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 received the 2007 Coming Up Taller Award from the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities as “one of the top arts- and humanities-based programs in the country serving youth beyond the school hours.”

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 following the Donner Party along the California 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.

Successfully negotiating the challenges of trail life, the teens discover in themselves unexpected strengths and a dependable capacity for independence. They come to recognize that their pioneering experiences are valuable resources which they make available to others in the spirit of community service. When they have taught a class of fourth grader or given a talk at a Lions Club meeting, the trail teens stand taller, confident in their competence. Finally, those who experience these teens on the trail, in the classroom, at home and at school, come to understand that blindness is less an inhibiting, isolating disability and more an occasion for growth, positive challenge, and effective contribution to the community.