On New Years & Twenty Years: A conversation with Brad Ludden

It’s the New Year, but for FD it’s not just any year…it’s our twentieth anniversary! In the spirit of New Year’s goal setting, adventure planning and #OutLivingIt, we sat down with First Descents’ founder Brad Ludden to reflect on two life-changing decades, and to learn more about his vision for 2020 and beyond!

FD: What are you most looking forward to for this milestone year, and what are your organizational goals in the year ahead?

BL: This is indeed a tremendous milestone in so many ways. For me, it’s an opportunity to both reflect and daydream. Regarding reflection, I see this year as an opportunity to honor those we’ve met who are no longer with us, but have left a powerful and lasting impact on our lives. An opportunity to reflect about lessons learned, failures experienced, friends made and all those who wrote a page in the book that is FD 20 years later… a book that wouldn’t be complete without them.

As it relates to daydreaming, I feel this is FD’s chance to set our intention for the next two decades. Our dream is about just how much impact we can make, adventures we can provide and lives we can change. How can we reach every young adult in need and get them onto the rocks, rivers and waves? Connect them to a community of friends and family going through so many shared challenges? What page will they write in the chapters to come? Daydreaming about these things fills me with an excitement that’s hard to convey in words, but simply put, the future is incredibly bright and full of opportunity and endless adventure.

FD: The new year is also a special time to reflect. What are a couple of your favorite memories from the past twenty years of FD adventures? 

BL: As I mentioned, this is such a tremendous opportunity to reflect, honor and thank all those who made the FD journey possible. For me personally, there are countless memories that define the history of FD over the past 20 years, but if I had to pick two, I’d say the first would be our very first program. After all, that was the single most defining moment for FD. It set the course for the future, proved that adventure is truly healing and became our stake in the sand from which we marched forward with one goal in mind: to deliver adventure to as many young adults as possible. Before that first program FD was just an idea, but by the end of it, FD was real. And it’s that flame that was lit on that program that continues to burn bright today.

The second milestone was when we served 1,000 participants in a single year. After our first program (we served 15 participants and it took everything we had to pull it off) the board asked me to set an audacious goal, one which we might never achieve, but one that could be a beacon on the horizon to track toward. I thought 1,000 participants in one year was that number, honestly never believing we’d realize it. But we did, and in doing so we all became inspired to think even bigger. If we could achieve that we felt we could achieve anything. So here we are looking out over the next two decades and realizing there are hundreds of thousands of young adults, with a variety of serious health conditions whose lives could be better with adventure, and in the next two decades we’re determined to reach them all!