While we spend much of our energy working hard to build outdoor communities for youth, it is easy to overlook the need for growing our own personal communities and networks. Building your network, while essential for professional growth, often gets put in the “to do when I have time pile.” Having a strong professional network can not only help your own professional growth but also improve the quality of the work that you do.

Imagine the impact we collectively could have…

• if we all worked together towards the same goal of getting youth outdoors,
• if we shared our best and most successful practices with others who may be struggling,
• if we collaborated and created ways to increase our productivity,
• if we did not reinvent the wheel every time we were presented with a new task because we could reach out to colleagues who have the experience we lack,
• if we had more time to spend outdoors with our youth.

TYO members are instantly connected with others passionate about getting youth outdoors, providing members with an online professional network of like-minded people with a shared passion. Many of TYO’s features are designed to connect you with others in our community. Exploring these features is easy, does not take a lot of time, and can provide tremendous value. The following are just a few of the reasons why you should expand your online network!

1. Access to experts! TYO Gatherings provide free tips and resources from subject matter experts and forums where members have productive professional conversations. Gatherings are created around organizations, locations, or topics. We recently launched the  Digital Marketing & Content Strategy Gathering to help TYO members take their online marketing to a new level. Mooncut Mountain Creative are the subject matter experts overseeing this gathering offering great tips, sharing resources, and answering your questions.

2. Diversity offers new perspectives and opportunities.
   While everyone in TYO shares a common passion to get youth outdoors, our members come from every state, multiple countries, and a wide range of professions and organizations. You can expand your connections by joining and actively participating in gatherings and by discovering learners to follow. By doing this your activity feed will reflect what learning events are happening in your chosen communities. Networking outside of your normal circles often provides new and thought provoking inspiration and ideas.

3. Networking online provides unique benefits. While building your network in person is great, it is also can be time-consuming, expensive, and hard. Putting aside the hours of work you still have to do to fight traffic and make that happy hour event, finding the funds and time to get to that out of state conference of your peers, identifying your local community of professionals working to get youth outdoors and then connecting with them… sometimes it happens and often it does not. TYO brings together our community, provides 24/7 access, is free, and is easy. Search for people you want to connect with, join gatherings that interest you, partake in discussions about content, share your experience, ask questions that you need answers to. Network when it works for you.

TYO was created to provide those working with youth in the outdoors free access to field-tested tools and resources designed help them excel in their work and in doing so scale and support the movement connecting youth to the outdoors. We invite you to not just be a TYO member, but to become an active part of the community!