Always Choose Adventures
Making Adventures Accessible to All
Always Choose Adventures (ACA) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization located in Gilpin County, Colorado. Our Mission is to serve people in connecting to their bodies, nature, and their community. We fulfill this via programs that enable people to show up as their whole self and facilitate the intersectionality of identities that allow people to grow.
Everyone deserves adventure in their lives to better their physical and mental health. Some of our flagship programs include:
• Our ANGUISH TO ADVENTURES PROGRAM: highlights the importance of conversation and awareness around mental health issues. It reinforces that connection to one's community through recreational therapy can have a significant, positive impact on mental health.
• Through COUCH TO TRAIL: ACA supports individuals in acknowledging wherever their unique starting point is with Adventuring. ACA volunteers and trained wilderness partners create low-pressure events for people of all fitness levels to get outside, meet new people, and build new routines.
• Our REWILD YOUR CHILD: focuses on events for families and children, providing a structure that is compatible with the attention span of developing brains. This ACA program introduces outdoor activities that are friendly for beginner Adventurers and is complemented well by the ACA Gear Library offerings of youth-oriented outdoor equipment.
• Through Colorado SWAP and our PUBLIC SCHOOL PARTNERSHIPS: ACA helps connect young adults to the mental and physical benefits of outdoors and adventure, giving them more advanced educational aspects of outdoor preparedness and creating opportunity for teens to learn work skills through volunteering in our Gear Library.
All of ACA's programs are adaptive to people with different physical and mental abilities, as well as accessible for participants from a variety of experience levels. Program clinics are hosted by knowledgeable ACA ambassadors and include use of appropriate outdoor equipment from our ACA GEAR LIBRARY to help ensure participants learn aspects of wilderness safety and essential preparedness. We offer monthly and annual memberships for people to utilize our Gear Library independent of any of our programs.
We also offer an ACA ADVENTURE DISABILITY PASS for individuals who have a permanent disability and who also hold the America the Beautiful U.S. Parks Pass to utilize our Gear Library for a nominal fee and receive free participation in ACA program clinics.
Founder and Executive Director Chantelle Shoaee:
A premature birth alongside multiple birth defects (Tracheoesophageal fistula) is how her story began. A story of being born to overcome life’s adversities and what it means to fight to live. Just a few hours after she was born – she endured major surgery and in the process had to be resuscitated 13 times. Because of a challenging beginning, she now endures vocal cord dysfunction, severe asthma, and low functioning lungs which come with their own set of unique challenges in the form of frequent and multiple respiratory infections. During her childhood – doctors instructed Chantelle’s parents to keep her indoors as much as possible; she was a bubble child.
Never being able to participate in camping, hiking, backpacking, climbing, exploring or adventures left a void her a young Chantelle that would only be filled later in her life.
Fast forward to Chantelle’s adulthood and she still continues to overcome life’s adversities in the form of continued and persistent health issues. Desperate to break free from the ties that bind her to a life where she felt it served no purpose knowing deep down she could do so much more; she began to always choose adventures which began her new journey. She began to acquire the skills and knowledge needed to tackle almost anything she missed out on and in the process was blessed with meeting hundreds of kind, adventurous souls who've changed her world as she knows it.
After years of dealing with numerous medical issues while adventuring, Chantelle has recently started seeking treatment with National Jewish Hospital, her medical team has discovered her birth defects were not repaired. Chantelle's trachea collapses 90% while eating, speaking or exerting herself, making Chantelle hypoxic. Chantelle is now a supplemental oxygen dependent adventurer, and is exploring procedures to repair her illness.
Her favorite adventures include but aren’t limited to camping, hiking, volunteering, paddleboarding and backpacking.
Chantelle founded Always Choose Adventures to remind people who may be suffering from various physical or mental conditions that ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE!
identity
Women-Founded
Women-Founded
impact
% to People
% to People
organization
501(c)3
501(c)3
offerings: advocacy | climbing clinics | community | disabled | gear rentals | hiking | mountaineering
