BOT Report May 2024

NOLS Employee Association Board Report – May 2024

Mike Titzer, NOLS Employee Association President

NOLS Employee Association Board Members: Ron Rash, Sarah Acuff

Mission: The mission of the NOLS Employee Association is to communicate and advocate employee views and to work within the NOLS community to promote the school's mission and values.

Who We Represent: We represent the interests of current NOLS employees in four categories: Location Staff, HQ Employees, Wilderness Medicine Faculty, and Field Instructors. We represent the interests of employees below the “Community Leadership Group” level. We give voice to employees who are working every day to bag rations, repair gear, enroll students, process payments, and teach around the world in classrooms and the field.

Number of Members: 213

Community Gratitudes

·       The NEA would like to recognize that this month marks the one-year anniversary of two NOLS instructors’ deaths, Nafiun Awal, and Eli Michel, while on a personal mountaineering trip in Alaska. We are grateful to the Alaska branch for continuing to hold them in remembrance by providing a reflection garden for employees to gather and keep these two in our hearts.

Gathering at NOLS Alaska to remember Eli and Nafiun

·       NOLS employees are mourning the losses of the Northeast, Pacific Northwest, and Southwest branches. Employees are remembering all the laughs, joy, hard work, and fulfillment that they experienced while working in these beautiful locations while facilitating life-changing expeditions for students. Some of these locations were truly “home” for NOLS employees, and the loss from their closures are felt throughout the community. We understand the need to create a sustainable business model to carry NOLS into the future, and recognize that tough decisions had to be made to work towards that goal. We have immense gratitude for the countless positive impacts that these locations had on our NOLS community throughout the years.    

Updates

• 2024 Flamingo Fund Projects

• Teton Valley Branch – The employee-sponsored sauna is back under construction, with employees continuing to build the structure before/after working hours.

• Patagonia: Employees at the Patagonia branch recently reached out to ask for funds to build equipment storage racks. Each year, NOLS staff bring personal outdoor gear to the Patagonia branch to use between courses, on days off, etc. Being able to explore Patagonia on personal trips is a big draw for employees to continue coming down to the Patagonia branch! Employees want to keep some of the bulkier gear stored safely at the branch between seasons (bikes, kayaks, etc.), and this NEA-sponsored project will go towards the construction of these storage racks.

• Be a part of the Flamingo Fund! If you’d like to donate to these employee-welfare projects, please consider donating at the QR code below, or go to https://www.nolsemployeeassociation.com/flamingo-fund

• Meet-Ups and Engagements

• We continue to listen to our members’ concerns and opinions through online and in-person meetings, one-on-one chats at branches, phone calls, and emails. Through all this listening, we try to represent the majority view of what employees would like to see happen at NOLS. We will continue this listening and advocating throughout the summer, as we ramp up our busy US summer season at NOLS locations. 

Requests and Ideas from Employees

Through our outreach, we have identified two areas for growth that NOLS could implement. We tried to focus on ideas/requests that do not represent a significant cost to NOLS, always looking for “win-win-win” ideas for employees, NOLS as an organization, and NOLS students. Below are two ideas that fit into this category:

Create a NOLS Certification for Expedition Leadership Skills: NOLS field instructors are some of the world’s premiere teachers of expedition leadership skills. We all know that these skills are even more important in today’s world as leaders need to bring together diverse, distributed teams to work towards common goals. A rollout of an official NOLS Expedition Leadership Certification could help NOLS field instructors and students prove their skills in the workforce through a tangible certificate, while providing a needed source of revenue to NOLS from students seeking a professional certificate.

·       Historical context: In the 1990s and early 2000s, guide-company owners would look for perspective guides with NOLS or Outward-Bound experience. That all changed for virtually every guide service in the USA between 2005 and 2010. The American Mountain Guides Association (AMGA), who had been offering a certification process since 1993, did a fantastic job of marketing their product. Today, the vast majority of guide services, if not all, hire guides with AMGA certifications. The same was true of universities looking for outdoor educators that take students rock/alpine climbing.

·       Benefit to Employees: These certificates would allow NOLS employees to easily demonstrate what expedition leadership skills they bring to any organization, helping them increase their career prospects and advancements in different industries.

·       Benefit to NOLS: The professional certificates market is projected to grow 8% a year over the next five years, with a projected market volume of US$8.9bn by 2029. With most of this growth concentrated in America, NOLS can capture some of this market by attracting students looking for professional certificates that prove their expedition and small-team leadership skills.

·       Benefit to Students: Students could more easily quantify what expedition and small-team leadership skills they learned while on their NOLS course to prospective employers with a professional certificate.

Hire a Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO): Employees around the world care about their organization’s impact on the environment, and this concern is especially true at NOLS, with our mission of teaching “skills and leadership that serve people and the environment.”

• Focus on NOLS and the Environment: Modern organizations have realized the importance of centralizing their environmental accountability, and data shows that as of 2021, more CSOs have been hired than the previous five years combined. Similarly to how NOLS hired a Director of DE&I, which employees appreciate, we would like NOLS to also have a CSO. As a leader in outdoor environmental education, it is imperative that we have someone looking at our NOLS’ relationship to the environment holistically.

• Minimal Cost to NOLS: We propose using the endowed funds already earmarked for the public policy position hire so as not to use new funding sources. Public policy is an important part of a Chief Sustainability Officer’s purview.