Award from the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, January 28, 2008.

Teens who are blind or visually impaired recreate the pioneers’ experiences of Trail life. Beginning where the trails begin in Kansas City, teens spend from two days to two weeks traveling the Santa Fe Trail. Days are filled with activities like blacksmithing and making rope, walking the trail, fording streams, forming a functioning community, facing common difficulties and dangers. At night the teens set up camp, pitch tents, prepare meals, and improvise their own tales of pioneer adventures around the camp fire.

Teen participants are encouraged to translate their pioneering adventures into valuable resources which they can make available to others in the spirit of community service. Facilitating the teens’ activities are professionals who are familiar with teens and with blindness, plus artist-educators who engage the teens’ imaginations and prepare them to create compelling stories of their adventures to share in elementary school classrooms in the fall.