Our Mission
Exploring Paths®, is a mentorship program with the mission of providing youths with an outlet to have fun living healthy, active lives while simultaneously exploring their own paths of development through the exploration of destinations and experiences, cycling, journaling, and nature.
Our program aims to improve the overall health and wellbeing of youths living within urban environments while also setting them up for future success. Urban environments like New York City offer a plethora of amazing opportunities, and we want to ensure that those opportunities are actualized by youth everywhere.
We believe that exploration, exercise, goal-setting, visioning, and gratitude are key to overall well-being and future success, and our goal is to share these fun positive experiences with as many youths as possible.
Our Story
Exploring Paths is the vision of its founder Katherine Long, who, at a young age, was exposed to travel, exploration, and other cultures and ways of thinking while growing up on the Texas-Mexico border and spending summers in Southern Louisiana and New Orleans. And, it was amid exploration as an exchange student in Germany that she discovered a genuine love for cycling. She loved the freedom bicycling brought with it as she explored all the small towns near her host family. As much as she enjoyed bicycling, it became a somewhat missing part of her life until her move to New York City in 2010.
New York is a fantastic city, and while opportunities are everywhere, it can be a very hectic and demanding place to live. In a quest to find an escape from the hustle and bustle, Katherine stumbled back into cycling. Katherine loved the experiences of exploring ‘off the beaten’ paths and destinations a friend provided. They unlocked another world for her. She quickly realized that the fun, the freedom, and access to the outdoors that she had experienced years ago in Germany were still achievable from the concrete confines of New York City.
Ultimately, it was through all of her travels, lessons from her parents around gratitude and goal setting, those off-the-beaten-path rides, a friend’s gift of a cycling journal, experiences mentoring youths in NYC, a co-worker’s nudge, and fantastic support from friends and family that led her to start Exploring Paths.
The idea is simple: combine consistent access to exploration and the active lifestyle of cycling with mentorship, journaling, and goal setting, and you allow a child to step back, have fun, stay fit and explore where they might want their life paths to lead.