The Outdoors Tomorrow Foundation’s outdoor education initiative expands to over 2,800 schools in 2026, driven by increased demand and significant grants, as it aims to reach nationwide districts with outdoor recreation and conservation skills.
Outdoors Tomorrow Foundation says its Outdoor Adventures programme has had its biggest year yet, adding 804 schools and more than 60 school districts in 2026 as demand for outdoor education continues to climb. The nonprofit says enrolment has risen from about 210,000 students at the start of the year to roughly 270,000 across all 50 states and Canada.
According to the organisation, the curriculum spans 40 units and 360 lessons, covering activities and skills such as fishing, archery, hunter education, orienteering, wildlife identification, camping and Leave No Trace principles. Much of the teaching takes place during the normal school day, usually through physical education classes, rather than as an optional after-school club.
A major driver of the expansion was a $600,000 grant from Safari Club International Foundation and SCIF Sables, which the foundation says helped it place the programme in roughly 800 schools that had already shown interest but could not afford to adopt it. New additions included schools in New York City, Charlotte and Jacksonville, along with districts in Texas and California. The Outdoor Industry Association said the expansion added about 60,000 students this year.
The growth has not come close to exhausting demand. Outdoors Tomorrow Foundation said it entered 2026 with 2,358 schools registered but not yet enrolled, reduced that backlog to 1,221 during the year, and then saw another 600 to 700 schools request access. That has pushed the waitlist back to roughly 2,000 schools, a sign that interest in outdoor education is running ahead of the organisation’s funding.
Keith Tidball, the foundation’s executive director, said in a press release that the appeal of the programme is that it is built into the school day rather than tacked on as an extracurricular. The curriculum also includes the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation and state-recognised hunter education. In Texas alone, the foundation says 19,000 students earned hunter education certifications through Outdoor Adventures in 2025, while more than 1.25 million students have taken part in the programme since it began.
The organisation expects Outdoor Adventures to be active in more than 2,800 schools by the end of 2026 and says its next phase will focus more on school districts than individual schools. Tidball said the goal is to move from adding single campuses to serving entire districts, with a longer-term target of reaching at least 6,000 more districts nationwide. Outdoors Tomorrow Foundation plans to launch its Rock the Schoolhouse campaign at the SCI Convention in Nashville in January 2027, alongside a new monthly giving programme designed to support future expansion.
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