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On a Thursday morning in mid-June, I joined Maria, a young social worker, and Susan and Michael, both Sierra Club volunteers, as they led a group of Bay Area inner city kids on a day hike in Rancho San Antonio State Park. The event, a Sierra Club “Inner City Outing,” grew out of a chance encounter between Maria and Susan at a conference for Hooked on Nature, an organization that teaches families how to use nature to “de-stress.”

Maria works for Mid-Peninsula Services, which runs low-income housing developments. After three months planning the trip, she rounded up ten eager kids between the ages of eight and fifteen who lived in Mid-Peninsula’s properties. On the day of the hike, eight of the ten met up at one of the developments’ “community center” rooms. Before we left, while the kids ate Cheez-Its from a bowl on a table, I talked with Michael. “Ideally what happens,” he told me, “is that [Susan and Maria] can say to the kids, ‘This was just a taste. What else do you want to do?’”

An hour later we were hiking along a dusty trail, the sun blazing down on us. Some of the kids spotted a creek just off the path, and soon all of them, including a trio of previously sullen, “I don’t wanna do nothing” boys, had plunged in, skipping rocks, scouting for tadpoles, scampering over a log four feet off the ground. I asked Tyler, almost thirteen and going into eighth grade, why he decided to join the hike. “Fresh air,” he replied without missing a beat. “Too many people smoking at home, and there are bad influences on me. Out here it’s quiet and you can clear your mind and everything.”

A Century of Clear Air

Many youth service organizations offer tutoring, after-school programs, and other “push-in” services to needy city kids. But organizations like Inner City Outings operate instead on what could be called a “pull-out” model: getting the kids out of the inner city. Bringing fresh country air to kids like Tyler is not a new impulse. The first organization to do so, the Fresh Air Fund, started in 1877: its simple goal was to give city kids summertime vacations from the streets of New York. Originally, the Fresh Air Fund arranged rural home stays for its participants, and that program continues to serve thousands of children each summer. In the early 20th century, the Fund started its first overnight camp, Camp Hidden Valley, to meet the unfulfilled needs of kids with polio-related disabilities. Today, Hidden Valley continues to serve handicapped children with state-of-the-art facilities, alongside four other camps with a range of missions on the Fund’s 3,000-acre reservation in upstate New York. Over 127 years, the Fund has served more than 1.7 million of New York City’s neediest children,

Hundreds of other organizations nationwide have since adapted and expanded the Fresh Air Fund’s ideas, from Inner City Outings to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, which runs sleepaway camps in woodsy locations accessible from urban areas. Some simply want to give kids a break from tough times, while others claim loftier goals: at Camp Mendocino of the Boys & Girls Clubs, “kids learn respect for others and themselves and gain character and leadership skills… And, being away from home for 10 days builds the self-esteem and confidence of our young people.”

Catching the Outdoor Bug

When the kids from Mid-Peninsula Developments had reached their final destination, a working farm full of animals and crops, I asked ten-year-old David to describe a typical summer day. He replied immediately, “At home I play PS2.” The other kids echoed his answer: “boring” was the first word seven of the eight came up with to describe summer. Compared to their usual activities, hiking and exploring the outdoors is healthy and appealing. While I still had his attention, I asked David what video games he liked. He paused to reflect, then responded, “Fighting games, shooting games, war.” But just then, a rooster crowed, and I had lost him: “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” he cried in response, unable to resist leaping away to ogle a large brown cow. “Wow! That’s a big ol’ cow!” David remarked admiringly, to no one in particular. “Look how big that thing is!”

These kids’ families, several of them headed by single parents who work more than one job, rarely participate in this kind of all-day meandering outdoor adventure. The sole parent chaperone on the trip, Ruben, who moved to California from Mexico fifteen years ago, said that “my people, the Latin people, don’t like to go hiking. They like to stay home.” He saw himself as different: “I love this,” he told me earnestly. But even his professed affection for the outdoors doesn’t amount to regular outings: “My family doesn’t usually have time,” his ten-year-old daughter Jasmine told me. “My dad works and my mom does too.”

