Enriching Education - The Airport Adventure

The Airport Adventure, a Philadelphia-based, minority-owned social wellness brand, uses aviation industry principles, procedures, and philosophy to help children, families, and communities navigate social and emotional challenges. Through books, theatrical productions, workshops, and speaking engagements, founder Cleous “GloWry” Young provides practical, real-world strategies for resilience, connection, and trauma recovery — turning complex emotional challenges into actionable frameworks, much like mapping a flight plan.

I had a chance to learn more in this interview.

- Why is it important for kids of all ages to be able to work on skills like resilience and connection?
It is important for kids of all ages to be able to work on skills like resilience and connection for the effectiveness and sufficiency of their future. Otherwise, they become ineffective and insufficient adults. Meaning, their adult life challenges will plague them rather than enhance them. Areas of their adult life where they should be prospering or giving to others, those areas will become increasingly insufficient, which is like going to the bank to withdraw money but did not deposit any money inside the account. The teller or ATM will share that you have insufficient funds. Thus, this is parallel to practicing skills such as resilience and connection. If you don’t deposit (practice) it in your childhood account, then you can’t withdraw it in your adulthood circumstances of difficulties and challenges that will arrive. Period!

- How can aviation principles help with these skills?
Aviation principles work best with these types of skills as a parallel life approach. The main philosophical idea of aviation is to bring people and things to new destinations. Thus, adulthood is a new destination from childhood. Hence, certain principles are utilized daily in the aviation industry that safely bring over 4.3 billion passengers and other items to their destination annually. The number one prioritized principle in aviation is safety. Now, parallel this to a child’s life. If he or she is not safe, then just like the airplane that takes off and is not safe, there will be catastrophe in the end, and the same for the adult’s life of a child that grew up unsafe. There are no skills that can be enhanced in a child’s life if the child is not safe, and this is the main reason to parallel one’s life with aviation principles. These are successful principles that are tested, tried, and proven for decades within the aviation industry, and they can help all children, not some, all children get to their adulthood destination safely, just as it did for me.

- Why is it important for families and classrooms to have a variety of mental health tools for children?
The classroom is not just about learning facts and figures. It is also an evidence-based environment that can be used to help structure the lives of students to be best prepared for their adult life, lifestyle, and livelihood. Without the mental health tools to begin to hash things out at a young age in this type of environment, then we are creating ANOTHER crisis in future generations to come. I used the word ‘another’ to emphasize that many of our adults today are suffering immensely because they didn’t have the mental health tools as children when they were growing up, which has now been proven by the latest breakthrough studies in ACEs; adverse childhood experiences. We can either uphold the past mishaps, or we address these mental health issues while the students are learning how to obtain the adult skills they will need.