The Summit Origin Story
The story of Summit’s founding, as told by the three founders of Summit Achievement
Chris Mays, Adam Tsapis & Will White
Chris Mays
In 1980, I started working with Outward Bound (OB) on Hurricane Island in Maine. I held a number of positions in the organization and met my wife, Candide Kane, there. At OB we worked with all sorts of populations, including Vietnam Veterans, older people, and teens. But both Candide and I loved working with adolescents with mental health issues. One of the frustrations for us, at the time, was that OB did not have mental health clinicians working with the kids, no family work, and there was no follow up. We still loved it, because we saw the transformative power of the wilderness when angry or disengaged kids completed an OB course and left being positive and open to change for themselves.
In 1987, Candide and I were hired on by OceanQuest; I was employed as a ship’s captain. Basically, we were running residential treatment programs on Tall Ships without clinicians on board. I hired Adam Tsapis at that time to be my first mate.
Adam Tsapis
I was drawn to working at OceanQuest because I was a sailor and I had a kinship with some of the students I was working with. Now these were inner city young people, habitual criminal offenders from Philadelphia, and I was a guy who was kicked out of a boarding school as a kid, but there was a kindred spirit there. I was hired on by Chris as one of the mates. He was a real mentor of mine and inspired me to understand the power of being out in nature and at sea. The importance of the structure and routine was for the students to make change.
Over the years, Chris, Candide, and I talked about starting a program of our own. The kids at Oceanquest were really tough kids and I thought maybe we could work with kids, more like me when I was young, that were making lousy choices, being thrown out of their school, but fundamentally not so self- destructive like the kids from Oceanquest. We eventually left Oceanquest and headed up to New England.
Chris Mays
We had a house in New Hampshire and found a great property right over the border in Maine. We started putting together a team of people and we kept hearing about this skilled clinician who worked at a local boarding school. His name was Will White. We got together with him and convinced him to help us start Summit.
Will White
I had been working at a boarding school in New Hampshire when Chris, Candide and Adam approached me. Previous to working at the school, I had taken a year off from being a psychotherapist to climb and study Buddhism in different parts of Asia, as I had become disenchanted with traditional outpatient adolescent psychotherapy. When I was at this boarding school, I was excited as I knew I could see the students in all sorts of situations—in dorms, meals, classes. The economy was really bad and school was struggling, so the school pretty much enrolled any student, no matter their behavior, as long as they would pay full tuition. Needless to say, there was plenty of work for me to help these students get through school without being asked to leave. This was in the early 1990s and there were very few therapeutic schools in the country.
At any boarding school, you have at least two jobs – I ran the outdoor program and was a counselor at the school. So I worked with all these boarding school students who had previously been at the existing wilderness programs: SUWS, Anasazi, and Aspen Achievement Academy. These kids did great in the outdoor programs that I ran, but at every faculty meeting, the teachers would complain about many of the kids from the wilderness programs saying, “These kids are not ready for the classroom.”
So when Chris, Candide, and Adam approached me I said, “This is great, but we have to have an academic component to keep the kids’ mindset as students and we have to be licensed as a residential treatment program.” There had been a great deal of negative press at the time about wilderness programs. As a clinical social worker trained in family systems, I also felt strongly that parents should interact with their child weekly over the phone or in person with a clinician facilitating.
We ended up calling it Summit Achievement as we were inspired by the mountains that we looked at every day.
Read more about how Summit Achievement got its start in the co-founder’s own words (excerpted from the book Stories from the Field: A History of Wilderness Therapy).
Note: Change in Ownership
In early 2018 Summit Achievement announced a change in the ownership team. Two longstanding employees Nichol Ernst and Anson McNulty (with a combined 30 years working at Summit), bought out the original owners. The new ownership team is committed to remain an independently owned and operated program with owners on site and available.