Tyler agreed that his family would be unlikely to take him on this kind of outing. “They’re all tired. My mom has to work all the time.” Still, “She would want to go if she wasn’t tired.” On the hike back to our cars, I asked Maria if she will take these kids out again. “Absolutely,” she immediately replied. People had warned her the trip would be risky, but the day’s success had alleviated her concerns. “They need that quiet time. Kids nowadays, there’s so much stimulus: TV, computer games… Here, they get to take it slower.” She hopes that the children will go home and encourage their parents: “Hey, let’s take a hike.”

Still, when I asked her about loftier goals, such as these children’s success in the future, Maria seemed skeptical. “It certainly gives them the opportunity to see other types of recreational activities. Whether it’s going to improve their success in the future–I don’t know about that.” She paused. “But, I mean, how often do you get to see deer grazing–or lizards?” she asked hopefully. “In terms of education, this is good. But it needs to have some follow-up.”

Similarly, as a public elementary school teacher in San Francisco, Anne Martin saw her fifth graders transformed almost beyond recognition during a class trip to Vida Verde Ranch in Half Moon Bay, an outdoor education site for inner-city third through sixth graders. “I have this picture of this little thug boy who’s milking this goat, and he’s smiling so big… Even kids that never hung out together did that day. I had such a problematic class, and that was the best day they had [all year] behavior-wise.” But, while the photographs are delightful, but Martin is not optimistic that this single experience will affect her students’ futures. Programs that expose children to worlds beyond their city block remain troublingly disconnected from daily life in poverty. And getting to pat a goat and watch a sunset doesn’t raise a kid’s math scores.

Lasting Effects: Combining Rafting and Reading

Organizations that take kids out of the city are trying to make effects last through two tactics: longer-term commitments with repeat visits to the countryside, and increased academic content. San Francisco-based Seven Teepees combines year-round excursions out of the city with an in-city clubhouse, which helps “keep us more together as a group during the year,” says director Diane Dodge. Dodge calls her program’s Outdoor Education–annual weeklong camping trips in national parks, including summer river-rafting expeditions–“a carrot. It’s part of what makes [Seven Teepees] so much fun, so kids want to be involved. Other parts of the program are pretty rigorous: a daily learning center, activities where they’re working on improving their academic skills.”

Similarly, in the early-1990s, the Fresh Air Fund started a new camp to address worries about youth unemployment: Camp Mariah, named for pop singer Mariah Carey, who provided much of the new camp’s funding. The camp seemed successful, so the Fresh Air Fund built new facilities to provide some of the same services–academic components like reading and writing, in addition to critical thinking, computer, and communication skills–at its four other camps. Still, the basic philosophies of these camps remained the same, with educational programs existing to enhance a traditional camp experience.

When I asked longtime Fresh Air Fund director Jenny Morgenthau about the concrete success of Camp Mariah’s Career Awareness Program, she told me that kids’ progress is not monitored. Nor does the organization plan to begin any tracking of increased scholastic or professional success. This lack of hard data proved a recurrent theme among program directors I interviewed. Rob Connolly, Operations Director of Boys & Girls Clubs of San Francisco, who directly oversees the Club’s Camp Mendocino called tracking “something we’re going to have to invest in,” as it is “a really expensive process.”

Connolly was quick to point out that the anecdotal evidence is strong, consisting mostly of participants “returning year after year. We’ve got kids in our CIT program that have been coming to us for twelve years, so we’ve got a pretty good idea of the impact the program is having on them. We also have a large alumni base that does volunteer work with us at camp. We really know through their stories about what camp has meant to them.”

Unfortunately, the general question of how to improve poor kids’ futures has for too long been what urban reformer and Harlem Children’s Zone founder Geoffrey Canada calls an “abstract conversation.” As writer Paul Tough pointed out in a recent article on Canada’s work, “What is most startling about the current study of poverty is how little conclusive evidence there is about which cures do work. There are no more than a dozen studies in the field that track how successful various interventions are over the long term, and the evidence from those studies tends to be spotty and subject to debate.”

