Connect Outdoors launches with 2025 partners
John Muir Trust and partners launch the second year of our educational hiking programme, Connect Outdoors.
The second year of Connect Outdoors has five new partner organisations lined up to provide outdoor opportunities to communities with little or no access to the outdoors in Scotland
Mhor Outdoor, Tiso and the John Muir Trust launched pilot sessions of Connect Outdoors in 2023.
The 2025 partners for Connect Outdoors are:
- Community InfoSource, which works with refugees and people seeking asylum across Glasgow.
- Yahya’s Hub, a charity empowering unaccompanied young asylum seekers near Aberdeen.
- Simon Community Scotland, a charity supporting people impacted by homelessness or at risk of losing their home.
- UpMo, which provides support and opportunity for adults with learning disabilities and autism in Edinburgh.
- Sole Sisters, a women’s hiking group adventuring around Scotland.
Each Connect Outdoors session partners with a different community organisation whose beneficiaries face barriers to accessing the outdoors, taking them on weekly hill walks over a period of eight weeks.
The hill walks become progressively more challenging over the duration of the programme and are led by a Mhor Outdoor mountain leaders.
The project's goal is to introduce people from under-represented communities to the outdoors through sustainable, educational, and empowering outdoor activity that inspires long-term and meaningful connection with wild places.
- Find out more about Connect Outdoors