Our Story
Project Alto is a veteran-run, non-profit organization. We, military veterans, lead wilderness and survival excursions for inner city youth, corporate teams, and college students with the aim of fostering relationships, bridging cultures, and building community. We provide these excursions at no cost to youth from low income families.
Mission
Project Alto educates, inspires and enables young people to thrive in diverse, difficult and changing environments. We do this by developing confidence, fostering interpersonal relationships, improving cultural competencies, and gaining an appreciation for diversity, equity, and inclusion through wilderness and survival experiential learning.
Vision
An interconnected world with community across cultures, backgrounds, and experiences, consisting of individuals who thrive in diverse, difficult, and changing environments.
Method
Wilderness and survival experiential education led by military veteran instructors. Alto provides excursions, on-site and nearby wilderness instruction in NYC, team-building workshops, and on site coaching for young adults centered on military skills in the outdoors. All Alto programs provide equitable access to these resources at no cost to low income families.
A Letter From the Executive Director
In one way or another I have been leading and organizing expeditions into the wilderness for young men and women for over 8 years. And with each trip, and with each group, I learned that the true value of the outdoors is the ability to bring people together, and particularly, to bridge the socio-cultural gaps that keep people from truly understanding one another. I learned that for a young person, these experiences go far beyond the tangible, and create opportunities, foster relationships and promote values necessary to succeed in life.
For New Yorkers, like most city residents, these outdoor experiences are often unreachable or left on the sidelines creating a “Nature Gap.” As a son of low-income immigrant parents raised in the city and given many unique and fortuitous opportunities, I recognize the blessings that enabled me to succeed, graduate from the Naval Academy and serve as a Marine Infantry Officer. I view my life as a testament to the value of closing the nature gap.
I officially decided to launch Project Alto while forward deployed in the Pacific in January of 2022 as a way of fulfilling this dream to serve the community that raised me while using the skills and the gifts I had been given in my life as a Marine Infantry Officer. To accomplish this, while helping to serve those who have chosen to serve by providing them employment opportunities and a community where all their hard-earned skills were valued, seemed like a call directed at my soul.
Project Alto owes its name to Pier Giorgio Frassati, an outdoors enthusiast and philanthropist who is remembered through his motto “Verso L’Alto,” meaning reach for the heights/heavens. And Project, as a nod to Project Cicero, a non-profit that influenced me in my youth and catapulted my education from a young age. Project Alto was chosen to inspire hope, and remind the community that we must always be striving for greatness, we can use the outdoors to get there, and to borrow a line from Mary Church Terrell; we can lift as we climb.
Jimmy R. Peraffan
Executive Director