Still, some measurable successes exist: all 60 of Seven Teepees’ youth participants this year graduated to the next grade. Dodge said, “We have kids in foster care, kids that are right out of the shelters. A couple of our youths’ relatives have been murdered. In light of the challenges that they face, that’s really good.”

And perhaps some of the impacts of outdoor getaways cannot be directly measured. As one Philadelphia elementary school teacher puts it, “The rule of the street is tough on children. Getting away from the violence and dirt of the city is the only way I can do the extra things, the important things, with the children. I can teach and develop minds in a classroom, but I can only work on the spirit, soul, and character in the woods.”

From Compton to Choate

Another kind of “pull-out” program believes that, while promising inner city students could learn better outside of their troubled schools and homes, lakes and wildlife are not the missing elements most essential for long-term progress. Educational advancement programs like New York City’s Prep for Prep and the Icahn Scholars Program at New England boarding school Choate Rosemary Hall take inner city children out of their local public schools for years at a time and enroll them in private schools. While many Prep for Prep students end up at boarding schools in suburbs or small towns, getting some exposure to the countryside, others attend private day schools in New York City’s wealthier neighborhoods.

There is a vast difference between the stated goal of the Fresh Air Fund–“to allow children living in disadvantaged communities to get away from hot, noisy city streets and enjoy free summer vacations in the country”–and that of Prep for Prep, which describes itself as the most comprehensive minority youth educational program in the country. Prep for Prep ambitiously aims to develop leaders who will “guide this society towards a significant narrowing of the gap between the rhetoric of the American Dream and its blemished reality.” Whether they leave the city itself or just their own troubled neighborhoods, Prep for Prep participants, almost all minority students from low-income families, spend fourteen months between the fifth and seventh grades preparing rigorously to attend these prestigious private schools. The program then dedicates plentiful time and money to following up on these students throughout their middle and high school careers, offering them, among other services, tutoring, counseling, college tours and application help, as well as leadership retreats.

Prep for Prep quantifiably helps kids to successful futures: over 90 percent of its participants graduate from their top-tier high schools to move on to colleges ranked Most Selective by U.S. News & World Report. “I think exposure to the broader world, no matter what the means, is an essential component to having kids have greater aspirations than the life they know,” said Ed Boland, Director of Development and Public Affairs. “Whether it’s through the Fresh Air Fund or any kind of outdoor adventure, I think it makes a huge difference. But then what needs to be done is follow-up opportunities”–the kind of opportunities offered by Prep for Prep, at considerable expense, and not by the vast majority of organizations that take kids out of their inner city communities and then return them, months or days or hours later.

Bringing Change Back Home

Significantly, none of the program leaders I spoke with described the inner city as a hopeless place. Although all of them acknowledged serious problems in these neighborhoods, they didn’t see the kids as potential refugees escaping to a better, greener place. Instead, most programs directly encourage kids to return to their urban communities, approaching old problems with more self-confidence and a greater sense of responsibility.

The effects of these “pull-out” programs on affected inner city communities seem to be less about freshening city air than about changing kids’ outlooks–the way traditionally marginalized inner city youth view themselves, their options, and their place in the world. If you take kids to a place less complicated by the pressures and problems they face in their daily lives, perhaps they will gain a better chance at becoming successful adults–or at the very least enjoy a relaxing vacation. Participants aren’t meant to abandon their troubled communities, but rather to realize that there is a world beyond them, and in the cases of more extensive programs like Icahn Scholars and Prep for Prep, to become full-fledged members of that world. As Boland told me, “Exposure to the broader world is an essential first step, but you also have to have the equipment to get yourself there.”

And then return: currently, the majority of Prep for Prep’s alumni live in Brooklyn, the place where most of them were raised. Sixty percent of alums donate to the organization each year, and more of them enter education than any other field. “What’s critical,” says Boland, “is giving young people the tools so that they can change their own place in the world–or change the community that they’re from.” The new generation of Fresh Air Fund-style programs that work with kids continuously over time, along with the private school scholarship programs, are beginning to give some young inner-city residents those much-needed tools.